Thomas Festa

Cooper Lake

mist so thick
to move at all is to stray
spring defile

For once, we didn’t argue about distances. We followed the phone’s map past Woodstock, along a back way I didn’t know, to an art gallery for a friend’s book launch. A sudden glimpse of wide water through the dark pines and I realized where we were.

weeping willow
the wavering trails
of remindfulness

Seen from above, from Twin Mountain, it’s not much to look at, but because it serves as a reservoir for the city, it remains unfished, unsailed, unswum. That was the rocky shore where I taught the kids to skip rocks, when they were small and we used to do things together.

evening’s fresh rivulets
tethering thoughts
of morning rain

A quiet sanctuary exuding the air of unsung beauty. I recalled the house that had been my grandmother’s—a place I’d never lived, but which I’d visited my whole life—how my mother, leaving it soon for a care home, would be signing it away…

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About the Author

Thomas Festa is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and the author of a chapbook of poems, Earthen(Finishing Line Press). Other work includes an ecopoetic reading of W.S. Merwin’s late poetry (in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and poems in Bennington Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, and Haiku Journal.

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