ARRIVING ON PAUMANOK Paumanok: "The island with its breast long drawn out." W.W., Brooklyn Standard A Midwesterner, an inlander, a lover of the interior, arrives on Long Island. "Paumanok!" he whispers, savoring his Whitman, local aborigine. "Paumanok," he says, half aloud. He feels salt water swaying on every side of him. He looks around for the rows and rows of ripening corn he'd sighted down since he was pushed from the womb. None. Expressways. "Paumanok," he repeats, looking at a map. "Manhasset...Mineola...Massapequa," he reads. He picks out the red and green lines looping the long breast. He turns them on his tongue like strange herbs. "Cutchogue...Patchogue...Ponquogue," he intones. "Wantagh and Wickapogue." He feels a mist drifting in from the shore. "Quogue and Nissequogue, Nesconsett and Amagansett," he sings. He hears the surf splashing nearer. "Commack and Speonk and Setauket," he chants, "Ronkonkoma, Ronkonkoma." "Shinnecock, Peconic." In the middle of a fog sliding inland off the sea like the souls of the dead, he says, softly, "Mattituck, Montauk." He whispers, "Paumanok, Paumanok." He begins to hear voices from the interior.

BITTERSWEET ALONG THE EXPRESSWAY
	As if in retreat from the unending lines of cars jerking and swerving from Manhattan onto Long Island the slender bushes crawl up the wire fence preserving the strip of greenery from the service road and like wild animals trapped in a zoo peer through wire diamonds with bright orange pupils.

SUN ALSO SHINES
Wherever I walk stars for which I have no name fall toward me. Leaves drop and drift, rain and snow fall. But sun shines too. People glide in and out of my life. A few swirl back. Sometimes icicles bar the windows I look out of. Two infants from another country have become our children. I listen to them breathe at night. Rain and snow fall. The children cry, yes, but they also smile. And light from some other place shines in their eyes.

Press Release for Norbert Krapf's Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island.