Poetry Feature:
Words Flow from New York's Catskill Mountain
Watershed Region
by Bertha Rogers
It's not easy to define the boundaries of the Catskill Mountain Region of New York, partly because of politics, partly because of land pride. In April of 1708, Queen Anne set aside, for Johannes Hardenburgh and a few others, a million and a half acres, a property that encompassed almost all of the Catskills and would become known as the "Great Patent." This rocky, beautiful land is not mountains at all, but part of the Allegheny Plateau Province and, although a link in the Appalachian chain, is different: Some two hundred million years ago, when the earth heaved and formed the Appalachians, the Catskills did not cooperate; that stone gently burgeoned to plateau, to be later engraved by water runoff and erosion.
After the Native Americans, who used it primarily for hunting and travel, the area was settled by English and Scotch-Irish immigrants, its crop-inhospitable soil friendly, first to sheep and goats, then to the milk-rich Holsteins that have been ubiquitous to these hills and valleys for generations. Now the rolling farms are changing, becoming homes to New York City exiles and summer people who, ironically, have been year-round users of its valuable water, brought to since mid-century through the Catskill Watershed System, since mid-century. About 700,000 acres are included in the area that is called the Catskill Mountain Park, but its parameters are continually embellished by those of us who live here.
Bright Hill Farm is situated in Delaware County, near the hamlet of Treadwell, New York, on a true watershed—East Platner Brook, originating just south of the big blue-green barn, flows to the Delaware River, and Roaring Brook begins just north of the barn and flows to the Susquehanna, both ending in the Atlantic. It was here that the watershed series, Word Thursdays, had its first meeting in January of 1992.
Since that snowy night, the organization founded by two ex-New Yorkers—my husband, Ernest M. Fishman, and I, has grown to include Bright Hill Press, our literary publishing company; Radio by Writers, our regional public and commercial radio series; our Share the Words High School Poetry Competition; the Word Thursdays Literary Workshops for Kids; and the Speaking the Words Poets and Writers Tour and Festival. To date we have featured more than 500 poets and writers from New York and throughout the U.S., and more than 700 poets and writers in the opens that begin the Word Thursdays programs. Our annual Speaking the Words Poets and Writers Tour and Festival, inaugurated in 1993, has hosted hundreds of professional and emerging poets and writers at regional libraries, bookstores, supermarkets, banks, medical and real estate offices.
Not all the poets and writers who have enhanced our readings are from elsewhere; the broader mountain region, even beyond its western rim, is home to many accomplished wordsmiths, a very few of whom are presented in this collection. The poets here are like poets everywhere today—some are public- and private-school teachers, some are college professors, some are journalists, and some work at a little of everything. Their words are what define them, and living in the Catskill Region almost certainly determines how they shape their thoughts and words. All have read at Word Thursdays and/or our Speaking the Words Tour and Festival, which this year, for the first time, is an intermittent word feast, taking place in April, August, and October.
For further information about these projects, contact wordthur@catskill.net. For maps and historical essays concerning the Catskill region and/or its valuable water, see http://www.delawarecounty.org, http://www.catskillguide.com and/or http://www.cwconline.org (Catskill Watershed Foundation), http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dep/html/catdel.html.
~ . ~ . ~
Bruce Bennett (Aurora, NY)
House Husband
A tiny mouse, about to leave a hole,
peered here and there. Behind him squeaked a voice:
"Remember. Seven tidbits from the roll
that's on the table. If you have a choice,
"Get crust. A bit of peel. I think instead
of ham, I'll use some casing from the wurst,
some seed—have you heard anything I've said?"
"Please, dear," he shushed. "I've got to get there first."
Though helpfulness is pleasant in a mate,
a wife's in luck if he just keeps things straight.
Silly Sheep
"You blandly bleat whatever's in your head!"
a ram sneered at a ewe, who sweetly said,
"I'm sorry, dear, that what we do annoys,
but we don't have the savoir-faire of boys."
The sexes often don't see eye to eye,
but often do not even seem to try.
Robert Bensen (Oneonta, NY)
Orpheus and E
—for Elisabeth Baldanza
I
As the last grains of night dissolved in the dawn,
I woke to a voice of hoarfrost, misting, almost gone,
rehearsing how, in such light, he lost the woman
he went to hell and won back with a song. Doomed
to seek her this far North when verdant May returns,
again when winter stiffens us with grief, he burdens
us both with his reversal: For death to me is life,
if thou diest, as the blind poet sang to wake his lost
wife.
In a shade of the voice that the prince of shade
heard and wept to hear again, like the dry rustle of a
blade
he with his tale reopens the wound in my side, enters
and fashions her after my heart's desire, and through its
chambers
she dances well after his voice has left my verse.
Either I'm snake-bit, or I can't shake the dream with the
curse.
II
In the grainy light, where the sun flinches on its slope
from the pull and call of the dark pall of death,
I paused to quell my rage and raving heart. And
breathe.
And listen: no one. I lifted the lyre. The first note
hung there, then echoed down the stony way we'd come.
I can see her yet as her wraith had stepped, veiled, from
among the veiled dead. With effortless grace
that the very dark withdrew to admire, she began to
dance.
How could Death and his consort not yield, as night to
day,
as silence to her footfall, how not restore her to the light
of day?
But how, as sound returned to the step of her whom I'd
won again,
could I not turn?—and ever after scour every shadow
like a raven
as if she'll return through a stage door one twilit winter
day,
or bare-ankled enter the annals of a flawless emerald
May.
Nancy Vieira Couto (Ithaca, NY)
Poem in the Letters of the Mohawk Alphabet
who she is she wants to know
on Water Street in the stone store
where she is she knows she wants
no worse to wear on Water Street
in the stone store oh roar her heart
oh hear her north the snow she shines
her sharks are near her store is sorrow
she who knows she is no saint
is heat is show is taste is thirst
on Water Street in the stone store
is torn is worn is art is arrow
is near the shore oh stone the oar
oh nearer to thee oh see oh we
who know no sin who throws the stone
on Water Street in the stone store
(According to nineteenth-century students of Native American languages, the Mohawk dialect of the Iroquois, when translated into English, uses only the following eleven letters: A, E, I, K, N, O, R, S, T, and W.)
(Prior publ.: The Bookpress Quarterly.)
Now She is Foot
She pitied the nuns
that lived in sleeves
and stockings. She
pitied their mushroom
elbows and knees and
secret swellings
behind the cellar
doors of the heart's
moist house.
Oh, she was bursting
her pods then,
full of herself, her
self spilling over.
Now she is foot
in a shoe, she is hatted
and gloved, she is
powdered and dry.
Graham Duncan (Oneonta, NY)
Seeing Clearly
Down the street in the new
house going up, the lights
have come on. It's only
the workmen who've rigged up
a bulb or two to get on
with the job, behind schedule
as usual, but the owners,
making a new start, no doubt
feel their lives have been
brightened, can see the day
they'll be moving in, putting
down roots in a new place,
where soon they'll be spending
their nights taking on the old
problems. Settling there,
they hope that some things
at least will be more clear.
We wish them well, whoever
they are. The mailbox,
already up, waits for news
from the world, other places
they sank foundations,
the news to be read best
under lamplight and thought
about in the kindly dark.
Ends
All periphery
deception,
all edges
connections,
sites of change,
transformations
below sight,
matter's art,
invisibilities
more sound
than surface,
every end
a start.
Richard Frost (Otego, NY)
Life
A poem may be written about anything
from a can of beans to a chorus of bluebirds.
A dull can opener, making intermittent slits
along the rim, was responsible
for this cut in my finger I got trying to pry
the ragged top from a can of beans.
I finally did get the top off,
and a small swirl of my blood there on the surface
of the beans looked almost like tomato catsup,
which some people do put in pork and beans.
I spooned off the blood before it got mixed in
with the beans, and put them into a saucepan
and heated them for ten minutes on the stove,
stirring them so they didn't burn
on the bottom. Boy, they were good, little golden
beans, and I ate a piece of bread and butter
with them. Sometimes I put some beans on the bread
and ate it all in one mouthful, and drank
a cool swallow of milk and then ate
more beans until they were all gone.
I took a piece of bread and soaked up the last
of the sauce, and ate the bread and had a last
drink of milk. For a long time the taste
was still there in my mouth. I kept finding it
with my tongue in different parts of my gums and up
in my teeth. I'm telling you, with the sun
coming through the window, reflecting off
the flowers in the wallpaper, and that taste
lasting and lasting, I was so happy,
I felt just like a chorus of bluebirds.
(Prior publ.: Michigan Quarterly Review)
Mary Greene (Narrowsburg, NY)
Faith
It asks of me this: that I go into the garden
with my weight of heavy lead, willing to spread it
like ashes under the spreading trees.
That I go like a beggar into the evening,
willing to let the darkness be whole, or not-
simple, or not-that the sleep that comes
will be broken, and fenced into meaning.
That if I kissed you, and my breasts rose
like two broken moons toward your lips
that you also kissed me, and that at night
I am the dream that walks beside you in the city.
I am the woman climbing on the tall ladder
greeting the sun. It is the tenderest
of new blooms—this creeping faith that love
is a hidden, but true, thing. That the reasons
of your heart are meadows full of sunshine, rain, thorn,
birds,
blackberries whose prick and bramble holds
the questions, the answer, the hidden fruit. I wait
for the rain to come, for morning
to come shooting over the trees, wait
like a child who never questions the flow
of seasons, never questions the ocean
with its thrift of sandy shells drifting
on their long journey
toward another shore, bringing
the treasure of white bone, shining--
as though it could help it—into the new day.
Phyllis Janowitz (Ithaca, NY)
The Door
When he found the words
he found the key
He found the key
That unlocked the door
What bliss
When he found the words
He found the key
That unlocked the door
What bliss his lips sipped
What sorrow unglued his eyes
When he found the words
When he found the key
That unlocked the door
What bliss
What sorrow
When he went through the door
When he found the words
When he found the key
That unlocked the door
What bliss
What sorrow
When he went through the door
And vanished forever
When he found the words
Bertha Rogers (Treadwell, NY)
Luna
Luna, I have longed to see you, touch your
creamy green wings. Wanted your eyes on me,
false romancer! Oh, I stopped for the hawk
moth, dazzled by his hummingbird buzz, needling
beak—how he throbbed over the purple phlox's
honey!—I summoned my husband, our guests,
pointed out the insect's antics. August thrummed
around us. Enough? Should have been, like
the day I made this drawing of my left hand,
trembling beneath the maple's leaves, awaiting
that summer's lover. Ancient heat, long ago.
I am and am not sorry. I still desire
the translucent luna, its arrayed rings—
nothing can diminish my need for green.
Matthew Spireng (Kingston, NY)
Mohonk Mountain House,
From the Rondout Valley
Evenings, all the old hotel's
west-facing windows
light like fire's gone
and gotten far beyond anything
anyone's ever brought back
under control. It's as if
the sun's lush fury
were unleashed in every pane,
molten gold at every window.
Middays or mornings there's no sign
the naked eye picks out
of anything human high up
the Shawangunk Ridge
to light like that, just cliffs
and trees, greens dark
with distance, and the tower
to watch for fires from.
The first I saw that evening flash
I thought how sad it was
the old hotel gone like that,
so fast even the sirens
hadn't started. Next day
I pored over papers seeking news
of the hotel's loss. Come evening
I watched the fire again,
contained by understanding.
("Shawangunk," based on an Indian word, is pronounced
"Shon-gum," with the accent on the first syllable.)
The Light of Rural Habitation
(after a line by Barbara Guest)
is not like any other light,
is more beacon-like but warmer
like butter melting in a pan.
You stand off in a field at night
and a longing wells up to go there,
to be inside. You don't know
just what you'll find, but whatever it is
it'll be fine. You do know, though, that once inside
looking out from a darkened window
you'll see mostly dark, only
the light of rural habitation across the valley
beyond the woodlot and barn.
F. Bjornson Stock (Cherry Valley, NY)
Fall
The bird that gathered translucent grass,
Wove a sock above the river,
Sang, laid, this immigrant bird
With the flaming breast,
Anthracite wings,
Stranger that warbled and shook as the body life
The forest, this Assyrian flute-playing bird,
The one you put oranges out for in the springtime,
So late snow would not kill this songbird,
Scarlet Tanager I thought we were
On Friday nights when bodies spread
And we climbed,
Built soft pockets
In limbs, crotches, the water below
Catching our notes,
This
Bird
Sprawled
Dead,
Disintegrates now
Behind the abandoned wall where the moon
Has tossed a final bag of water.
In the Nursing Home
When I pull my chair up close to my mother,
A zither opens between our bodies
And I take her hand in mine and our years
Together begin to sob and I want to
Run out of the dining room
As the old ladies begin to keep
Slow time to the sound we throb
Into the wing-laden dusk beyond.
My mother swears that she remembers
How many times they pasted blue paper
Over the house windows so the moon
Would not harvest them fully, oh,
I drive home determined to cover
The north window and all I can find
Is a smudged sheet of carbon paper.
Beamed light exposes the corner hutch,
Her dishes protrude, bone-white, dental.
As I rub my eye, I stain the lid
With a half-gone crescent, her hand,
Unrecognizable against my skin
Grown wet beneath this duplicate moon.
Julia Suarez (Oneonta, NY)
White Bears
I quoted The Times: "Subjects told not to think
of white bears could think of nothing else." "Nonsense,"
you replied. "Put out the light."
I can't speak for you, but all night I felt them
coming in, over the green rim of the Catskills
in July, legions of great
beasts moving smooth as milk, their heads bobbing, their
paws the size of sheep. I felt their flanks rolling—
as if the room were rolling—
or was that you?
We say nothing over eggs.
Out the window the landscape is suddenly
white. I can see nothing but
"Ursus maritimus: semi-aquatic
northern bear. . . found on drifting oceanic
ice floes throughout the Arctic
regions." I have barricaded The World Book
behind The Daily Star and as you hunch to
your coffee, I read on, "sharp
teeth. . . adult males. . . more than 1,000 pounds. . . dense
white fur. . . can smell food up to 10 miles away. . . "
(Here I think of clapboards, our
thin roof) "can scent seal dens buried in layers
of snow and ice—" Are you looking out now too?
"Rarely kill people. May live
up to 33 years. . . " Looking up, I see
them, some hunting seal pups, some nursing their young,
others loll and yawn. They have
obliterated the flower beds. When one
huge male rears, he overarches us, a white
cathedral.
It is snowing.
There are only bear sounds now, only bear shapes.
The shattering of bones between strong white teeth,
the wind ruffling dense white pelts.
We have gone among them. They have dug their dens
in the snowbanks and will sleep. In the heavy
land, we, too, will find ourselves
bedding down. Between the paws of the great she-bear
I imagine craniums like caves of ice.
You are already dreaming.
Contributors Notes
Bruce Bennett teaches English and creative writing and is director of the Book Arts Center at Wells College, Aurora, New York. Orchises Press published his Navigating the Distance: New and Selected Poems (named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of 1999 by BOOKLIST). He is also the author of Straw Into Gold (Cleveland State, 1984), I Never Danced With Mary Beth (FootHills, 1991), and Taking Off (Orchises, 1992).
Robert Bensen is the author of Scriptures of Venus (Swamp Press, 2000) and editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (University of Arizona Press, 2001). These poems are from "Two Dancers," a sequence of fifty sonnets. He teaches at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York.
Nancy Vieira Couto, Ithaca, New York, is the author of The Face in the Water, a poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including The American Voice, Black Warrior Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry. She is the poetry editor of Epoch.
Graham Duncan, Oneonta, New York, has published 352 poems in 114 periodicals, including Blueline, Heliotrope: A Journal of Poetry, Pivot, Poem, and Southern Poetry Review. His chapbooks are The Map Reader (1987) and Stone Circles (1992). His new and selected poems, Every Infant's Blood, will be published by Bright Hill Press in late 2001.
Richard Frost's Neighbor Blood was published by Sarabande Books and his two earlier collections by Ohio University Press. He has had NEA, CAPS, and Bread Loaf fellowships. He is a working jazz drummer and is Professor of English at the State University College, Oneonta, New York.
Mary Greene's writing has appeared in Sojourner and First Intensity. Her chapbook, Where You're Going in this Dream, was published in 1993. She lives in Narrowsburg, New York, where she writes for a local newspaper and teaches writing to children and adults.
Bertha Rogers's poems have appeared in journals and in anthologies and in several collections, including A House of Corners (Three Conditions Press, 2000). Her translation of Beowulf was published by Birch Brook Press in 2000. She is the founding director of Bright Hill Press, a nonprofit literary organization, and administrator of the Bright Hill Press/New York State Council on the Arts literary web site.
Matthew Spireng's poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Scholar, Southern Humanities Review, Yankee, Poet Lore, The Amicus Journal, and College English. His poetry collection, Out of Body, has been a finalist in three national competitions and is seeking a publisher. He lives in Kingston, New York.
F. Björnson Stock was born in New York City, but for more than 25 years has lived in Cherry Valley, New York. His work has appeared in the anthologies Aurora and Out of the Catskills and Just Beyond. He has also published in the Georgia Review, Onthebus, and Poetpourri. His chapbooks are Drawing Water and the willow's amber hearth (Bull Thistle Press, Vermont).
Julia Suarez was born in New Jersey and has lived in Oneonta, New York, since 1973. She shares an old house and a small garden with her big dog, Crispin, and finds the seeds for many of her poems in her upstate environment. Poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Phoebe, Wordsmith, The Second Word Thursdays Anthology and Out of the Catskills and Just Beyond (Bright Hill Press).