LITERARY GAZETTE P RO S E • P O E M S • P H O TO G R A P H Y
A RIVER REPORTER LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE
Page 2 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 7 Moving Into My Cabin —The Catskills Will Nixon My Wilderness By Kathleen Gavin Grimaldi 11 Animals By Marcia Nehemiah Blue Heron By Jan Castro 14 In The Field By Nancy Dymond The Return By Susan Jefts 15 Bungalow Summer By Norma Ketzis Bernstock Realms By Malcolm Willison
Far From Home By Maureen Hand Homecoming By Georganna Millman 23 Daylight By Will Conway Home Is No Place By Rees Davis I’m No Pacifist, By Paul Lojeski 27 8 Millimeter By Mimi Moriarty Duets By Judith Lechner Just Once More By Sheila Dugan
19 let us each and every one be a country By Wendy Merrick Burbank
Each year, The River Reporter publishes the award-winning and topical Literary Gazette, a unique publication devoted to photography and the literary arts. The Upper Delaware River Valley is a region that celebrates the literary arts with strong public libraries, literary programs, writers groups and regional readings and gatherings. Organizations such as the Grey Towers National Historic Site in Milford recognize the literary arts with a festival each year, and Lackawaxen’s Zane Grey Museum re-opened this spring with an expanded and updated celebration of this famous Western author of the 1900s. And you can hear cutting-edge poetry from nationally known poets every month at First Fridays at the Narrowsburg library. Along with artists, many photographers are drawn to the region for its beautiful scenery, and their work can be found in area galleries and shops—and in the Literary Gazette. This year, the Gazette is focusing on the idea of “roots,” and the many ways that roots can be defined and preserved. One’s roots can relate to family, cultural identity, ethnicity, landscape, country or ideal. Our roots can refer to set of values or a stash of memories. Our roots can clash, or they can be seamlessly embedded in the psyche of our being. Where we come from—our first home, in a sense—is something we run to (or from); in its best sense, it provides a sense of deep comfort and belonging. As Victor Hugo wrote, “Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.” Or as Saint Theresa of Avila said, “All things must come to the soul from its roots, where it is planted.” We hope you will enjoy the various meditations within these pages on the idea of roots and home, and the photographs by Michael Barzda that depict nature close up, as well as two local children in the greenery that express childhood explorations and are by turns haunting, playful and lovely. Enjoy.
Mary Greene Section Editor
Contributors’ Bios Poets NORMA KETZIS BERNSTOCK writes and creates art in her studio in the woods in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation area. Her images can be seen at the Highlands Photographic Guild in Milford, PA. A member of the Upper Delaware Writers Collective, her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. WENDY MERRICK BURBANK’S story “Janet and Keith” can be heard throughout 2010 on the Conflict of Interest Theater Company’s Podcast. She has been a featured writer at the Catskill Mountain Foundation Center for Literary Arts. Her writing has appeared in Fed1a: a digital display of ideas and information. JAN CASTRO wrote The Last Frontier (poetry), The Art & Life of Georgia O’Keeffe and other books. Castro was a finalist for the 2007 Fulton Fiction Prize from Adirondack Review and received the CCLM Editor’s Award for River Styx magazine. Castro is contributing editor for Sculpture and publishes frequently. WILL CONWAY was born in Danville, VA. He received a Bachelor of Professional Studies from Empire State College. He lives in Mongaup Valley, NY with his wife and a cat, where he enjoys gardening and writing. Upper Delaware Writers Collective member NANCY DYMOND considers poetry to be a rosetta stone of the dance we perform through life as we follow the lion’s gaze in multiple personas. Her poetry has been published and performed in the Upper Delaware area and has won the Alyssa Katon award several years in a row at Cedar Crest College in the Lehigh Valley. REES DAVIS has lived in the Woodstock area with his wife Mei and son Wiley since 1991. He has been a psychologist and a behavioral researcher for more than 20 years. He has returned to writing poetry in the last four years. SHEILA DUGAN lives in Milanville, PA with two cats, hundreds of books, a tiny garden, a woodchuck, a pond, a river and a view of Skinner’s Falls Bridge. KATHLEEN GALVIN GRIMALDI was born and raised in New England. She raised a family in New York and retired to the mountains of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Upper Delaware Writers Collective and has affiliations with poets in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in various anthologies. MAUREEN HAND taught English and writing for 25 years in Amsterdam, NY. Her writings have appeared in magazines, newspapers and literary journals. She is the author of Write The Snapshots Of Life, a book on memoir writing. SUSAN JEFTS is a poet and writing instructor living in Saratoga Springs, NY. Her poems have appeared in journals including Parnassus Literary Review, Big
City Lit, ByLine, Hudson River Anthology, Caffè Lena Anthology and Blue Stone Review. She also enjoys collaborating with musicians, exploring ways of joining music and poetry. JUDITH LECHNER has had her poetry published in Chronogram, Home Planet News and other publications, and in the anthologies Be Mine (Alliance Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY) and 25 (Arts Society of Kingston, NY). Her poems and essays have been read on radio (WAMC, WKZE) and interpreted with visual art in local galleries. She has read extensively throughout the Hudson Valley. PAUL LOJESKI, whose poem included here won first place in the second annual Green Heron Poetry Project sponsored by the Upper Delaware Writers Collective, was born and raised in Lakewood, OH and formally educated in the public schools there. He attended Oberlin College. He lives with his wife and daughter on Long Island. GEORGANNA MILLMAN lives in the Catskill Mountains with her husband. She is self-employed, owning an independent retail pharmacy. Her poetry has appeared in national and regional publications. Her chapbook Formulary won the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press 2008 Poetry Award. Her second book, Set Theory, will be published in July by Finishing Line Press. GeorgannaMillman.com. MIMI MORIARTY is the poetry editor for The Spotlight, a weekly periodical in the Albany, NY area. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and teaches creative writing to adults and teens. Her chapbook of 23 poems about the aftermath of war, War Psalm, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007. Award-winning poet MARCIA NEHEMIAH is the author of two books of poetry, Reclamation (2005) and Final Story (2009). Her poems and essays have been published widely in literary journals, magazines and online. She writes the In Our Hands column for The River Reporter. marcianehemiah.com. Love in the City of Grudges (FootHills Publishing) is WILL NIXON’S latest poetry book. His previous collection was My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse (FootHills Publishing). With Michael Perkins he wrote Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town (Bushwhack Books). He lives in Woodstock, NY. willnixon.com. MALCOLM WILLISON has been writing and publishing poems, while living and manuscript editing in the Northeast, Key West and New Orleans. (Yes, we and our most of our friends survived Katrina and, despite dysfunctional, incompetent, and downright malicious public and private policies and practices, New Orleans and its poetry scene are alive and well, though now looking down the muzzle of the biggest oil spill ever.)
Photographer
Michael C. Barzda is a photographer photographing nature and people is the Upper Delaware River Valley. All photographs in this issue of the Literary Gazette are his. His human subjects Luca Ricciardi and Francesca Ricciardi, son and daughter of Cynthia and Richard Ricciardi of Barryville, NY and New York City.
“All things must come to the soul from its roots, from where it is planted.” THE RIVER REPORTER
—Saint Teresa of Avila LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 3
Page 4 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
“Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.” THE RIVER REPORTER
—D.H. Lawrence LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 5
Page 6 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
Moving Into My Cabin —The Catskills By Will Nixon
Hung a Cherokee bear mask by the door. Loaded the pencil holder with wild turkey feathers. Gathered an armload of dead branches for the kindling box. Picked asters and goldenrod for the old pickling jar on the table. Decorated the windowsill with birch bark and bird nests, a littered shotgun shell for a humorous touch. Swept mouse droppings off the shelves. Shook dust from the fireplace rug. Noticed again the smell of the cabin: thirty-year-old logs varnished whiskey brown, charred chimney stones, wool blankets passed from owner to owner. Brewed pine needle tea. Wiped owl pellets from the porch bench. Transcribed in my journal the song of the stream. Listened to the red-eyed vireo owning his treetop till sunset. Lingered over sauteed mushrooms and stew. Studied moths on the windows, dozens, hundreds, fluttering, crawling, staring with eyes tinier than crumbs, yet gold, gold as fire. Stepped outside to join moths at the windows, my first friends.
My Wilderness By Kathleen Gavin Grimaldi
As a child I’d known these woods rife with pink laurel in June, where I remembered one night a majestic owl sitting on a high branch of the oak in front of the cabin, thrilling and scaring me all at the same time. I loved that world with its little woods weaving on and on, carefully holding the darkness snarled in the hemlock’s branches while allowing the stars so high and bright above the tops of the highest oaks, to stream pathways of light along its pine-needled floor, that allowed morning’s orange to break through as a grand surprise most days of high summer. But it is the heart-searing call of the chicken hawks that has never left me, that first hinted to me of life’s essential loneliness, that first linked my soul to the solidity of this place never to release its hold, even now, while I grow old.
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 7
Page 8 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
“It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.” —John Synge
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 9
Page 10 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
Animals
Blue Heron
By Marcia Nehemiah
By Jan Castro
My dog died, but that I miss him is not the point of this poem, even though I think I hear his nails click across the kitchen floor to meet me when I come through the door.
The blue heron in the sky moving downstream lands on his favorite perch in early morning light
With him gone, I crave the company of animals, yearn for their simple mysterious understandings, no layers of language to cloud the connection. I want to look into the eyes of cows, and deer, and goats, watch foxes flash into the woods and rolling black-fur bears. I spend hours staring as wild turkeys peck and pick up their heads at the slightest sound, or hunker against the cold, black massive balls perched on black fallen limbs, still in snow until signaled, and then they slip away, quiet and aligned. All these animals joined in the secret places they do their living.
as I place pepper seeds and basil firmly into earth. A gentle rain turns torrential, pelting the house and the riverbed increases its perpetual gurgle across grey, blue and black stones streaked with sulfur, spotted with green moss, slippery from lichens hugging their water-worn surfaces, the roiling rapids chilling ankles and calves. This whispering green water embodies boundlessness. Swollen rain crashes against stone, dislodging some boulders from the pier supporting the footbridge over Peekskill tributary at Rondout Creek. Motion creates sound. In this house, nature peers into every window -from the spiders busy with their secret language to trees gradually forming shadows of themselves. Patterns emerge from objects: handmade beds, Hand-hewn wooden shovels, old tools, bowls, a row of country shoes on the hemp matt in the front hallway. Night enters the waters laughing; darkness flows against my ears; blue energy nestles on the shore. **** for my sister Terry Benninga and for Ursula von Rydingsvard on their birthdays
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 11
Page 12 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
“As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.” —Sam Abell
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 13
In the Field
The Return
By Nancy Dymond
By Susan Jefts
In the field stands a fruit tree past bearing; A few branches still lift a rustle of leaves to the wind; But others, starkly bare, whistle of past ripenings, of youthful sap surges sweeping gleefully through unpocked cambium:
Land of apples, land of returning, this is the place we used to live. We can hear the sounds in our shoes of earth becoming whole again We go to the orchard, collect words and berries, conjure sounds, swoosh them ‘round in the red planets of our mouths.
We open wide our ears, our hands, our feet. Words live in the smallest places, in the thin gold edge of the honeycomb, the fading red of the bittersweet vine, the small marble of sun that is autumn.
They make their way through the rich dark mix of the earth, a stray mark of sunlight on an outstretched hand, the nape of the neck, or the skin around our mouths where we pull from them their small bright nutrients, their colors and their names, their still potent seed.
Oh, those trembling bee bodies scattering sticky pollen in their haste to lick and suck pink sugar-filled blossoms; The ceaseless swelling of bulbous fruits pushing their way from sour to sweet along the path of the season; The plop and swoosh of ripe fruit dropping, leaf smothered branches snapping skyward. For years my kitchen apron swelled with the pie makings of generations; Traditions bloomed and families came home at apple season; Even after lightning split the tree in half the lower branches seemed a reflection of those remaining against the sky; Heaven and earth blossomed and appled together. There was no sudden event no special day in which the apple tree grew gnarled and withered; It was such a gradual turning and growing in the field where other things also turned and grew and fell into usefulness far beyond the sight of one who would make pies from apples.
Page 14 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER
Bungalow Summer
Realms
By Norma Ketzis Bernstock
By Malcolm Willison
There’s something about the stucco facade of an old hotel, window paint peeling, glass shattered, wooden porches sagging. I’m brought back to a pine-paneled kitchen crowded with chattering mothers, air stuffed with tangy cooking smells. I’m holding a tin pail filled with just-picked blueberries, purple juice stains the corners of my mouth. I know in a few short hours my father will arrive from the city for a weekend in the mountains. For dinner we’ll eat cold cherry soup, fresh-killed chicken, carrot tsimis and chilled melon slices for dessert. On Saturday we’ll swim in the lake with the spongy sand bottom and sharp rocks. My father will hoist me onto his strong shoulders. We’ll wade deep into dark green water unsure of the depth and sudden drops. But at that moment I will feel safe in his grasp not thinking about the day in the future when his grip is no longer the measure of my safety.
All distances were measured from that house the chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace roads to mountains, sea or old friends brought back and food to serve out on the porch to talk and look out past stanchion maples to the field beyond the road that slowly erupted into trees.
Now we are quits of them trees, lawns, pond, house to find ourselves driving off loaded with remnants scattered like the cellar’s mold at risk of loss into dimensionless realms of travel and relief.
“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning.” —Alex Haley
REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 15
Page 16 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
“Family faces are like magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.” —Gail Lumet Buckley
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 17
Page 18 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
let us each and every one be a country
Far From Home
By Wendy Merrick Burbank
Her scent floats from words tucked in his pocket. He sits down in desert sand and fingers the letter. That tiny babe in blue beckons to him—
with temperamental kinetic borders crazier than any coastline formed by blurred verges of fingers toes breasts bellies buttocks genitals nostrils ear lobes eye lashes let us have only these moist fleshy countries no others no stubborn stiff ones with dull immovable boundaries
By Maureen Hand
“He’s getting big,” she says. “He’s going to be blonde— looks just like you.” He tastes the smells of home and spits out sand. He feels her lips, her embrace, her delicious curves. “War is hell,” they say. “But what do they know,” he sneers, embracing the son he has yet to hold.
let us have only countries that run and jump swim spin swing sing scream hit balls with sticks and dance and make love to other countries and give life and milk to small hungry innocent countries September 11, 2006
Homecoming By Georganna Millman
I light a candle and set it by the window. Night is when I think of you. I tell myself faith is silent like the owl moving from tree to tree. A single flame can be used to take a bearing. In my mind, it is a flame brighter than stars. When I dream, you tell me you are lost. There is no other light for miles. I stay awake as long as I can, looking out the window. I imagine your face in the rust-colored darkness.
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 19
Page 20 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
“Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” —Theodore Roethke
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 21
Page 22 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
Daylight
Home Is No Place
By Will Conway
By Rees Davis
The day is somber in the mood of summer pushed indoors by
Home is no place so much as homing,
an unexpected drop in the thermometer. A tufting breeze riffles at branch tips. Leaves wriggle off plates in a dampness following morning rain a waxing moon has lowered onto us. Roses sag heavy lopping over in their red dresses, too young for bleed of color It seems like a sorrow is lingering behind the weight of water. In the narrowing chill of thickened gray cloud sun waits its turn, like any ordinary day we hope might shine. The repeated lesson of patience is a humble gift for the practice of human life, lived with birds in the quietude between their joyful singing.
so much as taming by accommodations, a celebration complete when indistinguishable, the way dreams come true all the time, from nowhere, as home returns to the weightless womb, an opening of my heart safe enough to close my eyes, where I can see the alien is utterly self-centered as the darkly sheltered see threats in the sky and the chamber of my heart is the womb of my next life.
I’m No Pacifist, By Paul Lojeski
my friend said at brunch, summer bees bumbling around yellow flowers by the porch.
No such animal, anyway, he added, syrup dripping off steamy pancakes stacked high and I said
nothing, thinking there’re bears up in those woods, hunting honey. I wanted to run with them.
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 23
Page 24 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
“A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.” —Ivan Turgenev
THE RIVER REPORTER
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 25
Page 26 • LITERARY GAZETTE 2010
THE RIVER REPORTER
8 Millimeter
Just Once More
By Mimi Moriarty
By Sheila Dugan
This morning the trees are bandaged in snow the rocks in their stilled voice stoic in their frozen shadow
Tell me again how your mom danced her red mercury convertible down the dirt road to the lake how she found an old pair of huaraches in an old paintless boat half-eaten by the golden shore the player piano ka-plinking away as she made up words to go with the song.
You, wild and furious, stumble into its bleak uncertainty while I remain wrapped in the roots of domestic life a pie to bake a poem to write. You leave the day to me enlarged in black and white it’s as if my childhood has repeated itself in a cinematic loop you are my father leaving my mother to her chores, though this day I will spend alone no children to mind, no clothes to iron just the pen the pie the naked eye
Duets By Judith Lechner
An old woman’s longing: passion stirred into the pot crooned into the cat’s ear growing blossoms she can’t give away singing lullabies to the moon. How bad to end like this? The pot heats house and heart. The cat keeps all her secrets. The garden is her palette. The moon sings back.
THE RIVER REPORTER
Tell me again how she sang like a bird named Holiday and danced all night to the old victrola winding down till the stars left the cold morning sky and the snow fell all day as she made love to your dad in February 1938. Tell me again how she walked down the aisle in a handmedown dress of yellowing silk while the choir boys sang in high chirping voices blessed art the poor in spirit for they shall be children of god. Tell me again how she smelled like the wind when she kissed you good night how she snuggled you tight as you both lay in bed while she told you the tale of Benjamin Bunny and chamomile tea and rustling leaves on shivering trees.
LITERARY GAZETTE 2010 • Page 27