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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Please Welcome Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Poetry from Around Here
By Christine Potter
Allow me to introduce myself. I was not born in Rockland, but the first time my parents drove me across the bridge from Westchester to go antiquing in Nyack, way back in the 1960’s, I realized I had been raised on the wrong bank of the Mighty Hudson.
It took me a while to get here for keeps, but I’ve always loved everything about Rockland: legends of hippie goings-on at The Land in Haverstraw, people who tell stories about Doctor Pierre Bernard (The Great Oom) and his elephants. Then there’s Carson McCullers, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns…. The colleagues at my old Summit School job referred to this part of the lower Hudson Valley as “The County” when they were away from it. I’ve always loved that: “The County,” as if there were no other.
So a few decades ago, I found an apartment with a leaky roof in a great old house in Nyack, married a local music teacher, and helped him rehab a Craftsman cottage not too far from my single-gal digs. After that, we took on another old place and ended up living here on the Kill Von Beaste (aka the east branch of the Hackensack River) in Valley Cottage. It’s a grand spot for making poems.
Our little house used to be owned by the Heaton glassmaking family. A mill operated here before that. People have inhabited some form of the structure in which I’m typing these words since 1740. We’re supposed to have ghosts and I think we do. But what I want to talk about in these columns is another kind of ghost: the spirit left behind when folks who love the arts have made their lives in a place. That spirit opens the door to more art. And The County—Rockland County—is full of it.
So here we go: a monthly column filtering national and global vibes through a poet lucky enough to live in this tiny, inspiring part of the US. I’m hoping to offer other Rockland County poets and students of poetry a place to chime in with their thoughts and their work.
We seem to be in a period of waiting right now as a country. For an old-school FDR Democrat like me (runs in my family), it’s a difficult one. Maybe you feel differently, but there sure does seem to be a lot of flash and anger, a lot of trash-talking, a lot of pointed fingers. And yet I look out my office window and see the site of an ancient Colonial grist mill. Someone who believed in what this country was becoming built that first mill, and hardworking millers and later artists lived here for almost three centuries, all of us part of the American experiment. It’s all grist for the mill. Poetry works that way, too.
Here’s a poem I wrote at the end of the scary dry spell we had this past fall. I can’t tell you how happy I was that night, when I saw raindrops spotting the stones on my front walk! It rained on and off most of the next day—and over that next night, the rain turned to snow for a little while. I woke up and saw it falling, which felt both celebratory and incredibly soothing. I wrote this poem.
First Snow
I almost missed it because it slunk in
like someone all partied out, at 2 AM.
But it had been hanging out all day and
night—as our first real rain in weeks—
until it got sentimental. My only clue
a soapy, wee-hour-light on our pillows.
No cars swishing by, no keys jingling,
no one singing his way home. No wind.
My husband’s breath quiet as the cat’s,
both asleep beside me. The neighbor’s
roof white, lawn white, cedar branches
all mittened in snow, nothing moving.
Silence except for the creek in our yard,
tipsy. Giggling. Just a bit out of control.
Are you from Rockland County with poems to share? Pick out three or four of them and send them to me at: chrispygal@gmail.com. I’d especially like to hear from teachers in the local schools with poetry students!
