In my rendering of Madame Butterfly
There is no heartbreak and suicide.
Through panel rooms the sound of waves.
On a silk screen, the blue moonlight.
One gust of wind and it is spring.
Butterfly wings flutter on bronze,
The temple bells are ringing,
Flower and song flow into one.
No gods appear in the libretto.
No tear drop moistens a sleeve,
No ceremonial dagger falls to the floor,
No shadow feast will be served.
All night the nightingale floor is singing.
Month: May 2015
My Life in Opera
Growing up in a house of pain,
You sacrifice everything for love.
Like the time my uncle tore open his shirt
And begged his brothers
To let him return to the love
He left in Buenos Aires,
Like the time my mother
Was scratching at her eyes,
Like the time my father both raged and wept.
Days were scenes without direction.
One day a cousin would stab herself
Or an aunt jump from a tower.
I didn’t know what was real;
But what passionate singing I heard,
Tenors, sopranos, baritones–
All around me in full voice;
And there I was, in love with Tosca,
Condemned to death,
And just twelve years old.
The Uncanny
The composition by Koshkin
On The Fall of the House of Usher,
Was tonight the most haunting music
The guitarist performed;
Though it wasn’t the wild ringing of dissonant chords,
But the blue flash of lightning
At the window of the recital hall,
Which for a second
Made the guitarist look like a dead man
Picking a bone guitar.
Sun Halo on the Ides of March, 2008
Was is it an allegory of divine providence?
Or error of reification? At best, an appeal to probability.
It would take Plutarch and Shakespeare
Together to create so parallel a stage,
A theater with as many clouds and beams,
A shoreline for such drama and articulation,
Everything convergent on our arrival,
The return of art to life from art in life,
Doomed ice on shattered waters,
The vivid sun halo and vast light,
Sun dogs and rainbow zenith arcs,
It obscured both history and tragedy.
Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery
Montreal
Though I walk amid myriad gravestones,
The summer air is soft, trees cast full shadows,
And the grass ripples from grave to grave.
When a cloud passes, the shadows deepen.
I see Emile Nelligan, sixteen years old,
Brooding because he has fallen in love
With poetry and beauty. A breeze blows through him.
I think of Albert Lozeau, the invalid poet,
At the cold window of his solitary room;
And of the restless young Sylvain Garneau,
Gazing at the sky from his own grave;
And of how lucky I am to be thirty-two,
Hearing voices in the summer wind.
Ah, la belle vie, la belle vie… the dead are saying.
Grandmother
Quieter than the quietest of quiet things,
My grandmother was a whisper.
We shared a bedroom for five years
When grandfather died and I was a boy.
Quieter than the quietest of quiet things,
A hand smoothing out a sheet, a breath,
Is yet too loud for how she woke
While I was sleeping, then never woke again.
Snail on Ripe Tomato
A garden snail on a ripe tomato
Was trailing its wet love
Along the seam of its feeding,
Absorbing what absorbs,
Slime and pulp merged,
The long slow contraction
Before the love dart’s fired,
Snail muscle mounting,
Pouring out of its shell,
Surging to be all surface
That swarms and liquefies.
Not a pest but a guest
To the best of my garden,
To my reservoirs of red rain
Swollen to bursting
Where the snail drinks the sun
From the inside out
And the earth is whole.
Florence, 1993
It was the night after the car bombing of the Uffizi.
The city was a vandalized painting of itself.
I walked the via Inferno, to via Purgatorio,
And saw a prostitute on a street corner
Pointing the way to paradise. I saw
A collapsed bridge in a burning river.
Every sculpture was writhing with animal pain,
Every tomb thrown open, every masterpiece blackened.
My shadow led me like a spirit guide
Amid the howls of lamentation;
The street was river of boiling blood.
Then I saw a light and a passageway.
Above the doors of an old church I read:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
City of Cats
Palermo
In a city of cats shrill voices pierce rooms,
Clusters of jungle grow in parking lots,
Thick vines hang down from balconies,
Botanical gardens creep out of fences,
And alleyway become rutting grounds.
More than the all-night caterwauling,
All the terrifying and orgiastic voices,
Rabid loners with bared fangs drooling,
One senses the crumbling city overrun,
Felis libyca stirs, shadows stalk the ruins,
Nothing left but wild cats, and the rising sea.
And you beside me sleeping, fitful,
Night speaking through your dreams,
Manic laughter stilled to a purring breath,
Then the night cries of sexual shadows,
Then the fear again, ailurophobia,
Clawing the sheets as I stroke your hair.
She whom I knew, where is she now?
The body of a sphinx lies across the night.
I know her by the feral smile on your face,
And I who have been listening am afraid,
Afraid to sleep or to dream or to wake.
The Heaven of Handicapped Children
Where space flows like water,
So that nothing is hard or sharp,
Everywhere the pliant, buoyant, firm,
Infinitesimal balance of motion,
Equilibrium’s endless flowing
From every direction holding, releasing…
Or eternal and simultaneous interchange
Of subatomic and celestial particles,
Infinite number and regression,
The farthest point always near.
Gravity’s first rising.
Or regeneration’s genesis,
Beginning of all emerging,
The birth before birth,
Genealogy’s first molecule,
Progeny’s spring and curative.
Or clarity’s deepest water,
Simplicity’s essence distilled,
The weightlessness of all need
Where love is greater than chaos.
Salvatore Ala 