First Maine Poet Laureate

Kate Barnes

Appleton

Kate Barnes is the daughter of Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth, two prominent Maine writers. She was Maine's first poet laureate, 1996-2000, and has published three books of poems, the latest, Kneeling Orion.

Inside the Stone


Up in the woods,
in the circle among the beech trees,
last winter one of the lumber horses split a stone
horizontally, with a clip of his big steel shoe.
It had seemed to be a plain gray stone,
but when it was opened a black wall appeared,
rusty at the edges, flecked with pale checks
like unknown constellations, and over all
floated wisps of blue-gray, trailing feathers of clouds.

I brush away the fallen leaves
and stare into the distance inside the stone.
If one could become a bird –
if one could fly into that night –
if one could enter the light of those stars –

and then the woods become very still,
the beech leaves blur at the edge of my vision,
I find I am bending lower and lower.

Previously published in Clearing the Field,
Blackberry Press, Copyright 1992, Kate Barnes




Lewis Turco

Dresden

Lewis Turco has authored some 44 books, monographs and chapbooks, including The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Turco was founding director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and the Program in Writing Arts at S.U.N.Y. Oswego. He received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and was given an honorary degree by Ashland University. He now operates the Mathom Bookshop in Dresden.

The Shifting Web

It is time to write a poem.
You have spun out the string of hours –
 it winds down the road, across
 people's lawns; it tangles itself
in the bushes of the park, catches
 in the lower limbs of a horse

chestnut, and there, now, it lifts to
a kite, a blue kite against the gray
 sky. You must shinny after
 it. When you've caught it, hauled it down
by its rag tail, you see your poem
 scrawled on the tissue wrinkling in

 your hand. You feel the balsa rib
bow. Windcaught, the kite whispers free, sweeps
 across the street, blowing like
 the spiders that ride the air as
voyagers: you have read that somewhere;
 the kite spins out its line. You can

 not now follow. Your hands stop. No
longer do they climb and circle. You
 have seen the poem. The day
 freezes in its frame. The words squirm
out from beneath your hand. The wind is
 solid air, the clouds the color

 of waiting. Only the kite moves
above the still neighbors in their rooms,
 on their lawns, amid their sounds
 turned to rosedust hovering in
a blank white square of world: When that is
 done, things will move again. The kite

 will be somewhere in the center
of the shifting web it is weaving.
 You will follow it, follow
 the filament from pause to pause,
poem to poem. It is almost
 done. You can feel the wind stirring.

Previously published in The Shifting Web:
New and Selected Poems of Lewis Turco
©Copyright 1989 Lewis Turco





Ann Kucera

Garland

Where the rubber meets the road
It is the season of gigantic ants.
Who owns this kitchen, me or thee?
I kill them with annihilating stamps
In righteous anger as they haste to flee!

When I observe a busy garden ant
Pushing his meal down through his own trap door,
I look on with approval. Oh, I shan't
Disturb his gamboling on Nature's floor.

But in my very kitchen, my kingdom
I am no longer merciful and kind.
Although I wince to bring my big foot down,
To universal sharing I am blind.

Invasion turns the character about
And drives a vaunted altruism out.



©Copyright 2003, Ann Kucera




C. J. Stephens

Kingfield

The Saws
We heard the cries of those two men
caught on the saws that summer two days apart;
the moments themselves lost shape
and the day collapsed.

Young fool Moffitt's ferocious laugh
and savagery before his tears
and Josselyn's inhuman kindness –
taking the rag of his hand with him into the yard.

And in the blindness of mercy,
among the innocent saws,
July screamed her days out on the waste of wood,
hurrying us past disaster
into September and another job.

©Copyright 1999, C. J. Stephens




Herb Coursen

Brunswick

An ex-fighter pilot, a prolific poet, and a Shakespearean scholar, Herb Coursen is originally from New Jersey. He taught poetry at the Choate School and the Univ. of Connecticut before moving to Maine to teach at Bowdoin College in 1964. Retired from Bowdoin in 1991, Coursen lives in Brunswick and teaches now at the University of Maine in Augusta. He's also the academic advisor for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Insitute in Brunswick.


10 March: From Augusta to Dresden



Sunday again, morning of loss, of dream

driven away somewhere into the zodiac

of nights gone by. Abandoned now, the brick

of that roadside store was new upon a time

of hope. Or did someone already know

that this try brought the heartbreak once again

(as children sometimes do), that the small rain

on the edge of eyes would fall in place tomorrow?


The nation, we are told, believes in God.

So, Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching Off

(not As) to War. We follow down the road

to doom. A frostheave dips and tries to shove

my tires to the trees. March will explode

the pavement. Don’t tell me that God is love.  

©Copyright 2003, Herb Coursen




April Ossmann

Farmington

April Ossmann’s first collection of poems, Anxious Music, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in April 2008. She has published her poetry in numerous journals including Harvard Review and Colorado Review, and in the anthologies Contemporary New England Poetry, and The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse. She won the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award for ten poems published in the summer 2000 issue. She is Executive Director of Alice James Books, has taught creative writing and literature courses at Lebanon College and the University of Maine at Farmington.


A City, Like Venice

It's the same fascination I felt
with The Boy In The Plastic Bubble,
that movie I saw in my teens

about a boy born with no immune system,
who began life entirely vulnerable
to injury—which seems to me

how we all begin, and continue—trusting
or not trusting our existence,
knowing that a blip in anyone else's life—

a cold or flu or minor scrape—
could mean the end for us. It was
pure twentieth century, the way they

brought him up in the bubble to save his life
(a kind of savings account
for the future); and pure Shakespeare

the way he finally burst those bounds to claim it.
It's the sort of emotional bubble
I imagine you're in now, in the too-open,

air-conditioned atrium of Atlanta's
airport, your skin's tan absorbing rather
than reflecting, the sickly combination of day

and fluorescent light. You're waiting to return,
legs discreetly crossed, and perfect-postured,
perhaps trying not to think about what's eating me

or might be, and how you'll broach the subject,
having bitten off distinctly more
than you can chew in loving me—a constant

challenge to your awesome calm and poise,
your sometimes too elaborate indifference:
intricate and delicate as this construct

of Venetian glass representing coral
I keep on my desk; the pale-yet-passionate,
pink-orange combination

bleeding slowly upwards, stopping just short
of those clear glass ends of avenues.
A sculpture something like what I imagine

the surgeon sees during open-heart—
the transformation of what doctors
liken to a closed fist, pulsing

back into a hand all open-fingered.
Does it want to give, receive or simply
to make contact? I keep seeing

those built-in plastic gloves the bubble
came equipped with: reaching for his parents,
his pathetic expressions flattened

into the grotesque by the wall between them,
feeling the filtered warmth of encircling
arms—is the closest he ever comes to embrace.

Sometimes climbing what felt
like hand-over-hand, I have done
what none of those airport strangers

eyeing your grace in that artificial light
will ever do: I've trespassed finally,
your noisome moats, proverbial feet-thick walls,

and battlements; I have found
what they hid: a city, like Venice,
just barely kept from drowning.


©Copyright 2005, April Ossmann



Rod Farmer

Farmington

Rod Farmer has been a farm laborer, dump truck driver, grocery store clerk, spent 14 months in Vietnam via the draft, and a high school history and social science teacher. He is a professor of education and history at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has received a Fulbright-Hays Felloships to study in India, Israel and Pakistan and grants to study in Japan. Rod is an independent poet (i.e., he doesn't belong to cliquish literary circles because he finds more room outside than inside of any social circle).

A Sense of Place
As the mass culture homogenizes
the nation its regions become
less distinct yet my central Maine
remains remarkably New Englandly
in culture and anchored
in humble but honest old land
strewn with numerous stones,
earth the lilacs like enough
to prosper in and in the same
neighborhood as wild plums
and raspberries and blackberries
along woods roads and abandoned
but not forgotten fieldstone walls.
This place doesn't yell at you
for attention the way the grandeur
of the Grand Canyon does
or with the loud voice of
cosmopolitan New York City,
in too many places the natural
and social worlds shout you down
they do all the talking
and ask all the questions
but central Maine understates itself
it has a certain economy of speech
about itself a close-mouthedness
that lets the citizen ask questions
of the natural and social worlds,
and ask questions of oneself,
it is good to place one's sense
of place in a place of good sense.  

©Copyright 2003, Rod Farmer





Hortense Flexner

Sutton Island


The Fire-Watchers

Woman, who the dim centuries ago,
Guarded the fire,
Fed it with twig and branch,
While the strong male with weapon crude,
Ranged the deep woods,
In search of meat and berries and wild fruit;
Woman, who sheltering, hovering near the flame,
Watched its curved leapings, waiting, lonely, still,
With fear and dark foreboding and fierce love;
O, woman, silent watcher of the day,
Inactive, yearning, listening,
Stretching cold hands above the yellow flame
That must not die;
We send to you across the million years,
The kinship call,
Our greeting of despair!
Do we not know as by the hearth we wait,
Watching the falling ash, the glowing heart
Of coal or log,
What were your thoughts, your agonies, your prayers?
Do we not tremble with the fear you felt,
And strain to catch the footstep on the flag,
The opening door, As you the snapping of the underbrush,
The tearing of the cave mouth's matted vine?
Are not our hands, stretched to the blaze, your own?
And do our savage hearts not cry,
Out of the wilderness of stone and steel;
"Why always ours to wait, to feed the fire,
"While he, with leap, with joy of strength and life, "Follows the prey, spends of his fearless youth "Beneath the open skies!" Mother of ages, brooding in the dusk, Forging the chain of empty hours and years,
O why, for us,
The weary after-keepers of the hearth,
Did you not heed the call of wind and toil,
Tread the red embers cold and take your way,
Alone and free,
That all the misery of the faggot load,
The guarding of the flame by those who wait,
Had never been?

©Copyright 1913, Hortense Flexner




Dennis Camire

Kennebunk


The Retarded Children Entering Heaven

"To understand heaven is not to narrow down or define
but, rather, to open up to beauty."

Jefferey Burton Russell

First they know all state capitals
and the name of each Great Lake.

Later they fathom "transubstantiation"
and the human desire to lose oneself inside

another body. Soon minds feel like
the soul of a beehive as angelic tutors reveal

how toes and vertebrae retain their strange shapes
even though, on the subatomic level,

99% of flesh and bone is emptyness.
But after grasping the calculus

revealing the collectivie suffering
of thousands of mothers wondering

what they did in which trimester
to create such a challenged soul,

most feel overwhelmed in going
from illiteracy to reading

the mind of God--And so
as the day's other departed souls

continue imbibing "universal mind"
most retarded souls let themselves fall

to the back of this fast-track class
until able to hande all the grief

in seeing the cancer or tumor fester
inside a loved one's lung or kidney.

And now seeing with Rumi, Buddha, and Jesus
that the answer to each human grief

resides inside a soul skinny-dipping the body,
some want to flying to the reincarnation line

dissolving into the River of Forgetting;
some yearn to reclaim "special needs" labels

until beloved brothers or cousins
make their own "crossings...."

And a few even come close to losing all
faith in this life of the mind

before the answer appears as magically
as "Boise" and "Lake Ontario"

and the souls of the retarded think
that maybe, one day, heaven can become

this beautiful, palatial abode if
they can just look down at us in our grief

and learn that it's not dumb
to find their only consolation in

simply loving us as unconditionally
as we try loving a retarded child.

©Copyright 2003, Dennis Camire




Alice Persons

Westbrook

Alice Persons attended law school and works for a legal publisher, teaching part-time. She is co-publisher with Nancy Henry of Moon Pie Press, a Maine small press specializing in poetry chapbooks. She with her husband and six pets, and is a volunteer for the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland. She has had poems in Animus, Off the Coast, Aurorean, Barbaric Yawp, and other journals and was nominated in 2004 for a Pushcart Prize.


blues

The blues ain't nothin' but a low down shaky chill.

Taj Mahal

there are times
when nothing but the music
helps
not therapy
or chocolate
talking trash with a friend
St. John's wort
or even bourbon

some nights
when sleep
is out of the question
and every misstep I ever made
every false lover
comes back to taunt me

and all I want
is to get on the floor
and howl like a lost dog

the blues don't fix it
but the singers' pain
and the wry humor
they wring from it
remind me that I'm human

flawed, frail,
ghost-ridden
but standing upright
at least for now.


©Copyright 2004, Alice Persons


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