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POETRY

The Adirondacks

Metallic light blurs mountains,
streams, lakes and sky. My body,
a map of rivulets you fold deftly,
scouting hidden waterfalls
that sport such magnitude we both
fear we’ll be taken down river.
Just beyond the terrace, a white pine
rustles its branches like a warning.
You with your constant, elegant gloom
predict the family farm will never sell.
Even if it does, the new owners will level
the house, you say partly to razz me,
then laugh as I roll my eyes on cue.
We sip wine in the alpenglow,
silenced by glacial spills
of granite boulders, the wilderness
of the darkening sky.
It begins to snow.

Torohill

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again
…for a while I could not enter, for the way was
barred to me. —Daphne DuMaurier

Your dead aunt’s chimney stands
like a blacksmith’s forge as you crest
the drive, your home surrounded
by a cemetery of stone foundations,
tumbling tenant houses and trees old
as fairy tales about to topple.
A staircase rises to the brambled sky.
Your grandfather’s mansion turned hotel
lies charred from a jilted piano player
who murdered his lover
then shot himself in a sea of blinking
ancestors. Ponies decay
in the paddock, while the pool,
tennis courts and gardens are forgotten
even by deer. Taxes that could choke
a horse. There’s crazy Kate down
in the ruins forever building walls,
flying her blue-blooded flag
like a Keep Out sign, hoarding
matches, storing cans of gasoline.

Waste Not, Want Not

For my stepfather

Eying boxes carried to a truck, a raven
cackles, hoping something will drop,
a treasure, a charm for his nest.
Nothing good here, he squawks, hops
forward, cocks his eye for a closer look,
then flies off. Yellow aspens rattle like bones,
as my daughter carries my belongings
into independent living. Cathedral Rock looms;
canyons dim in the fall dusk. My late husband’s
beady eyes given to science, glare with mistrust
no more. I donated all his organs,
saying, Keep the rest.
His burial drawer, paid for years ago,
is empty even of rings to grace his nest.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

  • God’s Shepherd in Anti Heroin Chic

  • Ocean Grove, New Jersey & Doting in Atlanta Review

  • Orientation in Cimarron Review

  • Angels of the French Quarter in Cumberland Poetry Review

  • Learning to Sail & Dawn in Delmarva Review

  • My Father’s Alternate Life & Again II in Evening Street Review

  • Dawn in Furious Gazelle

  • Torohill in J Journal

  • Letter to Jane Kenyon, Two Rooms Left in Mudfish

  • Shoes in OxMag

  • Egg in a Basket, Bird in a Nest, Toad in a Hole & To John Berrymore Who Would Have Turned 100 This Year in The Same

  • Mexican Standoff, Portal & The Last Night in Sheila-Na-Gig

  • Botched Job, Excelsior, How Do You Like Them Apples, Great Horned Owls, Grey Rock, Squirrel Island, Learn to Sail, Miracle Whip & Woolite, Our Forlorn Hope, Please Forward, The Festival of Broken Needles, The Hill in Verse Virtual


ESSAYS

Vermin Mischief

 

What’s grey, has four legs and a trunk?  A mouse on vacation!

(Ba-Da-Boom)

BY DONNA REIS

I have a history with rodents. In eighth grade Darby and I chose to breed mice as our science project.  And breed they did.  The first litter was fun. We documented their gestation period and different stages of early mouse development.  However, motherhood was quickly lost on us.  In fact, it was gross.  Our female mice bred like fruit flies and the males chewed their babies’ heads off.  What to do?  

A group of mice is called a “mischief” and mischievous we were.  We scooped them out of their cages and tossed them by handfuls into our boarding school dormitory rooms, yelling, “Go free.  Away with you.”  During chapel a few days later, we overheard the janitor whisper to our headmaster that the school was suddenly overrun with mice.  Darby warned through clenched teeth, “Don’t look at me, or I’ll kill you.”  I was certain we were doomed to spend every sports period for the rest of the year sitting on the mourners’ bench in the dark hall that led to the headmaster’s office as he rocked on his wing-tips, hands clenched behind his back, his huge six-foot-six inch frame (he was probably much shorter than that) looming over us.  This incident was the only grade school shenanigan that we were never called on although I’m sure we were suspected.  


Years later at a Christmas party, my husband and I met a couple who thirty years earlier owned our farmhouse. They claimed what we eventually heard other former owners say, “We turned that house around.”  “When we bought that house,” they continued, “it was falling down and infested with rats.”  “Hmmm, rats,” I thought, “now that’s a detail I haven’t heard before.”  The husband of the couple enthusiastically told us which parts of our home displayed his mark, while his wife rolled her eyes saying, “I hated that house,” as she scurried to the next horde of holiday revelers.

It wasn’t long after that I began to see the floor move out off the corner of my eye.  Instinctively, I knew that rolling movement.  I walked to the center of the living room. Sure enough alongside the fireplace was a perfect shaped vole hole like the ones depicted in cartoons.  “Is it a rat or a muse,” I asked myself.  Mice and I go way back, but rats, forget it!  Just then a furry, little field mouse, all big ears, little black eyes and cute whiskers skittered along the molding into the kitchen.  

Now that I’m an adult, I knew I couldn’t grab him and his relatives by the fistfuls and chuck them into my neighbors’ house.  Although, there have been times when I would have liked to.  I sort of owed it to these mice to be nice.  I wasn’t proud of what I did in grade school and this was my chance to rewrite or re-right my karma.  Oh, and one more factoid, I have four cats.

That night Franny, my long haired, ginger and white tabby woke me up making a commotion in the bathroom.  Franny’s a real softy.  He never kills his catch.  Instead, he drops them in the tub and watches them run round and round and bops them on the head if they try to get out.  

I knew what I had to do.  I had to capture the mouse in a saucepan, quickly put the lid on the pan and release the poor fella into the field.  The mouse panicked squealing and leaping from one end of the tub to the other.  And me, in my nightie, did the same while ocautionally dropping the pot with such a clatter that it scared the bejesus out of all three of us.  Finally I caught him.

Franny and I worked tirelessly all winter relocating mice, while the other cats watched bemused, most likely thinking, “Why don’t they just kill and eat the damn things” Each time I turned one loose into the fields, I sent it off with Darby and my blessing, “Go free.  Away with you.”  Franny always looked a touch betrayed, but all was well as we snuggled under the patchwork quilt next to my oblivious husband—a hard day’s night warmly rewarded.       

“Vermin Mischief,” was featured as the “back porch” personal essay in the magazine, New York House / June 2010 

The House on Weed Street

Memories of family and forgiveness make a bittersweet season bright.

BY DONNA REIS

My earliest childhood memory is going to my grandparents’ house in New Canaan, Connecticut for Christmas.  I was three and because of a barely-healed family rift, it was the first time I met my mother’s parents. 

As we drove down the long, hedge-rowed driveway, the light grey Cape Cod style home with white trim built by my grandfather came into view.  Even though it was th modest house on Weed Street, its beautifully two-acre expanse gave it an understated New England elegance.  Grandpa had made his living taking care of other people’s lawns and gardens and now he had his own.

I remember the way the open door flooded with amber radiance of a roaring fire reflected in hand-pegged oak flooring.  Silhouetted in the room’s glow was my grandmother.  She had a round figure and a melodic brogue that could melt ice cubes like Jameson’s.  She wore her hair in silver waves close to her head like a flapper.  My grandfather beamed as he rose to greet us from his worn, red leather chair.  It no longer mattered that my father was protestant.

Placed invitingly by the Christmas tree shimmering with glass ornaments from Ireland, was a little Dutch painted char, perfect for a three-year-old.  From there I watched the guests arrive.  There was Annie and John O’Keefe, Hannah and Joe Nevel and Patty Sweeny.  Soon the floor bounced to music as they danced a jig.

That year marked the beginning of several years of amber lit holidays in New Cannan.

Grandma and Grandpa’s house was the one place I felt free to dream the world into anything I wanted it to be.  On rainy days, I would go into the attic with its steamer trunks stamped Irelands and scads of furniture perfect for setting up house under the eaves.  

Every summer I looked forward to spending a week with my grandparents.  Grandma prepared all my favorites: cherry Jell-O, chocolate pudding, and her famous rhubarb pie.  She could also be counted on for superstitions from the ole sod: “Don’t follow the Will O’ the Wisp over the bogs ‘cos you’ll never come back; If a picture falls off the wall, or you hear Banshee’s wail someone is going to die.”  Once while visiting a crack of thunder shook Grandma’s ribbon candy church so hard it came crashing down.  Grandma and I were fearfully silent the rest of the afternoon, certain death lurked around the corner.  Later that summer Grandma died of breast cancer.

Our visits were different for the next few years.  Grandpa aged rapidly as he sat in his chair reminiscing.  Then one day he showed up with his new bride, Nellie.  Nellie was an eccentric lass from Tipperary who was full of fun and madly in love with my grandfather.  She had dyed red hair and wore low-cut blouses with big brooches pinned between her breasts.

Grandpa repainted the whole house to freshen it up for his new missus.  Knowing Grandma had been after him to paint for years, I felt injured by this gesture.  I didn’t like Nellie living in my grandmother’s home using her things.  When we visited, I spent more time by myself, making up stories and taking walks.

Grandpa died soon after he retired.  It seems so many men of his era shriveled up without the routine and identity of a job.  Since Nellie took such good care of him, my mother gave her the house.  I mourned the loss of the Cape with all its whiskey colored memories, almost as much as I did my grandparents.  

Years later, Nellie invited me for lunch.  She said, “I know how much you loved your grandmother and that you’ve never accepted me.” By then I was an adult and knew what a brave gesture this was.  She showed me the projects she was working on, and I discovered she wrote poetry and sewed like I did.  She taught me how to smock little girls’ dresses and make pleated drapes.  That afternoon she said, “Why don’t you go into the attic and take whatever you’d like of your grandmothers.”  I brought down the glass Christmas ornaments.  They weren’t half as nice as I remembered.  Much of the color was chipped and I’d never noticed that they were strung with a loop of dingy packing string instead of wire hangers.  

I’m now in my fifties and every year when I finish trimming the tree, I toast to Nellie, who’s long-gone now, as I step back and watch the light catch the very ornaments that twinkled the night I met my grandparents.  To me, string and all, they’re as valuable as Waterford crystal.    

This personal essay was featured in the “back porch” section of New York House / December 2009.