Excerpts Several of these poems are also available as audio files, in your choice of streaming audio (requires free RealPlayer) or MP3 (requires free Winamp [PC] or iTunes [Mac]). Medians On the Garden State they're dull lawns you expect to see neighbors mowing. But neighbors are no more, only landscape services. A few bits of nature remain around Montvale to remind us of what once was: swamp, cattails, some huddled stands of birch, young maples, small oak and pine, slight habitats for fox, skunk, racoon, a red-tailed hawk, feral cats and fugitive carrier bags, torn pennants of consumption. The first medians I remember were on the Cross Bronx on the way back home. I would see them through the window glass, decorous social places, old couples eternally seated on benches near processions of breathing, flaking sycamores, their broad leaves green bats or hearts and whose new skin of bark smelled of cork and butter even at a distance. My father told me the green statues were bronze, not strange, mossy plants. My mother stayed a silent passenger Hear this poem in streaming audio Download this poem in MP3 format [600K] The Radio Dial In the Chrysler you'd turn to the frequency you wanted and give one of the five silver buttons a good push, setting the hook in the ether. The buttons could be pulled off to reveal tiny chrome steering-wheels to tune more finely, clasping the frequency a bit longer. My father never much cared about cars what interested him were highways, railroad tracks, bridges and rivers, the small towns and back roads where he sold paper His succeeding vehicles became more and more stripped down to purpose, utilitarian but they always possessed a radio. The last, an unadorned Plymouth with blue vinyl interiors and pretty good reception. We would hear Verdi and Brahms Bizet and Puccini. I would drive into what for him would always be hazy skies Hear this poem in streaming audio Download this poem in MP3 format [480K] The Radio Dial II Dials don't exist any longer, the polished circles having been replaced by an angry green, glowing thing of broken dashes. Then, the AM stations would float about with your right hand in pursuit. My younger son, Gabriel, scornfully shows me how to set the digital frequencies, which I have had to scan for helplessly each time. For this gift I pay him in hip-hop channels and I would like to hold his hand. His hobby is naming me. He has always done this. One of my new names in Papageno and sometimes I think I hear a soft, sweetly-pitched singing from above: Zum ziele fuhrt dich diese Bahn Sie standhaft, dulm sam und versichweigen It's all about roads, patience, standing fast, and it's a tune I can carry Farther Up on the right, to the east, is what looks like a mental hospital. What else could it be, with everything so uniform, the bricks the color of a lost crayon, ochre or umber, windows dirt glazed and empty, with bars? It looks like no one's ever home there. I want to look closer, but worry if I pull off. There's even an inviting white wood gate among the forbidding cyclones. I could buy a map and find out but I won't. Never get out. There's another hospital on the way down from Leslie's Untitled When I drive down with Leslie I see all the paths, the cat tails in spongy marshes, reed grass-- communis means common, but these commons are more. There is only one death here in the median, just past the "One Way" sign, there a small sensible white cross nailed to a pine. The mowers once took it down, but it has again been restored. With her, I rarely think about the hospital Hidden Paths I see them through the woods on the way down from Leslie's, my safe harbor on the Hudson to the North. I've always looked out windows for them, first gazing from my parents' Chrysler at the flats and marshes of Douglaston. They were there, through tall blond reeds. Now to the west they're everywhere, blazed blue and red, hiking trails, old logging roads with tumbled down brown stones awaiting repair. There are deep paths giving glimpses of themselves in the reaches of the forest, then they disappear. The Appalachian Trail, blazed in white, courses across the median, courses through and under a bower of lindens. Some day I will get out and follow them all Hear this poem in streaming audio Download this poem in MP3 format [390K] Inflorescence is better a whole lot than the instress of inscape although they're both pretty much the same thing in my book. It's the panicle, the broad tail of a brush that blooms May to June the feathery fletching of earth bound arrows filling them with their seed then flower a brightening brown I see all year now the reeds sounding spheric harmonies into them, Phragmites communis. Hear this poem in streaming audio Download this poem in MP3 format [240K] Work I Have Not Seen The mowers have been busy or perhaps it's unfair to say the mowers. All I know is that the wildflower gardens past the second toll have been cut down, leaving a brown absence, dirt not earth, leaving slight rows regular as a price code. Lost are: bee balm and bergamot painted trillium and downy gentian and fox glove and wild geraniums grape-hyacinth and larkspur and evening primrose Black-eye susans butter and eggs Hear this poem in streaming audio Download this poem in MP3 format [310K] Reamy Jansen's work is also available online at La Petite Zine and Ducky Magazine.