Author: Marty Luster

HERE AND THERE

When I was a kid, I spent my summers

near my grandfather’s farm in Port Benjamin,

in upstate New York. Port Ben wasn’t a port

anymore, not since 1900 when

the train replaced the D & H canal.

Anyway, the Rondout Creek ran near our house

and provided a great place to play, fish,

swim and have adventures that are with me

sharp and clear after more than sixty years.

To get to the creek, we had to cross a

hayfield, which, if recently mowed, was tough

on our bare feet , climb down the creek bank on

a rickety staircase and cross the muddy

bottom  land on a wobbly wooden walk.

Here’s the point. While walking Atlantic Street

the other day, as in a foggy dream,

I found that old boardwalk spread over the

flooded soggy salt marsh, no doubt trod by

kids with sixty years of adventures remembered.

Marty Luster

THE VOYEUR

Ripple by ripple by ripple, the tide,

as if swollen with water from a

giant sponge squeezed by an unseen hand,

floods the bare rocks and rides up on the shore.

After a short while, it is absorbed once more,

draining out the harbor and rinsing its

piers of grunge, drying a miniature

archipelago beneath a mimic sky.

I can sit and observe the tide for hours;

in fact I have often done that under

the guise  of going  to take some photos.

Through the lens, a voyeur in the dark,

I clandestinely watch the Earth cleanse herself.

Marty Luster

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,

I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and had a good

time;

You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

From Song of Myself, Walt Whitman.

Does anyone find this vaguely reminiscent of Lennart Nilsson’s magnificent in utero images that appeared in LIFE in 1965?

Click here to see the originals.

TIME TRAVELS

Each time I walk through Gloucester, it’s like tripping through time;

whether down by the docks, or out along the back shore,

or up along Main Street, Middle Street or in Dogtown,

Eastern Point, Lanesville or, more to the point, Rocky Neck.

One afternoon in July, camera in hand, I headed out

Rocky Neck Avenue cloaked in the peace of Smith Cove

and the universe of color, texture and form  in

the galleries, shops and displays  all along the way.

As I approached Alma McLaughlin’s gallery and

raised my camera to my eyes, I was surprised to

find that time had been reversed and the last hundred years

on the Neck had vaporized; it was as it had been.

But the strangest part of this sight and gentle afternoon

was that I was not alone on Rocky Neck Avenue,

visiting the old sites and scenes of a century past.

Like a lantern dimly lit, a woman  came in view

and joined me on my  serene trip through time.

We did not speak, but both briefly paused to appreciate

the bright creations that adorned the walls of the gallery

that could be seen through the orderly glass-paned store front;

in a building, a street,  we had come so far to see.

Marty Luster