Saugerties Art Tour Preview

Windows on Main Street in Saugerties are starting to bloom with work by artists from Saugerties Artists' Studio Tour. I am featured in the window of Smith Hardware, on the corner of Main and Partition Streets. An honor to be in the company of Barbara Bravo, Diana Bryan and Ellen Perantoni. An honor to be in the window of one of the great locally owned hardware stores anywhere...the sort of place that could well have inspired the Hudson Valley's Nancy Willard to write her poem, "A Hardware Store as Proof of the Existence of God."

I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,

and a rack of wrenches like the bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.

In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.

In the right hands, they can work wonders.