Poems by Maxine Susman
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Destination
by Maxine Susman
From Canary Spring 2023
Maxine lives in Kingston, New Jersey, near Heathcote Brook which feeds the Millstone River watershed, on former farmland that was once a Lenape settlement.
I want a good night’s sleep. I mean five hours plus.
I want to go to Alaska in bed, to go to bed in Alaska,
see tundra and taiga and moraine, see Denali
prepare for spring when it’s summer somewhere else,
sleep in a hut under wilderness sky,
to dream Alaska,
be in Alaska, go hunting and fishing for Alaska—
not me alone but people I love, even strangers
who’ll see white land and dark sky
somewhere else but someplace real—
I want time, money, and sleep to find it
but I’m lucky in the places I don’t have to travel,
not like the teenager and her baby
wrapped in a blanket on the Times inner page
who just wants to sleep, she and her baby,
get a night’s sleep in a bed in a room,
it doesn’t have to be Alaska.
© Maxine Susman
Entanglement
Fewer than 350 North Atlantic right whales still exist.
(Center for Coastal Studies, Provincetown, MA).
by Maxine Susman
At first you don’t mind so much,
the rope caught on some distant
part of you—trailing like the loose tie
of an apron or robe, only a feeling
that you’re getting sloppy,
you’re letting things go,
then it wraps a loop again
around a careless limb,
slows down how you move
a finger, a hand, a leg
but when you try to slough it off
it winds another coil
you find it harder to write, speak, walk
but it’s not crucial, not yet, so far
hobbled you still manage to move,
shuffle, but the rope’s not done with you—
finds a way to tighten across your chest,
around your throat. Difficult
to swallow or breathe.
This has taken months, maybe years,
you didn’t realize while you still had time
© Maxine Susman
Snowstorm, December 2020
by Maxine Susman
We felt it was bound to happen.
With the first few faint flakes
I walked a long way through the streets
on both sides of the thoroughfare
and met no one.
By the time I got home
snow came slapping me in the face,
it seemed to have a sense of purpose
I have been lacking.
I was in for it now, as other storms
of my decades, but this
ending the hardest year so far
for everyone—storm-breath threats,
bleakness we huddle beneath,
sleet pinging the roof, clicking at windows,
trying to slither in.
Before daylight a plow goes down
our invisible street.
© Maxine Susman
Start
Mapleton Preserve, New Jersey
by Maxine Susman
From Canary Spring 2023
From one day to another.
Yesterday, not. Today
spring peepers blast their pipes from the bog—
year after year I’ve never seen them,
tiny hidden creatures
visible only in their noise
raucous swells of it, playing
hide-and-seek among the water-sodden
tree trunks. They blurt and spill
to one another in no pattern
I can as a human discern
but something makes sense to them
the kind of sense
in having a sound to make
and listen for,
send back and forth among swelling throats.
Something pumps them up
keeps them going
for a couple of joyous weeks
then spring overtakes them and moves on.
© Maxine Susman