I would have wished a gold medal,
To stand upon the pedestal
Wearing the flag of my country
With my head bowed humbly,
The grace of poetry at my sides.
But at what cost does gold outshine the sun
Whose radiance will come undone.
I celebrate this moment while it lives,
Knowing that beyond me, time will run,
And exhaust all distances.
The Grammar of Day
In a single day the sky
has swallowed the leviathan of night
and every cloud that veiled the light.
The stars have folded their maps away,
leaving only the pale grammar of day.
Now that you have peered into its eyes
it is up to you to write
with the same clarity
in which time is lost.
Montreal Drinking Story (Revised)
The last “yassou” in Greek Town
Made ouzo shots fly up as one.
A Greek, Italian and Australian
Created madness therein.
The divine imagination
Was at least equal to the heroic sum.
A taxi drove us home at five am,
The meter set at sunrise’s minimum.
The Haitian cabbie hesitated
As though on voodoo we had visited:
Like the wing of a soaring sun
Countless gulls lifted as one.
“Montreal Drinking Story” celebrates one night of creative energy, as a Greek artist, an Australian musician, and the Italian poet—together embodying “divine imagination”—move from revelry to a mythic dawn witnessed in the rise of hundreds of gulls.
Dreams Left in the Cracks
Along forest paths
between city streets
among people
how often I’ve changed places
with empty spaces
diving into shadows
to swim in the backs of my eyes
something told me
they were the cracks
in which death resides
the places
in which truth hides
and I tried to leave a piece
of my dreams in each
for those who come after
A Poem, Today
How do you think about a poem
when over a hundred little girls
have just been killed in an air raid
how can one say a butterfly
is not a demon born of fire
how can you say flowers
are not noxious faces in the dark
a poem nothing but intangible ego
or that the human race
is nothing but a monstrous face
like a coin without value
I’ve pondered this before
but today it’s crushing me
Crow Feather Totem X (Revision)
The days carry heavy spirits,
Evil airs float over the land.
Why today should I find
A feather from the first sky.
Why today this immaculate thing
Like the infant origin of a cloud,
To offer me the lightness of this moment
For having kept my own mind.
Ice Music
Larger Than Life
Just a trace of Spring
An inkling of a sprinkling
A tinge of thaw
A smatch of song
A reek of warmth
A quickening
Motion before meaning
Like a bird’s breath
An airy nothingness
Larger than life
Alfred
for Roger
The used bookshop’s cat has died
Exactly where the dust of time decides.
Alfred sat among the books in silence
Like the living presence of the past tense.
Always in tuxedo, he was mysterious
As Max Beckmann, and as serious.
A collector of voices and browsing faces
He was his own book of thoughtful places.
Goodbye, sweet tiger of the stacks.
Life is fiction and books are cats.
The Rebirth of Song
I know that the birds will return,
Each one will have a drop of sunlight in its beak
That will appear as song
And that the song will also drip with rain
And in each drop there will be a green tinge,
A new horizon
And the nectar of the sun in every note.
Salvatore Ala 