3 Poems by Albert Geiser

The End Of Summer Camp

the blind people arriving
because summer camp ended
the tents taken down

the worker from Alaska,
smelly and heavy
who brought the camp dog
Claude the worker in mine the
last tent up, him and me
he's making the tent smelly

blindness and weight
gone is the lightness
there's a lightness of camp
it's all gone away
the coming of the blind

playing pool on the
old warped table upstairs
with a tunnel vision guy who
always misses
and has to have a bath

the camp weighs so much
love you so much much, a voice
in the gravel parking lot


Kyokusetsu On The Raquette River

kayaks take for granted bloom
on River Ellen

kyokusetsu

Old Town holds firm ashore
for lovers' tangled hair to be returned

with our roadside laces
loggers' boats petrified

by the river's deep mud and exposed
to lightning

wide shallow water offers no privacy
there's a pale shade of
the newish home, a driveway

that got its theived sedan
fated for the pressure at red Potsdam stone


The Aluminum Man

A sculpture my
father told me of

an aluminum man
at 64 East College

Avenue in Ohio.
who made his own

batteries to win
that electrolysis.

My father
made small

hobby sculptures
out of metal

being acted on in
aqueous solutions

at roadsides.
I stopped in my

father's college town,
I was in my early

twenties. I did not
think to look then

for the aluminum man.
I had rusted metal

pieces I had found
via Missouri, Oklahoma

Brought them
back.   My dad's thought

acts on me as if
I am rusted metal...


Bionote

After my birth and toddler experiences in very urban in East Orange New Jersey, my family moved when I was 4, escaping the preceding events leading to the Newark riots of the 1960s.  The apartment where we lived when I was born would later be burned and gutted.   In 1973 my father was going to be denied his tenure at Drexel University over Vietnam War era politics and we then moved to Potsdam, New York .I was 13.   I was to Bard College for its reputation for radicalized teaching, and loosely structured academics.   A literary magazine friends of mine and I put together which  we called Dialogue attracted some very good writers, and brought several of us together who have since had real successes in our writing and careers..  I had done very erratically in school, and I flunked out of Bard College.  I put my attention exclusively to writing in a quiet farmhouse in Tivoli New York in 1980.  I sent a book collection of short stories to the Richard Brautigan library in Vermont, at age 25, which done from 1981 to 1986 and which now is located in the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver WA.  I formally published for the first time in 1990,in the William and Mary Review, while living in San Francisco, and paying for very  fruitful services for  writing guidance from Thaisa Frank.  In 1998 I began writing poetry, and in October 2001 I began choosing writing workshops for poetry, beginning with Sandra Alcosser, including T.R. Hummer, Barry Wallenstein, Laura Kasischke, Olga Broumas, and Bhanu Kapil.   I then lived next to Naropa University, and wrote intensely for four years.   I published in a workshop magazine at Naropa.   I began putting poems onto FB, and once again I took the outsider path.   I formally published a poem in an anthology which is sold on Amazon.   The poem is called Aunt Betty, and the anthology is called Men In The Company of Women.   swisskys@gmail.com