A strange distance for anyone,
driving between the lines
of being well or ill,
following traffic to the end.
Red lights are reprieves,
yellow goes both ways,
green condemns you to go,
stop signs lie to your face.
You drive on and wait.
May
May I have a cup of sunlight, please?
May I touch the flesh of summer?
Why have May flowers bloomed
only to hide in quiet gloom?
Where is Maia, the Roman goddess of May?
Today she is crueller than kind.
May I feel the warmth of the sun?
May I marry Maia to my miasma.
And once betrothed, may she appear
wearing white robes of the sun,
a bride of unbridled blossoming.
May I know you, May, at last.
A Violin in Vowels
A sound like green, seen, or sheen,
a rasping, straining and ringing—
also round like a flowering,
like glowing and fading.
Sometimes a note thins into a cry
when the bow barely holds the string
and makes the sound
of suffering sweeten.
Sometimes a note will vanish
like the bit of an it that was
and is no more.
Itzhak Perlman’s violin
between lost worlds,
singing sad thoughts without words,
like the open rose of the night,
calling Shoshana, Shulamite,
and I am the Song of Songs.
Song Flowers
for Patricia Janečková
At the funeral of the young soprano,
people said they had never seen flowers
so radiant, so alive.
They seemed almost to be singing—
and some of them were.
The Ancient Face of Silence
When you find a dead body
Your fingers turn to ice
They reach down through the earth
And pick rocks from the quarrel
Between life and death
When you touch a dead body
And feel for a pulse
Your hand slips through
The moment the heart stopped
Down into the depths of timelessness
Then you are wordless
And stand in the cold
Exchanging glances
With the ancient face of silence
April
Cruel King of cold and warmth colliding.
Water running down the stone
As though from Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral
To the last drop, the last holy shine.
April’s clouds confound the concert.
If not the weeks, the days are unkind.
The birds sing in a dead wind
Like a recording of the first flowers.
Homeless, he goes with an overcoat and violin,
The cruel king of the Calendar
Who could never be any other,
Marching to murder May, his own brother.
Spring
The fly at my window
turned into a bird
then a lizard
then an eye
holding me hostage
to change
After Voznesensky
The idea of a storm began forming in the clouds.
The idea of rain saw its reflection in a mirror.
The idea of wind spread all its wings at once.
The idea of thunder arrived before the sound.
A storm did form and the idea was swept away.
Rain did fall and shattered its reflection.
Wind folded its wings and came to rest again.
The mind survived the thunder and the idea.
The Law of Creation
A deer runs through a spring thicket
and emerges green as the young leaves
Raindrops kiss the flowers—
and birds burst out
A stream of water suns itself
on a rock, then slips away alive
Bats shake loose from a flash of lightning
when the sky cracks open its caves
Along the streambed frogs gather
from the thawing strings of ice
Even insects hesitate—
then step out of their own bones
No place to hide from creation
when creation calls you home
Garage Works
Between hammer and anvil
demons send out sparks
The acetylene tank’s blue flame
is the eye of the almighty
The rust of old parts
or the blood of the machine
An oil spill on the floor
or an exhausted rainbow
The heat of the engine
the cold of the season
The revving of an engine
clears carbon from the heart
A transmission job
moves the day along
A cut or a burn
and a bruise for the wages
When the car’s on the lift
it’s a poem in a mirror
Salvatore Ala 