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by Mark Fischweicher

I walk to the market
two blocks away
for some salad, a spring mix
from Salinas,
in southern California
chock full of Oak Leaf Chard,
Baby Butter Kale,
Green Leaf Mizuna, Red Leaf Arugula
and Rosa Radicchio

crabapple blossoms
litter the road where I walk
making the
pavement pink

the sidewalk’s pushed up
by the roots of the tree
spreading beneath them
with splotches of weeds
coming up in the cracks
and in no time at all
the pink paved road
returns
to its constant,
its black, brown and gray

I say, perhaps
the Street Sweeper
swept by spinning its brooms
sweeping away the blossoms
with all the other urban rubbish
and debris,

blossoms not withstanding
we move on
under the rootless
scaffolding, our city’s official tree
the fruitless
sidewalk sheds
we walk under, more than
three hundred miles of them
stretched above us
one which still stands
after it was first apparently planted
twenty-eight years ago

while the “actual” blossoms
herald their buds and
no late frost has of yet
decimated the chance
of apples or even peaches
and berries upstate,
in the summer,
already in bud
as is our Tulip tree
the one we bought 35 years ago
just six inches high, having grown to around
60 feet tall by now,
the same as New York’s oldest,
the Alley Pond Giant, a sapling when
the Dutch arrived, thought to be
as much as 450 years old,
likely the oldest living thing in New York,
it sits in a sunken grove
within earshot of
the Cross Island Parkway and the L.I.E,
the top of the tree
visible to cars and trucks
travelling west

a green planet here,
where I rest

 

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.

by Mark Fischweicher

Years ago the ground floor of our building flooded
May have been Sandy or Irene
Up from Florida
Just another unpredictable
torrential tourist.
Mathew never made it
Past the Carolinas.

Now I walk along the East River,
the walk closed below
The Brooklyn Bridge.
They’re raising it, they say,
widening it.
What with the river widening itself
and Manhattan sinking,
under the weight of its skyscrapers,

meanwhile, the Bikers and joggers breeze by
Soccer and softball
filling the fields
along the drive
while the water laps
at the sea wall.

Ferries running up and down the river.
Tugboats, tour boats,
sight see-ers, and sloops.
And here along the walk,
They, almost all of them Chinese,
with rods tied to the railing,
Fishing for bass and porgy
And selling it, they say, on the street
In Chinatown.

Marshland,
the Lenape landed their canoes here
Good fishing still
I suppose
The ancient ones gone
Having lasted hundreds of years
Street names remind us of their land;
Spruce Street, Pine Street, Cedar, Beech.

Once you could have walked up Maiden Lane
or its previous incarnation, Maagde Paatje
to get here, the footpath
used by lovers to walk along the “pebbly brook”
that ran from Nassau Street
to the East River,
where wives and daughters washed their linen.

Or think back to 1712,
The New York , that’s right, The New York
Slave Revolt, which happened here as well.
A group of more than twenty black slaves,
gathered on the night of April 6th,
and set fire to abuilding on Maiden Lane
near Broadway,
according to city historians,
killing nine, injuring a half-dozen more.
Colonials arrested seventy. Six committed suicide,
21 were sentenced to death
including one woman with child.
Twenty were burned to death.
One was executed on a breaking wheel.

Or think further back
to the massacre
at Corlear’s Hook
named after the Van Corlear family,
17ty century Dutch landowners,
and the geographic bend in the shoreline
that had the shape of a hook
where forty Wecquaesgeek Indians
of all ages and genders were slaughtered
as they slept, by the Dutch,
at the end of February in 1643

Just a short walk up from “De Smit’s Vly,”
“The Smith’s Valley”
where Cornelis Clopper
had a blacksmith shop’
a central stopping point for country people
to stop and shod their horses and socialize

And so I walk along the shore
Thru time, thru our collective history
Waiting for tornadoes once again.

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.

 

by Mark Fischweicher

upstate
in the woods,
In a wilderness
of brambles
at one particular location
there is an old stone wall,
now homeless
but still in place,
that rises just where it stood,
one or two feet above the ground,
a corner, left in place
from someone’s former life
and periodically there are remnants,
one or sometimes
two boulders high,
of some old stone boundary,
stretching for yards
all matted and covered with bright
green moss
separating someone’s former world,
from their old forgotten neighbor’s
within this murky sea of stones
a border, a margin
a man-made fringe,
like water circling an island
an inlet.

as it was over a century ago,
in 1896
in the city
when the Harlem Ship Canal was built
allowing ships to move
between the Hudson and the Harlem Rivers,
when Marble Hill, now part of the Bronx,
became an island
still afloat despite its tons of
Tuckahoe Marble
nearly pure white in color
quarried and carried down
the Harlem Railroad,
to Saint Patrick’s, where
the clustered columns of the nave,
the choir, and the transept are all
of white marble.
those of the nave, of extraordinary dimensions,
striking the sight with a sense of colossal grandeur
which words will not convey
but I am bound to it.
these are my woods
my trails, my paths,
my streets through nature’s rude
forgetfulness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.