by Mark Fischweicher
1
Same as yesterday, he says,
“Everything bagel, cream cheese and lox,
slice of onion, tomato,
toasted?
and the creek, it still rushes
under the old railroad bridge
Just as it has
for years
It runs in the woods
behind our house
and we cross it often to get
through the maples and oaks and birches and pines
to the old iron ore pit
carved out of stone
after they finally
let the springs fill it in,
full now full
to forty feet deep
though the train no longer runs
as it had years ago,
bikers and walkers and runners fly by
on the paved over tracks,
and the spotted and painted,
the box and the wood turtles,
the goldfinch and catbirds
and sparrows, the waxwings
and swallows and warblers
still sing and the brook trail
still flows where it had
a history unchanged
off it flows to the Hudson
and back to the ocean
crashing on waves
and boulders and rocks
2
we can walk on the trail
as it runs by the brook
just where we’d seen, like a statue,
or a sculpture of sorts, a heron,
still as stone,
till it catches the fish
in one gulp
and down where the tracks still run
where we board for the train
going down to the city
there’s this one single woman
who walks out, on her lawn
across from the station,
who stands with her hands,
statuesque,
deftly stretched
there before her
balletically smoking her one cigarette
not to fill up the house with her ash
I suspect
these are the things that we look for in life
the things that return
even memories
and poems as such
3
The things that return
the seasons and waves the wind
and the rain –
cryst yf my love were in
my arms
and I yn my bed
againe
And in these steady
homeless winds
even the words sing
even the birds spin their tales
In these steady, homeless winds,
perhaps a breeze
will waft the clouds
away.
Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.