Category: Poetry

                    for Laura Savini and Jimmy Webb

On this day,
with the side glance
of a reluctant sun,

We have emerged
from the cold-snowy
backdoor of March.

The granite garrison,
armed with the
stuttering teeth of rakes,

Gathers the debris shed by
trees twisted and bent in
callous northwest winds.…

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Everyone called Cynthia, our church camp counselor,
Cinders even before she burned
my pink bikini in a big trash barrel
because I’d “left it lying on the bathroom floor.”
Branding me a rule breaker,
she slid her smoldering eyes my way
during our moonlit devotionals by the lake.
Those same eyes glowed with adoration
and envy when the boys’ counselor,
Donnie, led us all in my namesake song.
She snuffed out any spark of joy
lingering down in my heart.

I quit the church of my youth years ago—
misogyny was my reason.
I heard Cinders stayed,
married a man like Donnie,
a preacher who spews vitriol
about women keeping quiet in church.
Sometimes I imagine Cinders,
listening in a pew up front,
her gray eyes glistening with tears
necessary to dampen any scintilla of her fiery self.…

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I always feared the open sea
the shore on the horizon, too far to reach,
and the depth below that could encompass me.

that like a whale carcass I might sink to zero degrees,
to a lonely grave, the sinews of my bones leeched
away in the macabre dancing gravity of the sea,

blobs of fat and sponged skin, colored dark rosemary,
as it glistens in the distended membranes of benthic leeches,
all these depths that twinkle with their ability to digest me.

these detritivores drift then onward, unstable certophyllacaea,
wanderers without time, woven in existence foreign to speech,
predatory—a reason to always fear the open sea.

and wanted it too, though to a lesser degree;
to feel myself come apart and transcend some mortal breach.…

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The feeling was one of relief, not gratitude.
There were the familiar aspects of flight: velocity, height,
measuring distance, and seeing so much, again,
of the world as it should be.

She circled them once, in the clearing,
not as an act of farewell or defiance
but in a final effort to
understand these strange creatures.

Despite the searing pain at the time,
the injured eagle fought them at the start,
then learned in her captivity that
survival would require cooperation.

They had touched her and fixed things.
They had watched her, and even fed her,
and sometimes the touching, though unwelcome,
was strangely reassuring.

And as she flew madly above the green landscape
of summer, she did not circle back again
and could not hear her rescuers cheering 
and did not care that they had given her a name.…

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‘the silence of God is God’
                                                — Carolyn Forché

the sky dons its black cloak
and all its stars wrap about me.
light streams into my eyes
from so far away,
when the birth was first envisioned
on those starry nights of a distant time
                        that opened all around Them.

i.  the idea

struck you,
the only free will,
to have your son begotten,
to give him flesh and blood,
then raise an arm against him
when no angel in heaven would dare to intervene.
hard to imagine the thinking, when the word was God
and he was with God, talking to himself, mumbling
this is suicide, murder —
only to be answered
why hast thou forsaken me?

one would know a human mind,
mercy, love, suffering and affliction,
all that is of the flesh.…

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                          Via del Corso, 111 Centro Storico,
                          4 giugno 2005.

My apologies, wherever you are.

in that small square off Via del Corso,
I photographed your argument,
filled the lens with you
standing on your toes,                
leaning into him.

your lips pucker, as if you’d kiss,
but I can feel those wounded words
and watch the hands mimic every utterance:
pinched fingers point in the air;
a flick of the chin; ma va’ là!
basta! 
the words and every gesture
become a dance all your own.
more than once you take two steps back, turn
and then return
to continue with such passion, such intimacy,
the sun slips behind heaven’s white clouds
and a light grey veils the day.

while others continue on premeditated paths,
perform circadian chores
or simply go about their business,
I watch you walk away, disappear,
vanish in a crowd that’s unaware
                          of all the music in the air. …

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The time will come when Earth wobbles so fiercely that overcompensation is impossible. Notice its placement, its tilting, its hanging in there, just there, without a way to know it’s going to stay there securely for a few million years before the sun swells up beyond its present state and renders the Second Coming a moot point. Unless that will be the Second Coming, an inferno that makes Satan’s playground mere child’s play. A blistering nugget singed beyond recognition. Encompassing flames, heat, molten rock. All things melting into the air, the sky. Souls as blemish-free as a sleek new tablecloth – an afterthought along with everything else. No more thought will be left to hang our coats on when it gets too stuffy to move.…

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