Lee Sharkey

Farmington



Agents
Who who who woke up to say I didn't
Who who who woke up to say I did
Who who who raised naked palms before who
Who cried whose face was a purple flower

Who who who blessed the soldier fresh from killing
Who who who will wear black ribbon
Who who who'll say what to whose wife and children
Who who'll carry whose dark thoughts with them

Who wrapped grenades round whose waist like a lover
Who clipped flesh and lay gauze over
Who talked like a tourist while bombs arced around her
Who who who flew in flew low flew over

Who fired who ordered fire
Who who who turned away who turned away

©Copyright 2003, Lee Sharkey




Stuart Kestenbaum
Deer Isle, Maine


Cider
Lloyd knows all the trees on the island
the ones that were overgrown
but were once pruned and picked
for pies and cider, baking and eating.
The ones with the forgotten names--
Gravenstein, Northern Spy, Jonathan---
and the histories of the hardscrabble
homesteads they grew on.
Every year they were touched
by someone's hands in the fields and yards
where delicate blossoms come early
in the sudden New England spring.
He guides us to the cross road
near the cemetery back by the shed
once used for chickens
and now used for nothing.
Close by are the second growth spruce
where in early winter deer will
leap out to eat the fallen fruit.
But now we are the ones who crouch
in the tall grass of autumn's
fertility and decay and pick the drops,
the huge red Kings, an apple
almost gone from memory
nearly two bushels from one tree
that we add to our mix
of Macintosh and Golden Delicious.
In the colder afternoon air
Lloyd cranks the press down with an iron bar
turning pulp into cider
as Yellow Jackets swarm
and stumble around us, celebrating
the old sweetness as it goes by.


©Copyright 2003, Stuart Kestenbaum




Robert P. Tristram Coffin
Brunswick


Crystal Moment
Once or twice this side of death
Things can make one hold his breath.

From my boyhood I remember
A crystal moment of September.

A wooded island rang with sounds
Of church bells in the throats of hounds.

A buck leaped out and took the tide
With jewels flowing past each side.

With his head high like a tree
He swam within a yard of me.

I saw the golden drop of light
In his eyes turned dark with fright.

I saw the forest's holiness
On him like a fierce caress.

Fear made him lovely past belief,
My heart was trembling like a leaf.

He leans towards the land and life
With need above him like a knife.

In his wake the hot hounds churned
They stretched their muzzles out and yearned.

They bayed no more, but swam and throbbed
Hunger drove them till they sobbed.

Pursued, pursuers reached the shore
And vanished. I saw nothing more.

So they passed, a pageant such
As only gods could witness much,

Life and death upon one tether
And running beautiful together.





Edith Cheitman
Kents Hill


Painter Slowing Down in Harpswell, Maine

White house, veranda wrapped,
flag limp in morning air

Petite blond in bateau shirt,
white shorts;
dark rebel undressed in jeans cut off to there,
blouse tied to leave her midriff bare

He stops himself counting
the arpeggio of her ribs resonating
from the porch ceiling;
that odd shade of gentian
they use here,
just touched with viridian
(unintended premises always veer towards blue)

The girls lick ice cream cones,
cock precisely tanned and muscled legs just so.
(Were they born knowing how to do this?
Can he ever apprehend their particular truth?)
Blank canvases taunt from the back seat.  

Ultramarine, he thinks, some bois de rose —
but then the question of the light:
nacre, oyster, ivory, gauze?
Neither presence nor absence of that light will be enough:
that light must move, must drift, must oscillate  

On the porch a shift of haunch
tentative turn of winkled eye.
He hits the gas,  
gravel spit waking
the long-forgotten voice inside his head--
caveat from a younger self,
drinking cheap wine with another
second rater from New York.

“Don’t fuck with perfection, kid.
Some things just won’t go on canvas;
try it and you’ll turn into a drunk and bitter bastard.
Worst of all, you won’t get laid.”

He shifts to third.
Not far to Brunswick, Bowdoin, young women,
a pal who’s always welcomed him.

He thinks about a new beer he’s been drinking –
a different fortune inside every cap.  

His favorite? “The Universe begins Immediately to your left.”

He determines to get drunk,
not bitter or bastardly;
determines to get laid.  


©Copyright 2003, Edith Cheitman





Jeri Theriault
Portland, Maine


Add-A-Pearl
At Aunt Dee's funeral I watch her sisters
shrink in the August sun, women
who worked in the Kennebec mills,
and raised accountants and teachers, a priest
and a poet, all of us standing tall around
the slippery edges of the grave.
As I drive home with my daughter,
I tell her stories, string memories
like the gems I collected as a child
to add to my strand of pearls.

Summer evenings on the porch my aunts'
knitting hands moved like birds. They smoked
Lucky Strikes, drank warm beer and told
me about the mill's unending heat and clank,
the opaque sameness of making cardboard.
Piece work. Swing shift. Overtime. Machines
that never stopped, not for flesh, not for breath.
My aunts' hands stacked a million paper plates
in gray light and mended male pride
like shirt fronts at home.

But Aunt Dee chose the round hardness of rosary
beads, the beauty of a plaster Jesus, measured stories
and remembered alone. In dust laddered sunlight,
she opened the glossy Bulfinch and Graves,
and touched the toussled heads of other people's
children. In fourth grade I'd visit her
each morning, sharpen pencils and learn names. . .
Hippolyta, who cut off a breast for battle, maze
wending Ariadne, Penelope wearing out thread
in the weaving and the unweaving. . .

Aunt Dee spent sixty-three years as Sister Anne.
At her grave my living aunts are faded
as the colors in a factory apron.
At the wake they bounce babies, sip wine,
and whisper dirty jokes. It's late and cool
when I leave. Cassiopeia shines. Memory
blinks in a string of highway headlights.
My daughter sleeps in this dark and humming space.

©Copyright Jeri Theriault






Patricia Ranzoni

Bucksport, Maine


Patricia Smith Ranzoni was born in Lincoln, Maine, in 1940, to a woodcutter from Webster Plantation and farmgirl from Castine. Her roots and stories, of which she writes, mix in relation with Native Americans and Canadians. She grew up in Bucksport where she writes from one of the subsistence farms of her youth. Although working her way through undergraduate and graduate degrees in education from UMO, she is unschooled in poetry but for the folk traditions of her people and self-trained habit. Her documentary poems have appeared across the country and abroad and are used and archived in schools and gatherings on Maine writing, history, class, women's studies, and disability. In 2002 she became the first woman from the northern chain to be invited to read her poetry at the Univ. of Ohio's annual Women of Appalachia Conference. Puckerbrush Press published her first collections, Claiming (1995) and Settling (2000); and Sheltering Pines Press will publish Only Human, Poems From the Atlantic Flyway. An invitational chapbook is forthcoming from Pudding House's Gold series.



Today, Too

April 18, 2000


Billy's intermittent breeze
you explain to the boys
because they can figure the rest
even if not how a man contains
a spring day by letting out like this

they love it

especially the parts about opening
the canary's cage and freeing
those cottagers from the snowy dome

which means
there's hope for them too

this winter's school photos encased
in whatever that floating sleet is
glittering

when what a boy needs
is to be sifting dirt
for glints of rock to identify
or to rev his 4-engine invention
on the pond to test

and the phoebe pair loops
to the plum tree to wait

while they help air the pillows
and quilts they slept on on the floor
last night

before commencing construction
in the chosen location
under the east eaves

and the booted men pull over
in their trucks and neighbor-dear cars
answering the sun's call
with their clods of worms and rods
to wade into the swift brook loud

the way a flooding dictionary is loud

to cast for trout like perfect words
swimming back to their source

in liquid music
with flicker and twitter kissing
their machine-ruined ears

and the temperatures are human

and there is that intermittent breeze

if they can just hook the one word one
catch is all they ask the thrill of the hit

the way a rainbow-want tugs
and reels in your mind

one right fish
to show what needs refeeling
to get through another spring

inside that mill.


©Copyright 2000, Patricia Ranzoni






Bern Porter
Porter Settlement



Myrtle Beach Before and After the Storm


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Published with permission of Mr. Porter




John Tagliabue
Lewiston


Gifted we can fly
I feel a buoyancy in the universe, so
I pursue angels,
I perceive them,
let your poetry receive them. Let oceans carry on
in boats, let the
boats be named after
all the saints; let the
destinations be all the
destinations of all the
prayers of the saints.
Let Portia be a port in air ascending as if by mercy;
let charity prevail. Whatever
you work at let buoyancy
surprise you. A cork in a
champagne bottle shoots off and surprises Apolllinaire. Up there
exchange bouquest; buyoyant
readers carry THE GREAT DAY.


©Copyright 1984, John Tagliabue




Ken Nye

Freeport, Maine


Ken Nye was born in Nebraska and raised in New York and spent spent summers since the age of five in Maine on Lake Androscoggin. After graduating from Colby College, he taught in Illinois. Eager to return to Maine after 7 years in Illinois, Ken completed his Ph.D. and accepted a position as the Assistant Principal in Rumford, Maine. Ken spent 13 fond years at Rumford, eventually stepping up to Principal in 1977. He and his wife, Ann, renovated an abandoned farm where they raised their two children. Ken accepted the Principal position at Yarmouth High School in Yarmouth, Maine in 1984 and relocated with Ann to the Maine coastal village of Freeport. He earned recognition as Maine’s Principal of the Year in 1993. Ken left Yarmouth in 1994 to move into graduate teaching and is now a graduate professor in USM’s Education Leadership Program and delights in the time his position affords him to indulge his passion for poetry.

Searching for the Spring


I’d been told our spring water comes down the hill
through an underground pipe,
from a “spring by the wall, about 500 yards in back of the barn.”

Expecting to simply go find the spring,
I head up the hill along the stone wall.
It’s not easy going. Halfway up,
the impenetrable forest of scrub pines and firs
starts forcing me away from the wall.
Eventually, the wall, not the spring,
is the goal of my search.
Continuing up hill, I start angling left, then right,
broadening the length of my tack with each turn.
Eventually, though, it dawns on me:
I have no idea where I am.

I’m well more than 500 yards from the barn,
with no sign of wall, let alone spring.
Ahead there is more uphill forest to climb.
But facing down hill, just to my left,
I can see open sky through thick branches of brush.
Unsure of the reason for this hole in the forest,
I push through the bushes and
suddenly
the dark of the forest is gone
as I step onto a rock at the top of a cliff.

As if standing on a cloud,
I can see the river, the centerpiece of the valley,
meandering down from Andover,
the fields beyond the river,
the farm beyond the fields,
and the cliffs on the far side of the valley.
Below me, the trees are a dance floor of green.
I’m tempted to spread my wings
and glide out over the forest.

I can just see the roof of our barn.
The rest of our farm is screened by the hill
on which I began the search for the spring.

I sit down and drink in this vista.
Then my eyes are drawn to the granite on which I sit.
Crystals of mica spiced throughout.
White, creamy and yellow quartz in abundance.
The rock is a masterpiece.
So is the view.

But this is something that has to be shared.
Tomorrow I’ll bring the family up here.

And maybe later I’ll find the spring.

And maybe not.

©Copyright 2005, Ken Nye




Anthony Taylor Dunn

Machiasport

Anthony Taylor Dunn was born in New York City and he spent his childhood in Connecticut, summering in Maine. Educated at Hebron Academy, then graduated with a degree in performing arts from Dean College in Massachusetts, continuing his education at the University of Maine, for an English degree. He worked in the banking industry in Connecticut and Boston and began writing poetry in workshops at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge. Many of the narrative poems of his debut collection, Sunbathing on the Bottom of the Atlantic , are set in Boston. His poems have been published in literary journals such as Slant. He runs a seasonal bed-and-breakfast in his historic, second-generation home. He lives with his wife, the photographer Bonnie Dunn, and daughter, Isabella.


Unable to sleep, I clean the house in my mind


Lying here in a patch of moonlight,
eyes closing, eyes opening,
the bed has become my enemy
and will not give me solace
from the torment of the night’s silence.

Last time I tried to count the pairs
on Noah’s manifest
making their way up the plank
between drops of rain
and laughter of the dammed.

Tonight I am cleaning the house,
sweeping away yesterday’s sand,
dusting rows of molding books,
their spines cracked and covers torn,
their iniquities concealed.

I tenderly place the china
into the sink’s warm bath.
As the suds graze the chips
and seep in between the fissures,
I can hear indistinct cries –

the echo of an argument,
its anger like a print
fired into the porcelain –
or perhaps the soap has stung a wound
inflicted by rushed packing.

I will then take my furniture oil
and polish the cherry wood,
the oak, the mahogany,
caressing the dark surfaces
like a hand over a lover’s back.

The arc of my face pressed close
to the breath of sweet lemon,
I will whisper into the small gashes
a soothing lullaby,
a song of forgiveness.


©Copyright 2005, Anthony Taylor Dunn

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