Category Archives: Poems

1955 I had my degree and it was time to venture into the future. It started with a stint at a museum in Long Beach, California, before taking off for Europe. There wasn’t all that much to do in the town and about the only thing that was interesting was the beach with tankers loomingContinue reading “California Impressions”

Sounds March 8, 2021 Sounds that were and no longer are Sounds that are and then were not Velcro The click of the camera shutter The third avenue El. Memories of the past. But then there  is also The wail of a baby crying A sound now lost in yesteryear As the baby becomes a man. OtherContinue reading “Sounds”

I suppose I could have gone to Boston but I think I just wanted to get away from home. Besides which there was really no home any more for my parents had sold the farm and were living in a trailer. Logically, it was NY that beckoned and I had a possible contact in theContinue reading “New York City”

  Perceptible, but barely. The sound of a petal dropping from the full-blown rose on my computer tower.  We wait a whole year for that one brief moment of beauty, Francesco had said. But what about the other kinds of beauty, the other stages in growth and development, not just the flowering?  Another petal drops.Continue reading “The Sound of a Petal Dropping”

If I had had my camera out If I had had more time If I had been on my own And not running to catch the train to Zurich In the station of Milan. I would have taken at least two photos. One of a scraggly unleafed tree Waiting for someone As it sat onContinue reading “Tree and Girl”

Our farm was a real farm. Almost a hundred acres with pasturelands, fields and a hemlock grove with a brook.  It was at the end of a dirt road with a big red barn and a white clapboard three-story house with a couple of porches entrances over on the right. The mailman would come onceContinue reading “Goats”

A lady. The only word that suits the woman in the picture. Head held high, lips parted, gazing past me, into…what? A fur coat draped around her shoulders, evening gown cut low, a bare arm crosses, clutching white gloves to her breast. One earring glitters half hidden by a wave of hair. Her only jewels.Continue reading “Penelope III”

McIntosh. An apple of which there is no other.  Surely, that was the apple the wicked witch gave to Snow White. Round, red, perfect. Juicy, asking to be eaten. We had an orchard with over 80 trees on our 98-acre farm in Massachusetts. When harvest time came, my sister and I and the whole family wentContinue reading “Apple Orchard”

Boxes. That you had put in storage. Your past life lies scattered in the yard. Their contents, still remembering your touch wrapping each pot and pan each cup and dish with determination, anger at your fate, at false friends, betrayals, rueful yet relieved to leave it all in newspapers now stiff and yellowed. I goContinue reading “Penelope II”

Penelope (January 1995) – Part I All those things that once you looked at daily, used, took so much for granted you no longer saw them, unaware of their existence, appendages, hands, hammer, knives, tools feet, shoes, carpets vertebras and muscles chairs, tables teeth pots and pans and dishes the ensemble of your mind andContinue reading “Penelope”

(Feb. 20, 2021) Where has the handshake gone? That sign of trust, of human contact. Strong, firm, fleeting,   Warm, pulsating, limp and cold. Saying more than just a physical contact. Protective, as in Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride. Welcoming, forgiving as in his Return of the Prodigal Son. Clasping, grasping, as with Rodin’s anatomical studies. An emanationContinue reading “Hands”

Museum. Architecture for people – without people.  (2000 and November 2004) White rooms, doorways leading to other white rooms. Pictures, straight-edged, in the straight-edged architecture of the rooms. Muffled voices in the carpeted room. Intermittent sounds detaching from what should have been the underlying silence. A hum persistent low key elusory pervasive inescapable. Barely perceptible.Continue reading “Museum Hum”

The history of my mother’s family is actually rather complicated. My ancestors are remembered, some I knew and loved like my grandmother and aunt Toni. Others remain names in the Ahnenpass. Ahnenpass, a genealogical document required in Nazi Germany  listing birth and death dates, occupations, where lived, who they were married to – all toContinue reading “Ahnenpass”

The dark of night flows in like water, fills the room, imprisons me, a creature in its burrow. Eyes wide-open turn inwards to a world alive with ghosts that break unbidden through the fragile diaphragm separating out from in. Phantoms of the past exempt from time and space come one by one and then are gone.Continue reading “Ghosts III January 11, 2004”

Eugenie (Jenny) Voetter  1876 – 1936 1899. She was 23, a concert pianist and a soprano, when she sat forher portrait in Munich. In a year. she would have her firstborn child,on a forlorn island in the Pacific where she had followed the man withwhom she had fallen in love. And where a dark-skinned nativeContinue reading “Ancestors II”

ANCESTORS (January 2004) Ancestors I knewand those I never knew.Family trees.They grow and branchbut backwards.We say we’re looking for our roots.So who is branch and who is trunk?I am the end product,the result of endless matingsbut in turn branch out into others.I am the sumthe penultimate answerof a penultimate answer. Who were theywhere did theyContinue reading “Ancestors”

First thoughts – 1994 and 2021 The wind, the rain a wavering leaf caught up let down motion life New Year passing of time motion.  No fireworks last night unless meant to celebrate the passing of a year – infausto – inauspicious, fatal as no year before.  Although in other times and places For otherContinue reading “First Thoughts”