CARABASSET VALLEY

I am lying in the sun

on a rock in mid-river,

white water curling past.

When I was twenty

and had the right shoes (and legs)

I'd race the water down

from boulder to boulder, defying

Heraclitus:  I've often stepped

in the same river twice.

Tree-trunks shoot upward,

explode above me

into slow August fireworks.

Who is it here

who feels April at his back

in the rock,

midsummer

in his face,

rushing water

on either hand? 

In no time, time passes.

                -- Bill Holshouser

                in Naked Bread

Submitted by Susan Donnelly

in tribute to our much-missed

colleague.

MORNING ON OCEAN AVENUE

A longish while I've watched a grey-brown gull

-- or duck, I'll have to check the Peterson guide --

make toward what seems to be a lobster buoy.

Puzzling purpose, if admirable form.

The buoy's spanking white and black and yellow.

Is it a place to rest before paddling on?

Hedges of beach plum, blackbirds, honeysuckle

somewhere near, and just past the breakwater

the Veronica G. sets out for a day's fishing.

                                                                      Wait --

I see now that the lobster buoy can swim,

it's yellow-throated, winged with black and white,

and that the grey-brown bird has caught it up,

circling her mate.  Who flaps, looks wooden again.

                                                --Susan Donnelly

BLEU DE TERMIGNON

In a village thirteen hundred meters up

in the French Alps

one woman keeps her nine cows

in the Park of Vanoise,

where they feed on grass and flowers.

These flowers are the source

of the blue mold

that passes naturally into the milk.

The cheese she makes is of great quality,

a little fatty, down-to-earth, refined.

The mold develops, spreads its map

of veins. The crust

is white and brown, rocklike.

The pâte--the filling--

is crumbly. During affinage,

the ripening and curing,

she turns the cheese and wipes it

daily, for five months.

This fermier cheese,

made in its mountain hut so lovingly,

is best with Tokay wine, or with a white

called Rivesaltes.

Bon appétit!

                    --Deborah Melone 

Radcliffe Culinary Times

 THE BEGGING GIRL


The whole time I've sat here
at the coffee shop window
no one's given her anything.
It puts people off, that jivey,
almost-dance as she comes up,
with a smile that says you and she
share a joke.  In her twenties
probably, good clothes, fresh-faced,
            but awry somehow,
like the way she spoke
just now, as I came from the bank
any sweeties?  something like that
I didn't quite catch, and startled,
  -- do I know her? --
I hurried past, since it was pouring.
Most people don't even stop.
Only one starts to talk with her,
then, step by step, backs away.
Whenever the sidewalk's empty,
she stops jigging, walks under rain
in a slow circle.  Her head is bent.
She doesn't pull up her hood.


                        -- Susan Donnelly
Poetry Ireland Review (PIR99)