Lake George
is how she saw it
a translucent
blue topaz shadow
disappearing
beneath the stump
of half-eaten pine cones
Poetry
Poetry: The Hush
The Hush
is hearing
yourself blink.
A seductive vent
where words vanish,
before they are blown apart.
A child believing in a dandelion.
Or a small log bridge overtook
with early snow.
The signs and temples along the way,
where we must walk, all messiah-like
on the frozen water of the Siamese Ponds.
chanting our mantras on purposeful accident.
Poetry: Adirondack Seaway
Adirondack Seaway, Summer 1981
Before the finned
dinosaurs of the Icy
emptiness
were interrupted
by the early warships
of man
they cast their
love ballads
into the velvet abyss
waiting with hearts
as untamed and big
as school buses
for the memory of
their own answer
Poetry: Forest Recovery
Forest Recovery
The old cabin being too small
for the escalating generations
of our parents’ offspring now
we rented a large log place
down the road maybe
one-third of a mile
whose back porch looks
out on Eleventh Mountain
closer than at the old cabin
making it look
as our sister would have said
“like a whole new mountain”
— that and how the forest
has now grown up to conceal
our former lookout rock
we would climb to as kids
as those back at the cabin
watched for us then waved
mixed forest across the road
from the old cabin may soon
keep the mountain its secret.
Poetry: Father’s Breakfast
Father’s Breakfast
He ate a crustacean
every morning
the pure wild ones
He called the lobster
a sacrament and cleaned
his table with a napkin
his grandmother sewed
when she was 14 in Idaho
I watched him eat
and the embers from the stove
cooked into crystalline spheres
I once told him that I loved him
just loud enough
so he would not hear
Poetry: Memory Verse
Memory Verse
My extended family refers to bathrooms
as the “John,” because our old Adirondack
vacation cabin has a two-holer outhouse
we cherish despite its inconvenience —
keeping wood ashes and cured hay on hand
to dry the “payloads” and sweeten the mix
eventually raked out the back onto a dried-
hay carpet to be rolled-up like a rug to compost.
This may explain why super early this morning
as my wife returned from the bathroom — we ate
watermelon late last night — I awoke to interpret
our big-type digital clock as reading “John 3:16.”
Poetry: There is a calm
There is a calm
and steady
loneliness to the
half notes of sheet
metal-roofed
cabins in a hailstorm
Poetry: Gray Hudson Hornet
Gray Hudson Hornet
—In Memory of Don Greene, 46-er #1949
It’s upside-down-bathtub design made
1950s Hudson sedans look like think tanks
with the shallow end toward the rear but
who knew this when Buffalo Boy Don Greene
pulled up in front of my childhood home
at 6222 Forty-Third Avenue in Hyattsville
Maryland to give me a ride to my summer
construction job working for Paul Schaefer
in Schenectady New York in summer 1962
and I fixed Don my specialty sourdough
pancakes I’d learned to make the summer
before in Alaska’s Brooks Range to fuel
our long road trip north and Don refused
a third pancake because he was a mountain
climber then and explained how he would
not carry an extra pound in his climbing
pack so why pack it on his person which
logic suited me fine because I expected
sermons from older friends then since
I was the youngest of four kids myself
and didn’t yet need the Buddha’s help
to dis-identify with my ego which mostly
looked like the derby hat Charlie Chaplin
sat on and that I inwardly chuckled over
when Don’s old Hudson motored onto
the New York State Thruway that had
no Interstate Route number back then
nor pushed northward toward Montreal
right through the Adirondack Mountains
the weekends subtext of my summer job.
Urban Cries: Street Hawkers’ Shouts in New York & London
Pictures of street hawkers with their trade shouts recorded in captions of poetry or prose are known as “Cries.” They first appeared in Paris around 1500. This early creation of an urban iconography included socially marginal people such as vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, and others.
Fifty years later, these images were established as a stylistic category across Europe. Eventually, they would make their way to New York. [Read more…] about Urban Cries: Street Hawkers’ Shouts in New York & London
Poetry: Feedback
Feedback
I am not breaking apart
I am not coming undone
I am not washed up
I am breaking open
And it’s about time
It’s okay
I trust my path