Mohonk Mountain Preserve

Just got back from the Mohonk Mountain house outside New Paltz. Two days of hiking, fitness classes, spa treatments and relaxing. I had the best time ever, but each evening felt the air grow just a tad bit cooler. Autumn is just around the corner!

Labels: mohonk mountain house new paltz ny

  ¶ 3:42 PM 0 Comments

  Hey Sister and Viewers!

It is summer here now in SF. We get the sun and warmth a little later here then in other areas. Today I had the first beach day of the season, after the morning fog lifted. My favorite beach in the bay area is Baker Beach. You can watch cargo ships come in from Asia, coast alongside the Marin Headlands, and pass underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. There's even a clothing optional section!  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 Comments

  Check it out: today I tasted 'squash tendrils' for the first time. Apparently tendrils are the soft new growth at the ends of summer squash vines. We sauteed them in olive oil like you would spinach. Yummy as a garnish for corn and summer squash soup. You have to love a tendril...what a great word.  ¶ 9:25 PM 0 Comments

  Billy Collins & Animated Poetry

  ¶ 9:37 AM 0 Comments

  Paul Celan said a poem is a handshake. Well, big sister, here's a handshake to you and your new hometown.


Small birds are bold in Brooklyn,
they dive low and land on empty café tables.
Small birds are unafraid in Brooklyn,
they beak bits of challah bread, crumbs of currant scones.

In Brooklyn, you are tainted
with the belief that a wonderful thing is about to happen,
and so our foreheads,
folded to block the brilliant sun from our eyes,
shine like talismans.
You want to smile at us,
ask even the expressionless where we head.

The wait for the tremendous is no longer evasive.
The tick of our sandals
lulls you forward
into the walk among brownstones, sycamores,
and weeds that break into seed from cracks in the sidewalk.  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 Comments

  Leaving Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Coated with coal dust
I stretched across mountains
and valleys, searching your eroding
landscapes for crevices
where only open fields remain.
When I left your boundaries,
I sought newer histories,
turning from the outlined past
you created and the ruined lives
you sifted over streets
and houses and porches, continual
rot on a stagnant wind.

Until one morning decades
later I find myself
tracing the edges
of Goldenrod among coal
slag, Sweet
Woodruff shrouding
splintered panes.

-Jessica Myers-Schecter  ¶ 8:54 AM 0 Comments

  Here's a poem by Jean Valentine!

Night

From this night on God let me eat
like that blind child on the train
touching her yogurt as I'd touch a spiderweb
that first morning in the country--sky red--

holding the carton and spoon to her mouth
with all her eyeless body, and then
orientally resting, the whole time smiling
a little to one side of straight ahead.

8/1/07
On our walk into Union Square the headline for the New York Post reads “Ugly day for Vinny the Gorgeous”. The dapper young mobster, aged 45, pulls at the collar of his jacket suit with his left hand, smiles. In Union Square on a warm august day. Students from a film school summer camp act and film in clusters throughout the park. In front of me near a beech tree two boys look bad ass in their baseball caps, one holds a wooden bat, the other a ball. They keep enacting the same scene, one in which they shake hands and smile into the camera. It’s been five minutes, and they have acted the scene five times already. Now another boy, apparently the director, tells them what the next scene will be. They will walk down the pathway, and stop to stand near yellow leaf that marks their pause.

As I ran over the Brooklyn Bridge this morning, there was humid air rising from the river up over the cars and by cement to us on the promenade. There was the city- buildings filled with more people than I could imagine, streets packed with more people then I have met in my life. The immensity of place overwhelms me and then, the way a thought at first seems impossible and then is possible, the reality of NYC excited me. Running down Broadway to the square, I passed so many, all these eyes, these cabs, pigeons, windows, and curbs. All these hands which clutched plastic bags or coffee cups. All this is about possibility. Maybe my own, but also the feeling that anything could happen at any time, and happily. I would never been able to have imagined this particular thing happening. The people I’ve met, the friends or just acquaintances I’ve had recently, I could never have imagined them as they have appeared.  ¶ 5:02 AM 0 Comments

  Gabbers trial  ¶ 7:29 PM 0 Comments