Current

Peeskawso Peak

Come along William Culllen Bryant,
let us beckon Melville, Hawthorne to convene,
along with Umpachanee and Konkapot – all the best

Shall meet at Monument Mountain, and follow
Mohican Monument Trail, through the seasons
of the soul, to Peeskawso* Peak, and there to rest.

Dave Read

*Mohican for “virtuous woman.”

The poet takes the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires, Monument Mountain, Juky 2021; Mathew Lavalette photo.

Same mountain, earlier poem:

Paean to an Eminence

This geologic oddment in the Berkshires,
our bald uncle, with busted nose, looms

where echo of the penultimate Mohican sounds,
unperturbed by pale poets, disturbers of myth,
who revere the Hawthorne-Melville rain delay.

Snug as it would fit in the hopper of majestic Mount Greylock,
for us with tastes prosaic, Monument Mountain is our pet rock.

– Dave Read
(earlier version published by Trustees of Reservations, 2008, Views of Monument Mountain.)

Memorial Day

But for peonies or daffodils perhaps,
leave the stone etched with the name of your dead
alone to cast shadows over grass day after day –

And keep a little flag handy to wave at the parade,
or to poke in the eye of politicians who spill blood
as if they only were spending money.

Dave Read

Go outdoors and play says my father around eight on Saturday mornings as he heads to work in the middle of the 1950s, when the brainchild of Philo Farnsworth and company was yet creeping, it delighted me to gallup into adventureland,

My stint at the Idiot Box enough for an episode or two of Hopalong Cassidy, following ten, fifteen minutes of test pattern mesmerization, accompanied by In The Hall of the Mountain King*, the original earworm, which teased me and tickled me and finally made

Me feel on par with the happy people fifty years on when I attended this most improbable mashup: Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, together with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, who play both the European

Classical version of Edvard Greig’s Peer Gynt Suite and its adaptation for jazz band by Duke Ellington, alternating movements back and forth the score of players led by Marsalis seated in the midst of the four score musicians under Ozawa’s invisible baton

At Tanglewood, on Mahican land in Massachusetts, two hundred miles from my boyhood home sited five blocks from the mouth of the river that was Main Street to Onondaga Fire-keepers twenty five miles upstream of Lake Ontario.

Ten years earlier, according to a report March 13, 1945 in a New York newspaper, my father was chased out of his comfort zone by Nazi Germans in an airplane bearing down on “the first American airman, on the first American airstrip, east of the Rhine river.” A few weeks later, Hitler was dead, then World War II ended, then the Baby Boom began.

May we remind the New Zealand solon, and others with errant slurs, that some generations amount to more than demographic and marketing phenomena, and that we Baby Boomers come by our patriotism honestly, as it was our fathers who rescued the world from popular autocracy and racial madness.

Now pray tell, kids, what does your Saturday look like?

– Dave Read

*”In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Judging April

April is graded in the northeast by her work
toward the detonation of forsythia, which
converts neighborhood street corners and

Highway interstices into explosions of
sunshine for two weeks, max – and while that
shrub returns to ordinary and ungainly, a good

April hands the baton to May, who gets all the glory!

Dave Read

Good Mount Rushmore

The real one, the Mount Rushmore of the good American mind,
which does not trespass lands of the Sioux,

Beams bright with the likeness of good John Lewis,
the likes of whom America has no right to expect to see again,

Whom Americans fail to emulate at their peril.
Godspeed John Lewis, good rest is your’s; good trouble, our’s.

– Dave Read

Frosted Gloss

Instead of by the fire of desire,
or by the ice of hate,

From what I’ve seen,

America’s bound to succumb,
to lazy and dumb.

– Dave Read

Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Hunker Down

From time to time
Father nature pipes in
With an update, or to ground
Us for the weekend, or longer,
To effect the weight of things.

Our resilience becomes crucial –
We find drive we forgot about
And split the day between
Awake and shaken to the core.

Dave Read

Afterparty

We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.

After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.

Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.

Dave Read

self portrait in birthday suit

decades the dawdler, small d dilettante,
big a amateur, master of half a dozen useful/tasty things,
and an even-tempered brooder, to boot!

upon attaining seventy years, the chore is to unpack
cabinets and closets and to scan or riffle scores and scores
of notebooks, lest something worthwhile be lost.

the gift of seventy is humility enough to invoke alchemy,
which can hie the compression of these leaves beyond
the ink black stage straight to the bright and shiny.

Dave Read

We Fined God

Some few hours before a sloe-black sky would feel the prick of the crescent moon, she called my attention to the far ridge, where a blue mist rose over the leafless wood.

For a moment, we discussed the source: smoke? reflection of an unseen pond? but we couldn’t muster the energy – we didn’t amount to enough to care to know.

We had gotten nowhere in no time at all. A luckier couple, much less lovers, would have made up a story out of the blue, delighted by the emergence of Spring, at last.

All we could do was bounce memories off one another, carefully cut and pasted for the telling:

I noted where I first saw a scarlet tanager, but not the girl who was with me then, whose areolae were paler than scarlet; and she pointed to the bench by the pond, smiling in silence at the memory of what went down her last time there.

Ten days into April, some months since our first date, we parted.
It was the year we fined God for keeping Winter out past its due date, back in the library of the mind.

– Dave Read

The Muse Leaps Generations

My generation dropped the ball, big time, sure we levitated the Pentagon for a few seconds, then let it fall back to Earth while in Vietnam the war went on and on until Congress ran out of checks in the middle of the stupid seventies, not during the swinging sixties.

I watched the March for Our Lives on TV and wept wet tears, but felt an immense infusion of Hope to see the Muse leap generations -> Emma Lazarus passes the torch of Liberty to Emma Gonzales.

Sports metaphor is apt because they’re kids who belong in playgrounds on Springtime Saturdays and I’m glad they neither referenced scripture nor said a prayer.

Of course they didn’t, so clearly do they see that the scripture-clipping evangelicals are pleased as punch with the status quo, but Hell no, these kids are fed up and bold as brass and call BS what a nation of Moms and Dads have allowed to happen.

There was no soaring rhetoric, no reference to either biblical or historical slavery, no invocation across the millennia to Abraham, or Moses, or Jesus Christ these kids are fed up and bold as brass and call BS what a nation of Dads and Moms have allowed to happen.

Enough is enough, the torch is passed from Emma Lazarus to Emma Gonzales, do the math America – SIX MINUTES TWENTY SECONDS with an AR-15 adds up to silence to the NRA, made deaf by the noise of coins dropping into their coffin-shaped coffers, silent tongues choke their spokespeople, a tsunami of silence floods the lobbies and hearing rooms of Congress, of K street, of Wall Street, floods the Silicon Valley, swamps the fake White House, the meeting rooms and hideaways, the mirrored halls, elevators, and escalators all morph into escape routes for sycophants and lapdogs who rat out the hopeless, feckless, friendless foe (in the Oval playpen) en route to the Big House.

Dave Read

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus