Jean Zimmerman

Category: Poetry

  • Wildflowers and a Verse

    A mile-long park runs along the Hudson River bank at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where you can walk the path as dusk descends and see the sun set hazily, just for you. The town took an underused industrial area and rehabbed it about ten years ago with the help of the Open Space Institute so that…

  • Emily in the Garden

    The heat feels good. All ninety-nine degrees of it. The pole beans twist themselves around the bamboo supports, under the arcing sun. The pansies on the front porch of the Cabin salute. Even Oliver likes to move his luxuriating form outdoors, having decided that sun-warmed gravel is a choice nap mat. Along the lines of…

  • Boxcar Boy

    Mike Brodie is not making pictures any more. He left that behind along with a life on the rails, wind in his hair, the dirt of the road. But for almost five years, since he was 17, he used a Polaroid and then a 1980s 35mm camera to document the world of young freight-train hoppers,…

  • It Makes Perfect Sense

    About to be Mother’s Day. The night before, Saturday night, we go into Manhattan just as the thunder starts to roll. Fissures of lightning streak the sky. As is my mother’s prerogative, I let Gil do the driving. We check out a movie not for the weak of stomach. Then take dinner at Katz’s, founded in 1888 on…

  • How to Be a Couple of Writers

    Today is our wedding anniversary. Gil and I have been married 26 years. It’s a lot of  time since our engagement party, at a Russian bar in Brighton Beach, New York! People always ask, How can you possibly stay married to another writer? It’s not something everyone does, and in fact the matrimonial union of…

  • Witika or Wendigo, I’m Scary

    I am the voice of the Witika. Sometimes I am called the Wendigo, sometimes the Weetigo or Wetiko or other variants. It all depends on the region you’re from and the belief system you share. I roam the frozen north especially, northern Minnesota, the wastes of Canada, and New York State in the snowy winters.…

  • Gil’s Best French Fry Recipe

    Today I planted my potatoes. Their eyes are all sprouted, ready to go. Unearthing them at the end of the season – and here in the northeast, it’s a long season – is one of my favorite things. You get to reach into the dark, crumbly loam and pull out the hard little orbs, detaching…

  • Of Blooms and Brooches

    When the old magnolia by the Cabin blooms, I am rendered speechless. Here is an exquisite poem for an exquisite spring day, by Robert Louis Stevenson. I Will Make You Brooches I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit…

  • The Algorithm of Curvy Passion

    Whale bone doll. Greyhound vs. great dane. WTF? I get a regular report from WordPress, the outfit that hosts this blog, which tells me the search terms used every day to find my site. I love to read these oddly linked words and imagine the people that typed them into a search box and, even…

  • Pruning Links

    Damn. My cup runneth over with links. My computer wouldn’t let me save another bookmark, it was so stopped up, so I had to prune. Throw out and organize. Floss. Figure out what I really needed to save, what I might need – need being a relative term – and what could be relegated to…

  • A Lion, a Pit-Hound, a Bud

    The warmth has hit. The sun pours down. The day reminded me of the scene on a Mexican plate from the early 1800s that I saw recently at the Hispanic Society. Except I was sporting a ball cap rather than a parasol and my companion was a pit-hound rather than a lion. Gil and I…

  • Neruda Poisoned?

    Did General Augusto Pinochet murder the great poet? To me the question is not whether but how. Neruda’s remains, interred for 40 years in his garden, have now been exhumed. Will toxins be found that prove he was killed by the fascist regime on the 23rd of September 1973, just 12 days after Pinochet’s military…

  • Some Neruda for Now

    Today I stood by a graveside and listened to a priest speaking over his heavy book, watched the people carefully place their cut roses and carnations atop the casket, and wondered. Why do the words we say when someone dies seem so slight, so irrelevant to the task at hand. Why is there so little…

  • Softcover Orphanmaster – First Copies

    I was grumping around the Cabin in my chenille socks. I had a couple of bad things troubling my mind, ranging from awful (my close friend’s mother’s demise) to just stupid (bills overdue) and issues in between. It occurred to me, too, that I was no longer on vacation. Poor me. Oliver began to sound…

  • The Invisible Game

    “Hey, are you invisible?” That gets my attention. Here I am, humdrum paper-cup coffee and bland NYT magazine in hand, waiting for yoga class to start at the gym. A half hour to kill amid chrome and plastic, the café. Across from me sit two teenagers, talking over their devices. “Yeah I’m invisible!” responds the…