Almanack Contributor George Cassidy Payne

We Need the Soil

each contagious morning
the cherished dew of midnight’s tears

those empty diamond-shaped faces
containing the dreams of elderflowers

because she fills earth’s basket with the black
resinous warmth of grandmother’s hands

breaking the ruby white stalks
of rhubarb and celery, reenacting

the wild and mischievous
rhythms of eternity

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

A Child With You

Like smudge
marks from
burnt sage

You arrived
at the moment I
needed to touch your

Golden hair
and peach
white belly

Rolling in the mud
by the oak trees

I am
a child with you

Oshkosh B’gosh
overalls and eyelashes

raised like
prayer flags

at the one act of mercy,
we all know
never happens

the way it
is supposed to

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Littered With Salvation

A flask-shaped bald head
olive-black eyes. Short chestnut
brown eyebrows. Oshkosh B’gosh
overalls and an ultraviolet purple
sleeved shirt. Like small dolls
patched with the materials of a day’s harvest
sinking into the earth
into a wormhole of foliage, laughing at nothing
but the act of knowing that sometimes it’s common
and good to laugh at nothing. We played
unconcealed. Outside. Submerged in
winding branches and brittle, lifeless leaves
laying on a basket filled with the fluorescence of eggs.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Caught Between the Hours

Have you looked up
at the stars lately?

Have you watched the Moon bow
or gulp light from her holy grail?

Have you howled at her?
The sky mother. Oozing

through the gate, a vaporous,
sweet olive black night

in the distance, a coyote yelping

Self-Portrait as a Wolf
(For Donald Hall)

Once I served
my species proudly

by eating the
sickness of prey.

Now, driven from
the Adirondacks

I am the one
endangered. Spotted.

My sharp muzzle
sprinkled with dense,

black yellowish-white
underfur

turned into pelts
for unborn bones

on Christmas eve.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Homesick

Too far from
pan-fried walleyed pike

and those sultry June nights
when we stoked the coals

as darkness
fell on top

the manic appeal
of loons.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Sermon in Your Stones
(For John Burroughs)

I began to sense that I was saved
when I gazed at my reflection like a
river otter studies its own teeth;
or how a nine month old falls asleep, head first
into her own lap.

Without judgement, I began to sense it.
Looking down I thought that I heard
sermons in your stones. An intelligent, loving,
laughter-inducing possibility that I was never lost
to begin with.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Petting Zoo

I still have this picture of myself
when I was 7 months or so in a
fold-out camping chair at a petting
zoo somewhere in the Adirondacks.

I’m touching the snout of a ram.

And judging by the look in my eye, I
would have turned down knighthood
just to grasp a few strands of his wool.

Strapped in. Two creatures sent along
different neural pathways but attuned.

Locked in the symmetry of boundaries held
in place by a universal grammar of touch.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

What Carries No Weight

Miltonia orchids swaying
the way planets orbit
and the Moon
shining on the spine of
Whiteface Mountain.

Clothed in briny ash,
Black Willow and Douglas fir.

The Mourning Warbler’s
song, when the sun is nearly held,
in the soft spot of the palm,
weightless like
a grenade exploding.