Your aunt’s smiling face,
Your uncle’s hand
Passing a phone receiver through the space
Like a voice from the other side.
For prolonged periods
There is nothing but half a calendar
And half a clock
On the far kitchen wall–
Empty space
And the bottom half of time.
Not even a vanishing point
Only the empty face of time
Through such a small space.
An arched passage,
Like the shrine
Of an invisible saint,
To whom I offered
Long afternoons of my childhood.
The wind is a word which needs the earth
To make it speak
It contains so much time
It can explode through the trees
And devastate communities
It can kill power lines
And dispute with oceans
Such a small word
Almost without a vowel
Almost you would think a stone
In the middle of a desert
Not the swirling sweeping air around it
The glass tree has shattered
The inside is growing out
Leaf-shards lay in ruins
Vines produce crystal grape clusters
That fracture at a touch
The door to nature is open
Creation careens off cultivation
A glass sun seeds an unknown ground
Cut-glass is green
The roof glazing azure
The open light opens all the more
I would step inside
But the tree is still shedding
And splinters of light
Might infect me with eternity
You’re not dying at all, life is rushing in
birds fly through the glass unhurt
the blueness bathes you in spirit waters
the leaves are laughing with you
shadows have names you’ll learn in time
This is what we’ve been taught wrong
repeating over and over in song
dying is the abundance I’m beholding
not a body I’m withholding
but the transparency of life unfolding
Nothing is so still as a dead fawn.
Not even a stone can lie so still
Or draw all the light in the forest
To its own sad and resting self.
Infant of the woods, hooved angel,
Newborn of silence, spotted sister
Of death’s meadow, child of Artemis,
Now gentler than ever,
Now more attentive than the stars.
At the onset of the storm of the century
The museum doors opened
The windows shattered
All the portraits flew out to find their spirits
All the birds were blown in like wind
The landscapes came alive
Statues took up their weight and left
Saying frightful things as they passed
Much of the art was swept away
Lightning burned a tree of paint
Abstract art dematerialized
My impression of impressionism
Instantly blurred
The pop art survived like tattoos
But that wasn’t the whole picture
The rain fell through the open roof
Emily Carr’s forests grew even greener
Tom Thompson’s lakes flooded
Installation pieces floated about
It was really a pleasant disaster
A distraction from the seriousness of art
You stitch it to the wind
So that it will learn to fly without a mother
You hold it to your heart
So that you’ll know fragility forever
You weigh the infancy of time
In the palm of your hand
You stand there quizzically
Considering our contract with nature
You look for a nest
Only to discover space is home
You nurture the nestling
With an eye-dropper and a dream
You call a bird rehabilitator
Marry them and fly away
Spring shadows at the cemetery,
two old men, both with walkers,
meeting on a green transcendental plane
quietly conversing
along a row of headstones and graves.
I had the strong impression
that spirits were talking,
that they were there all the time,
that I was close enough to know.
Sunlight through the trees
A blue canvas
Birds crisscrossing
The day a “pure serene”
A colour Keats invented
The radiance
Of angels in the blue
And the sadness
With which they gaze upon us
When the dreamer is cut open
The surgeons are swallowed by the dream
The medium crossed over
And was devoured by ants
Acupuncture needles
Go through to where the dream fades
A masseuse became
A mannequin without hands
In the sleep laboratory
Centipedes infest computers
Neither therapy nor soporifics
Could cure him
He dreamt until the day he died
And then he could not tell
If he was dreaming or the world
Salvatore Ala 