Philip Booth

Castine

Philip Booth lives in the Maine house of his childhood. After returning from Air Force service in World War II, Booth studied with Robert Frost as a freshman at Dartmouth College, obtained his M.A. in English from Columbia University, returned to Dartmouth to teach English. After a year at Dartmouth teach at Wellesley College and, eventually, left New England for Syracuse University, where he was one of the founders of the graduate program in creative writing. He has published numerous books of poetry and has been honored by Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His first book, Letters from a Distant Land (1957), was the 1956 Lamont Poetry Selection, and in 1983 he was elected a Fellow of The Academy of American Poets.

Talk About Walking

Where am I going? I'm going
out, out for a walk. I don't
know where except outside.
Outside argument, out beyond
wallpapered walls, outside
wherever it is where nobody
ever imagines. Beyond where
computers circumvent emotion,
where somebody shorted specs
for rivets for airframes on
today's flights. I'm taking off
on my own two feet. I'm going
to clear my head, to watch
mares'-tails instead of TV,
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I'm going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I'm going?
I don't. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I'll be back
I'm not going to say.

From Lifelines (Viking Press)
©Copyright 2001, Philip Booth





Kristen Lindquist

Rockland

Kristen Lindquist attended Middlebury College and received an MFA from the University of Oregon. For many summers she was on the administrative staff of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She has taught various writing workshops, as well as for the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth, and has been a board member of the Live Poets Society. Her writing has been published in such venues as the Maine Times, Potato Eyes, Feminist Times, Café Review, and Down East Magazine. Noteworthy awards include the 1992 Bread Loaf Poetry Prize, the 2001 Red Fox Award, and second-place for the Penobscot Watershed Poetry Award in 1998. She is indebted to her wonderful poetry group of Kate Barnes, Elizabeth Tibbetts and Candice Stover, with whom she has been writing and performing for many years.

My Sister is Missing

Somewhere in northern Maine
she lives on chips, Prozac, and PKU formula.

Old men on the porch tell her
to stay early mornings to talk.

She has twelve pet rats in aquariums.
On Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays

she meets with her counselor, her social worker,
and maybe her therapy group.

Where she is I've never been
but I know there is an abandoned mill,

a boarded-up shoe factory,
cars junked in backyards, woodpiles,

a convenience store that takes food stamps.
She walks eight miles a day,

her mind counting the steps
away from and back to her door,

her path bounding the space
within which she has receded,

that black hole that won't release her voice,
won't tell me where she is.

©Copyright 2001, Kristen Lindquist





George Van Deventer

Bristol

George Van Deventer currently editor of the poetry journal, Off the Coast. He was instrumental in resurrecting the Live Poets Society in Rockland and is active organizing poetry readings on the coast. He sings with the Sheepscot Valley Chorus, Wiscasset and has taught workshops in the schools. He has been a member of the John Clare Society for 23 years. He was a truckdriver and labor organizer, farmer, and recently built his own home in Bristol.

I sat beneath a limbless tree

Circling it 360 degree.  

I moved in tiny increments
Beneath a tree without its ligaments.  

I felt I was the bottom of a totem,
A beginning for the ending of a poem.  

But, alas, I have a lazy muse,
She gets me started then drops off to snooze.  

A wordless poet is as dumb as dumb can get –
A brooding hen sitting on an empty nest – yet.  


©Copyright 2003, George V. Van Deventer





Larry Gorman
Bangor

The Hoboes of Maine

All brother Hoboes, I pray come along,
I hope you will listen and join in my song;
I would be delighted to have a thing righted,
Especially now, if there's anything wrong.
I'm poor and neglected, I'm mean and dejected,
I never can visit my birthplace again,
I've joined that great order, since I crossed the border,
So prominent now, called the Hoboes of Maine.

There are many young men crossing over the line,
Who have not in their hearts a bad thought or design;
They'll come in great hopes, for they know not the ropes,
And fear not the allurements of women or wine.
They'll curse and they'll swear then, they'll vow and declare then,
They'll never be seen on Roach River again,
That they'd rather go beg, with one arm and a leg,
Than be caught on the drive with the Hoboes of Maine.

Then the City Police they plot and connive
To snare those poor dupes coming off of the drive,
They'll hang round the station, in deep consultation,
In watch of those victims before they arrive.
They'll joyfully hail them, all ready to jail them,
And welcome them back to their city again;
Each man, as he'll walk up, is booked for the lock-up,
To lie there and sweat with the Hoboes of Maine.

The man who resists them is used very rough,
He is thrown on the pavement and quickly handcuffed;
You'd think by their twisters, their chains and cell-wristers
They surely had captured some notable tough;
They'll pound and they'll bruise him and shamefully use him,
They'll capture his money, his watch and his chain;
Likewise their design to collect a big fine,
Or to keep out of jail with the Hoboes of Maine.

Next morning he's brought to his honor Judge Vose,
Who sits there prepared to give him a dose,
As the victim acts silly from blows of the billy,
His cuts and his scars he will scan very close;
He bids him to stand up and hold his right hand up,
Saying, "They tell me young man, you've been drinking again;
A find I must levy, exceedingly heavy,
Or have you break stone with the Hoboes of Maine."

Now I have served out my thirty long days;
Last night I slept in a cold alleyway;
I'm totally busted and canot get trusted,
Folks would know, if they'd trust me, I never should pay.
I'm shabby and bare now, and never would dare now
To visit my own native country again:
They'd jeer me and boot me and threaten to shoot me,
And bid me go back to the Hoboes of Maine.

I'll tell of a man who was given to roam,
Being weary of tramping he thought he'd go home;
I mean not to name him, in case I'd defame him,
But just for a nickname I'll call him Bill Vroam.
He thought he could bluff them, and tried hard to stuff them,
He claimed he had served in the Cuban campaign;
But as soon as they spied him, they identified him;
The knew he belonged to the Hoboes of Maine.

But the Hoboes of Maine are still in great hope
That in some future day they will have further scope;
There's too much restriction, to much interdiction –
In some other states they've tasted the hope.
If those would-be rulers kept out of the coolers,
They'd soon become powerful and certain to reign
In the lowlands and highlands and Prince Edward Island,
Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick or Maine.





Lillian Baker Kennedy

Auburn

Lillian Baker Kennedy, author of Tomorrow After Night and Notions, co-published and co--edited A Sense of Place, Collected Maine Poems. Her poetry was exhibited with the sculpture of Kerstin Engman at Lewiston Auburn College and included in Off the Record, an anthology of poetry by lawyers. She practices law and lives in an old cape bordered by wild roses in Auburn.

A Daughter's Ode to Maine
Maine,
you cranky old girl,
we love you.
You’re a piece of work,
tender as driftwood,  
grounded as granite.

Portland, beautiful harbor, your brick sidewalks are
a carpet for cruise ships, boutiques, cold storage.
Scarf-headed women bow over crabbed knuckles
paring a living until the trudge home.

North to Auburn, north to Augusta,
plowshares clip the lawyers’ fodder.

Bangor, you’re laid out like lumber.

East to Ellsworth, east to Bar Harbor,
road stands line up steaming lobsters.

Let us lie down by the breakers.
Lord knows we’ve had our labors.
Here is the womb, the nursery,
shy Schoodic, the buoy sounding
swells, your cliffs slapped by seas.

Our necks won’t stretch for towers.  
Our feet run away from cement.
Meadows of lupines lulled by poppies
nod toward Machias parades,
elbow to elbow with neighbors,
room enough to go or stay.

We’re raised to root for the underdog.
Whiners are tsked, “fair’s in the fall”.
No child complains about a few
days off to work the potato harvest, but
apples are picked and chickens plucked
by foreigners sleeping in trailers with
organizers prowling their alleys.
We could wring our hands about it all, and

Mother arrives to deliver another glorious day.
Moosehead sprinkles colors over streams.
The scepter of the sun has struck Katahdin.
Soon the plows will unwrap the snow-white ribbons
All along the rivers leading back to bays.

Maine, your children adore you,
seasoned in crab apple ways.

Previously published in A Sense of Place
©Copyright 2003, Lillian Baker Kennedy





Gary Lawless
Nobleboro

untitled

she slept on the floor of
our cabin, dreaming of dolphins.
we drove north.
I have been looking for the animals
willing to talk with me -
in Newfoundland, the caribou,
in Alaska the ducks,
Lithuania the storks,
Isle Royale, the moose -
What will come of our conversations?
Better to know wind and water,
walk the woods and
navigate the stars.

©Copyright 2003, Gary Lawless




Elizabeth Tibbetts

Maine

Pier at Deer Isle

I think the artists are lucky—each painting
a different point of view: lobster boats
rocking on evening swells, white houses
congregated like a lit choir on the hillside
across the harbor, and a confetti of buoys
on the water. A gray-haired man gazes
farther out where the bay’s stream of light
winds between island after island. It’s a
common scene here, but enough to almost  

make us forget what goes on in the world,
as though beauty were the antidote which
could bind guns and missiles and our darkest
hearts. At the pier’s end an iron ladder
descends, its upper rungs above the tide,
its lower still seen, then disappearing into
green, opaque water. If I could, I’d paint
this: the face looking up at me, (body
already gone) features and hands barely  

visible. I wonder if the man staring out
with his brush mid-air would sleep with me.
No kissing, just comfort, the conformation
of one body to another, marriage of mediums.
His closed eyes filled with evening light and my
silent mouth shaping the words deep and green
as though, together, we could hold the ocean
in its rocky bed, the sky in its fragile bowl,
and all that’s perched between them as we tumble.

©Copyright 2003, Elizabeth Tibbetts





Robin Merrill
Farmington

Language
For Alex

If you’re going to understand,
let me explain: around these here parts
people communicate with truck horns.
Depending on duration, pattern, frequency,
a series of honks can say:
- Haven’t seen you in a while.
- Excited now to see you.
- Goin’ to town, be right back.
- Goin’ by your house now, thought you’d like to know.
- My father honks to you so I do too.
- Fuck you.
- Fuck you too.
The most versatile language,
with minimal effort
we honk our way through these small towns
never thinking anything of it.
Now with that background information,
you’ll understand my surprise
when my friend asked me
why I was honking to the cemetery on the kingfield road
long, loud, laboriously, with rhythm
and who the hell I was honking to
and now you’ll understand
how much sense it made to both of us when I said,
I was just sayin’ hi to my dad.

©Copyright 2003, Robin Merrill




Ted Bookey
Readfield

Ted Bookey teaches poetry in the Senior College program at The University of Maine in Augusta. Mixty Motions, a poetry collection, was published by Nightshade Press. He has translated the German poet Erich Kästner with his wife for Red Dancefloor Press. He is the Program Director for the Live Poets' Society of Maine

About Laughter in Poetry
I used to say, “Pain writes best, so
Give me pain. I am a fortunate man

& profound to be held prisoner
In a Russian novel.” I’d say

“2 weeks without a line!
What can the matter be?

How can I write as long
As life goes so unterribly?

Can this mean I am fallen into the depths
Of contentment? (man makes himself behind his back

& has a way of being two ways—& more),
But I have too much imagination to enjoy

The world. Today isn’t what it used to be,
Tomorrow will be worse, & I will be myself again.”

But just then, sly as a custard pie
In a comedian’s hand, laughter came creeping up.

That did it. I wiped my eyes & tasted.
“More,” I said, “Gimme another slice!”

©Copyright 2000, Ted Bookey




Tom Lyford
Dover-Foxcroft

Tom Lyford was born in Dover-Foxcroft and became an English teacher, finally settling and teaching back in his home town. He now lives down the street from the home he grew up in and works at the Thompson Free Library.

tribes
long before it was abbreviated to
the 'hood
there was such a thing as
neighborhood

it was back when you knew everybody
& everybody knew you
it was back when the internet
was the six-party phone line
back when you'd pay for the window you broke
because your old man would make you
back when friends & boundaries were determined
by the school you attended &
which side of the river you lived on
back when you were, by default, on the
sandlot team down at the point
back when playing freeze-tag on somebody's lawn
wasn't trespassing &
when that somebody might just
surprise you with a tray of
dixie cups brimming with ice cubes & lemonade
on a too sultry afternoon
or invite you in from your paper route
when the wind chill dipped south of twenty below
to warm next to the woodstove for a spell
& scoff down a piping hot
blueberry muffin

©Copyright 2005, Tom Lyford




Troy Casa
Bangor

Troy Casa has a BA in the Art History from Ohio State, a Masters in Business Administration from Regis University and studied classical guitar history and performance at the University of New Mexico. He's the author of "White Reflects the Sun", an eChapbook, and the "stark realities that surround texas". He has been published in the Cafe Review, Brushfire, Animus, Sakana and Words & Images. He has read at Poet/Speak, the Penobscot Poetry Walk, the Sebec Village Poetry & Music Night and the Schoodic Arts Festival. He recently coordinated a celebration of e.e. cummings‘ poetry for the Rockland, Belfast & Winter Harbor Public Libraries and directed the 2005 Belfast Poetry Festival.

The Dark Rivers
Now
I'm moving over them too,
the rocks God lay on a
slippery slope of moss.

From night sweats

I awake,
drawing a bead
down river one knot.

Into her harbor,
I am a cautious whale.

...and should I find clear passage
in the counter currents
safe from the swells,
with paddle, with prayer
and beyond the mysterious
clouds that swallow the Hebrides...

then into her harbor
I'll gladly go knowing

Moses too traveled these rocks
without putting a bullet in his heart.

©Copyright 2005, Troy Casa

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