Three Poems by Donald Nitchie
Light Air
Steve’s ancient trimaran could barely top 2 knots.
We’d motor out the channel, raise the main
and inch across the Sound until
the far-off islands looked like heaps of sand.
Sometimes the wind quit and we’d drift,
waiting for a breeze. Take turns diving off the stern.
One time the outboard died
and we had to paddle home in the dark.
His uncle was always after him
to cage the birds he let fly around the house.
Eventually Steve disappeared , and the number
they gave me never picked up.
When someone finally answered, it was a pay phone
in a marina in Florida and they’d
never heard of him.
Not long after, a winter storm
pushed the boat across the pond
and into kindling on someone’s lawn.
Like much else that’s gone,
but on late summer afternoons like this —
high clouds, light air — I can almost believe
we’re still onboard. Sharing a bag of pretzels
in the cockpit. Listening to the sail flap
along the boom. Sun winking off the chop.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Bottle Hunting With Uncle Gale
We’re in high boots, crossing soft ground
to get to spots he knows. “Folks’d toss trash
off porches, over walls, down gulleys,
into swamps — cans, bottles, whatever it was.”
“But there’s no sign of a house near here,” I say.
“Why dump in the middle of nowhere?”
“Who knows?” he says. “Maybe something special
they needed to get rid of — or maybe they had a still.
If you’re in the woods, you’re probably doing something
you don’t want seen.” He’s my expert on local lore:
arrowheads, geneology, chowder —
(double the salt pork, skip the cream).
“That’s why the woods are full
of junked cars, washtubs, bedsprings —
just make it disappear.”
He says we might find bottles, even coins.
“Frost brings ‘em up — like bodies.”
He inserts his spade to loosen the soil
which I sift with my pitchfork. He steps back
and directs me to another spot that shows
no promise. “Once I found blown glass
near here. Sold it. Now I wish I’d kept it.”
We keep digging, sifting, like archeologists,
grave robbers, definitely trespassers,
and build a pile of broken plates, rusted tin,
a doorknob — nothing we want.
The day begins to warm up and we’ve been at it
for an hour. “How often do you find things?” I ask.
“Keepers?” he says. “It’s been …
a while. But isn’t this a fine way to spend
a spring morning? Mildred’ll be on me
to start the garden any day.”
Shovel, pitchfork.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Ode to an East Wind
“Oh I hate an East wind!”
Aunt Mil would say, making a face. “Nasty!”
She came from a long line of watermen —
quahaugs, lobster, bottom feeders, though
the most money they made was hauling lumber
up the coast while smuggling booze. She used to
go out with her father dragging for cod —
the start of her aversion to small boats,
open water, and east winds
which would sometimes chase them home
and even catch them.
“I can feel it in my bones, Donald!”
she’d say, looking out at the clouds,
lagoon filling with white caps.
“It’ll storm by noon.”
Already gusts shook the windows,
lifting ash in the grate.
“Good day for a chowder!”
/ / / / /
Two Poems by Sue Guiney
Playing Dvorak’s 9th Symphony
The cellos may start mournfully
like a world refusing to awaken.
French horns like alarm clocks may try to jolt us
into awareness of some young dawn.
Even the flutes, soft and persistent, try their best
to get this new world up on its feet.
But it’s the violins that shake us out of darkness.
They echo that murkiness set deep within our core.
They remind us of dangers always gliding like sharks
in the watery depths of our minds.
The violins may be louder, brasher, sterner than we’d expect –
not a mother’s gentle good morning kiss on the forehead,
but a schoolmaster’s painful snap on unsuspecting knuckles.
They are the ones which edge us upward, note by note,
faster and faster to get us moving whether we want to move or not.
They force us to face a different day which does not promise
serenity or happiness. Instead, their strings announce
a new energy to tumble us forward
into a world grown out of what has come before
into a world we may not even want but will have, nonetheless.
I think this is called the future. And it is mine,
as I lock the door behind me, heading out
towards the airport. My excess baggage comes along.
For sure I will pay for it. But it’s money well spent.
No matter how well tuned my violin may be,
how well practiced are my fingers or how strong my bow arm,
I couldn’t play this symphony now
without those bags piled high around my feet.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Jaipur Foot
A prosthetic device first made in 1968 for Indian amputees,
now available throughout the world
This plastic prosthesis is brown as tea,
fragrant like vanilla mixed with
Lady Slipper petals.
It reminds me of a dream
where the sky feels full of cardamom,
nestled lakes and searing mountains.
I hold the molded mass in my hands each morning,
feel the lightness of its weight and marvel
that such a small thing, really, can hold such power.
I strap it on, just beneath my knee,
and try to ignore the lingering sound of mines
exploding each morning with the crash of dawn.
Replace that sound, is my daily command.
Better, hear the dream of finger cymbals, magical chants,
echoes of gifts from an imagined land.
Jaipur – the name itself sounds like God.
Two strong syllables, one foot then the next,
a poetry that moves me step by fearful step,
perhaps wobbly at first but then
miraculously forward.
/ / / / /
Two Poems by Michael West
Red Hawk at Polly Hill
for Allen Look
You know we used to walk around Polly Hill
Almost every week to watch nature take its course
We’d start at the Adirondack chairs
Under the vines and just sit and listen
Birds, the leaves moving in light breezes
Voices of other visitors to the arboretum
The Far Barn was always our very first stop
We’d pull two chairs from the pile and position
Ourselves in the wide doorway in the sun
and watch and watch and watch — nothing
There was only all of nature to see in slow
Motion depending on the season and the weather
There never seemed to be anything in particular
Just being there among the trees and flowers
After a bit we’d get up and walk to another vantage
Never very far and less and less far as time went on
We would sit on the wooden benches Allen loved
Resting mostly Allen resting as I learned to let go
Of having something on my agenda and after all
It was Polly Hill where nothing really mattered
Eventually we’d wander through Polly’s Playpen
Marvel at her azaleas and every kind of rhody —
Pink, scarlet, purple, blue and some of them
Big as a tiny house you could crawl into
Over time I watched as one gradually enveloped
In intimate synergy a monkey puzzle tree
Allen would tire of these explorations and seek
Another bench to gather in a new vantage
We said little and breathed in the solitude
Polly Hill seemed so far removed from everything
Eventually we’d return past the cedar-scented
Restrooms and the Adirondack chairs
To our cars in the parking lot but once
On leaving we saw some friends whose kids
Came running toward us excitedly shouting
There was a bird a bird a hawk up there alighted
By the pen of plants for sale at the entrance
We watched a red tail hawk take flight soaring
Above our heads into the skies over Polly Hill
Allen printed the pic I snapped with my iPhone
I think of him whenever I see that red tail
Hawk in flight at Polly Hill soaring high above
The trees and the flowering plants exquisitely
silent by the wooden benches where we sat
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Drunk on Words
“A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
~Benoit Mandelbrot
“I climbed the library ladder to reach a book by Coleridge
near the very top shelf and slipped on the ladder’s last rung
Before I knew it, I was in a delirium, a dream I could not
escape from, its abracadabra held me in a spell, trapped among …”
— from a letter to the poet Ron Silliman (composed, but never sent)
Oh! A madman shakes a dead geranium at midnight
His landlady hears the geranium scream, quickly she
Dresses to confront her tenant overhead
“Never, never, never, did I ever,” she
Mumbles as she stumbles up the stairs tying her sash
Shouting, as she raps upon his door, “No more! No more!”
Underneath the madman’s door a flood of letters
Pour, fragments of words, nonsensical syllables,
Jabberwocky hash babble — Those technicolor word clouds
Roiling up to rain and hail long forgotten
Incantations, shrouding in meaninglessness
The utterly outraged landlady struck dumb
And the moon looked down upon this unintelligible muck
With not a thought for geraniums, nor madmen, nor landladies
And sighed.