Once, I went out into the blizzard
to buy milk, bread, and some black hash.
Then I didn’t leave the apartment for a week.
Snow erased the street below.
Buried in Dostoevsky, I read
“The Brothers Karamazov”
as though I were on Moscow time.
I didn’t need the outside world
to know what was cold, what was evil,
what was passionate or profound,
— and the hours drifted elsewhere
as if in Russia.
At the 1984 Summer Olympics
in Los Angeles, a marathon miracle occurred,
a marvel of distance and persistence,
struggling, disoriented, vulnerable,
Gabriela Andersen-Schiess
did not win gold, but won the stadium,
as witnesses to loss and triumph,
their hearts breaking and rising together,
joined in the same Mass
of human frailty and fortitude,
seeing the spirit, naked and grotesque,
her limbs cramping and contorting,
a puppet on its last fraying string—
the body on its own crutches;
dying, and refusing death.
The Finish Line our own beginning.
“Thou art no Atlas for so great a weight.”
—William Shakespeare
Condemned to hold up the canopy of the sky,
Burdened with the strength of Hercules
In so small a body as mine.
Resolve among my virtues.
To lift such weight is to defeat gravity
Inside yourself, to rely on spirit
To shoulder the heaviness of life—
Heavier still the will to quit.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Salvatore Ala 