Mark Fischweicher

plantings

by

by Mark Fischweicher

I walk to the market
two blocks away
for some salad, a spring mix
from Salinas,
in southern California
chock full of Oak Leaf Chard,
Baby Butter Kale,
Green Leaf Mizuna, Red Leaf Arugula
and Rosa Radicchio

crabapple blossoms
litter the road where I walk
making the
pavement pink

the sidewalk’s pushed up
by the roots of the tree
spreading beneath them
with splotches of weeds
coming up in the cracks
and in no time at all
the pink paved road
returns
to its constant,
its black, brown and gray

I say, perhaps
the Street Sweeper
swept by spinning its brooms
sweeping away the blossoms
with all the other urban rubbish
and debris,

blossoms not withstanding
we move on
under the rootless
scaffolding, our city’s official tree
the fruitless
sidewalk sheds
we walk under, more than
three hundred miles of them
stretched above us
one which still stands
after it was first apparently planted
twenty-eight years ago

while the “actual” blossoms
herald their buds and
no late frost has of yet
decimated the chance
of apples or even peaches
and berries upstate,
in the summer,
already in bud
as is our Tulip tree
the one we bought 35 years ago
just six inches high, having grown to around
60 feet tall by now,
the same as New York’s oldest,
the Alley Pond Giant, a sapling when
the Dutch arrived, thought to be
as much as 450 years old,
likely the oldest living thing in New York,
it sits in a sunken grove
within earshot of
the Cross Island Parkway and the L.I.E,
the top of the tree
visible to cars and trucks
travelling west

a green planet here,
where I rest

 

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.

Marshland

by

by Mark Fischweicher

Years ago the ground floor of our building flooded
May have been Sandy or Irene
Up from Florida
Just another unpredictable
torrential tourist.
Mathew never made it
Past the Carolinas.

Now I walk along the East River,
the walk closed below
The Brooklyn Bridge.
They’re raising it, they say,
widening it.
What with the river widening itself
and Manhattan sinking,
under the weight of its skyscrapers,

meanwhile, the Bikers and joggers breeze by
Soccer and softball
filling the fields
along the drive
while the water laps
at the sea wall.

Ferries running up and down the river.
Tugboats, tour boats,
sight see-ers, and sloops.
And here along the walk,
They, almost all of them Chinese,
with rods tied to the railing,
Fishing for bass and porgy
And selling it, they say, on the street
In Chinatown.

Marshland,
the Lenape landed their canoes here
Good fishing still
I suppose
The ancient ones gone
Having lasted hundreds of years
Street names remind us of their land;
Spruce Street, Pine Street, Cedar, Beech.

Once you could have walked up Maiden Lane
or its previous incarnation, Maagde Paatje
to get here, the footpath
used by lovers to walk along the “pebbly brook”
that ran from Nassau Street
to the East River,
where wives and daughters washed their linen.

Or think back to 1712,
The New York , that’s right, The New York
Slave Revolt, which happened here as well.
A group of more than twenty black slaves,
gathered on the night of April 6th,
and set fire to abuilding on Maiden Lane
near Broadway,
according to city historians,
killing nine, injuring a half-dozen more.
Colonials arrested seventy. Six committed suicide,
21 were sentenced to death
including one woman with child.
Twenty were burned to death.
One was executed on a breaking wheel.

Or think further back
to the massacre
at Corlear’s Hook
named after the Van Corlear family,
17ty century Dutch landowners,
and the geographic bend in the shoreline
that had the shape of a hook
where forty Wecquaesgeek Indians
of all ages and genders were slaughtered
as they slept, by the Dutch,
at the end of February in 1643

Just a short walk up from “De Smit’s Vly,”
“The Smith’s Valley”
where Cornelis Clopper
had a blacksmith shop’
a central stopping point for country people
to stop and shod their horses and socialize

And so I walk along the shore
Thru time, thru our collective history
Waiting for tornadoes once again.

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.

 

Boundaries

by

by Mark Fischweicher

upstate
in the woods,
In a wilderness
of brambles
at one particular location
there is an old stone wall,
now homeless
but still in place,
that rises just where it stood,
one or two feet above the ground,
a corner, left in place
from someone’s former life
and periodically there are remnants,
one or sometimes
two boulders high,
of some old stone boundary,
stretching for yards
all matted and covered with bright
green moss
separating someone’s former world,
from their old forgotten neighbor’s
within this murky sea of stones
a border, a margin
a man-made fringe,
like water circling an island
an inlet.

as it was over a century ago,
in 1896
in the city
when the Harlem Ship Canal was built
allowing ships to move
between the Hudson and the Harlem Rivers,
when Marble Hill, now part of the Bronx,
became an island
still afloat despite its tons of
Tuckahoe Marble
nearly pure white in color
quarried and carried down
the Harlem Railroad,
to Saint Patrick’s, where
the clustered columns of the nave,
the choir, and the transept are all
of white marble.
those of the nave, of extraordinary dimensions,
striking the sight with a sense of colossal grandeur
which words will not convey
but I am bound to it.
these are my woods
my trails, my paths,
my streets through nature’s rude
forgetfulness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.

Unfallen

by

by Mark Fischweicher

xxxxxxFor Andy

Frost bites the ground I walk on
in the woods. Moss
carpets fallen limbs,
and leaves the cobbles lush
and verdant as some
random emerald gem.

On stones the lichen grows
like bark
and leads me thru the undergrowth
and leafless branches
thru the fallen twigs and leaves,
underneath the leaden skies,
which whisper
as I walk along
beside this frozen
glory.
Winter is alive.

Death seems to be unspoken
within these woods.
Who knows what lives or dies here?
Winter hides the crime
except among the pines.
Look up beyond the old and broken shoots.
No way to tell. Just
as you
remain to
be
to me.

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.

Tirade To Dismiss My Fall

by

by Mark Fischweicher

As I get older my memory fades.
His name, her name, that place, this.
No matter how I try, I can’t recall.

The emptiness that fills my mind pervades
though some say this aloofness should be my wish
to be detached to let whatever comes to me be all.

I say my nimble wits have never been my ace of spades
My greatest attribute has always been my gibberish
just letting all my fears and cheers flow out without a stall

Not trying too hard to manage all my weird crusades, my escapades.
If I am not remiss, that should be my bliss.
That’s all. I think I’ve hit the wall.

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets. 

Things That Return

by

by Mark Fischweicher

we can walk on the trail
as it runs by the brook
where a heron we’ve seen seems
a statue of sorts
still as stone
till it catches the fish
in one gulp

and down where the tracks still run
where we board the train
going down to the city
there’s this one single woman
who walks out
on her lawn
across from the station
who stands with her hands, statuesque,
deftly stretched

there before her
balletically smoking her one cigarette
not to fill up the house with her ash
I suspect
these are the things that we look for in life

the things that return

even memories
and poems

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.

For the Birds

by

by Mark Fischweicher

It is being God
to feed the birds
and they have dressed up
for the feast.

I will teach them
how to worship.

common knowledge
for the Cardinals,
already dressed in robes of red,
old hat for the gray cheeked
almost threadbare Thrushes
and the black capped
Chickadees
Who already wear their yarmulkes
to shul

I should not worry who will feed them
When I am gone.
They have gone without my industry
for forever and a day,
for eons.
for a crow’s age, an
eternity;
and the bird-seed aisles are always full
of somewhat seedy people
all the time,
but we have brought them tragedy as well;
the Willow Flycatcher may soon
no longer play the field
and the Yellow-Breasted Chats
may not cluck or cackle
as much as you have heard

but I will feed them still
with no religious purpose
after all.

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets. 

No More Dreams

by

by Mark Fischweicher 

Dead of winter

xxxxxAll the leaves are brown and 
xxxxxthe sky is gray

Pine needles carpet the woodland trails,
and, with its monochrome horizon,
the landscape unfolds and,
even as the days
begin to grow,
you never know where
the moon will be
but that the sun will rise above the barren trees
seems likely for a few more years,
or centuries, or maybe
a millennium or more, but,
at least, this year, I think
that spring will come
and so will summer 

and so, for now, to keep them happy
every other morning, I fill the feeder with nuts and seeds and tasty
bits of fruit
and watch for black-capped chickadees
and purple finches, and
dark-eyed juncos,
and maybe one or two black-backed three-toed woodpeckers
or just a few, a trio or a chorus if they will of some black-throated warblers
with something smart to say or
mourning doves or all the Cardinals and their families
come to church just for the day
till evening when I take the feeder in
as once a bear had come in from the woods behind the house
and bent the steel pole it hangs on
like a twig, but
it is not the birds I think of now
who spend their days here, dependable as sun. 

No dreams for me
My only two nocturnal visitors are just the two opossum that
come looking for the nuts and seeds and bits of fruit their feathered friends
have scattered in the grass and fallen snow. 

I watch for them
am pleased when they return,
old friends should never be forgotten
I shave with Toby’s brush,
badger,
not so unlike opossum,
but he, no,
he will not return.
Ancient peoples, plagues and parents,
no monuments for these,
Perhaps some footprints in the snow will prove that they were here
and as it always seems,
the path leads to our home
welcoming the darkness as it falls
within it
A quiet comfort before the sleep I take alone,
and I,
with you beside me, 

all aflutter

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

 

 

No More Dreams

by

by Mark Fischweicher

Dead of winter

xxxxxxxAll the leaves are brown and
xxxxxxxthe sky is gray

Pine needles carpet the woodland trails,
and, with its monochrome horizon,
the landscape unfolds and,
even as the days
begin to grow,
you never know where
the moon will be
but that the sun will rise above the barren trees
seems likely for a few more years,
or centuries, or maybe
a millennium or more, but,
at least, this year, I think
that spring will come
and so will summer

and so, for now, to keep them happy
every other morning, I fill the feeder with nuts and seeds and tasty
bits of fruit
and watch for black-capped chickadees
and purple finches, and
dark-eyed juncos,
and maybe one or two black-backed three-toed woodpeckers
or just a few, a trio or a chorus if they will of some black-throated warblers
with something smart to say or
mourning doves or all the Cardinals and their families
come to church just for the day
till evening when I take the feeder in
as once a bear had come in from the woods behind the house
and bent the steel pole it hangs on
like a twig, but
it is not the birds I think of now
who spend their days here, dependable as sun.

No dreams for me
My only two nocturnal visitors are just the two opossum that
come looking for the nuts and seeds and bits of fruit their feathered friends
have scattered in the grass and fallen snow.

I watch for them
am pleased when they return,
old friends should never be forgotten
I shave with Toby’s brush,
badger,
not so unlike opossum,
but he, no,
he will not return.
Ancient peoples, plagues and parents,
no monuments for these,
Perhaps some footprints in the snow will prove that they were here
and as it always seems,
the path leads to our home
welcoming the darkness as it falls
within it
A quiet comfort before the sleep I take alone,
and I,
with you beside me,

all aflutter

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

 

On the Bus

by

by Mark Fischweicher

Jeans so tight I would worry about ripping them just getting them on,
but they were ripped already.

With sky blue hair, long and full of manufactured curls
that matched the jeans.

She reminded me of the woman on the train yesterday, Easter Sunday,
obviously riding back from the parade.
Quite a bonnet!
The closest we can come to looking like
the cherry blossoms in the park,
covered with petals and rainbow colored satin eggs
she looked like she could easily tip over
and no one batted even an eye
on the IRT
reminding me again of ‘Blue’
on her way to work on Monday morning

Later, I walked through the little park on Second Avenue
only two blocks wide with a fountain in the middle,
not turned on yet but surrounded with tulips in full bloom
as colorful as any hat in the parade

Where a nurse or aide helped an old man with a walker
to the edge of the circle to get an even better view.
Tulips have so many colors
“So beautiful,” I said and she agreed,
“So blue.”

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.