Saw Grace Hospital operated on yesterday,
Walls and windows of a surgical procedure,
All lines and tubes, bent steal and remains,
Like a building you see in war documentaries,
Except this one bombed by fiscal management,
Recovery a financial risk, uselessness quarantined,
Without brain function, like municipal government.
And since the hospital has been sick
The neighborhood has open sores
Like someone amputated the streets
Giving nowhere to heal those with nowhere to go.
The hospital’s been sick so long
The sick have grown well and then sick again.
Those who died here exist in a state of grace.
Everyone born here is born again in other ruins.
Of all the beings we see expire in our lives
Nothing is like seeing a building stop breathing,
That’s a Code Blue to which no one responds
Except demolition crews and trucks, and they’re too late.
Month: May 2015
Symposia Above Sea Level
My cousins cautioned me about the red wine,
Counseled me on being too at ease
On ancestral land. Said lush vineyards grow
On Etna’s slopes, enriched by lava flows
And strange vapors steaming into the grapes
Produce a wine from the childhood of the world.
Whatever philosophy we were spewing
That I, drinking this, heard chaos talk,
Saw the sea burning in the crater of the sun,
Saw the mountain falling, space mounting;
Felt the wine venting, the winds of forgetting
Flying in the wine-dark sea of my mind–
I staggered on the cliff-side terrace—
Archimedes Theocritus Empedocles I slurred
The vertigo of history letting go,
Smelling sulfur, even there among clouds.
The Blue Hour
Neither complete reason or revelation
But falling in love again when we can’t help it
Ambient composite blue transparent to the stars
Between dawn and sunrise sunset and dusk
Constellations swirl in blue-ringed octopus spheres
Between cerulean and cobalt a painted sky
Something levels like the height of waters
Cityscapes hang in Krishna heavens
A mirror’s blue velvet tumbles to the floor
Night sways in the white sheers of a blue room
Unfinished wine drinks the rose of night
Music trickles the ether of afterglow
The blue hour ebbs from the earth’s shadow
We are strangers in the space of a window
Two Moon Matching Set
1
Moon in Tiffany setting with gypsy lights
And girdle of gold opalescence,
But rarely like this, cupped in cloud-stone,
Out of dark velvet night
This earthshine of all beauty;
Altered stone, at the angle of incidence,
Basalt glazed and ringed in space
With a lustre priceless and enduring,
Because in minimum of magnitude
All star-points gleam alike,
And time is richer by one jeweled night.
2
Shadows at full moon are deeper than meanings.
They embody fullness, erase space,
Build mass and edifice in mind and place.
The mystery behind history, opposing peripheries,
These silhouettes of branches and trees,
A phantom nursery, lunar forest,
Buried trees swimming up from the subsoil
As though through a lake of black glass.
Earth in earth, universe in universe,
Branches rupturing the stars
And we, fortunate to walk among them.
Snail Recipe
As a boy I dreamt snails,
Dreamt my mother was mother of snails
Who nursed them with milk and honey,
Cooked pastina, sage and basil,
To cleanse and sweeten the flesh.
I dreamt snails and cringed.
At dinner, I slowly picked snails from their shells,
Savoring dark morsels, eating my dream.
Haunted Hearing
in memory of Henrietta Epstein
Abruptly Henrietta remembered it was January 7th…,
Synchronicity is a bridge over time,
Talking about John Berryman the day he died.
One minute life’s a dream, the next a song…
Henrietta was such a poetry lover
She plucked a candle from her Hanukkah menorah
To commemorate the Oklahoma-born poet.
She told of John wildly drunk in Michigan
Shouting frenzied needing her naked and now
At a party held by patrons in upscale Birmingham,
Even flinging the glass that was shrieking to marble,
Articulating an imperfect present,
Redemption is at war with time.
If eternity is freedom why suffer for life?
“The Mississippi will have its way.” John jumped in,
“More bourbon please, more Baudelaire.”
“I could use one myself,” said Henry.
“Mr. Bones got a powerful thirst.” Henry laughed.
We shivered to the otherworldly recitations,
Our tribute to a poet turned séance to his voices.
Ellis Island
Passenger ships slip time in fog,
Their displacement forever in motion.
At Ellis Island multitudes materialize
In sackcloth and ashes.
As they pass, our ancestors
Smile at us in pity and in wonder.
More Translations from the Latin Fragments of Hugo Falcandus
In the Arab gardens of Sicily water guides you to paradise and order to hypocrisy.
Only in this sun can you weigh the shadow of a pomegranate to the ripeness within.
The Christian mosaics are the skies inside Palermo. Once there was a miracle. An evil monk was struck in the head and killed by a small piece of heaven.
Why are there so many miserable old men holding on to poetic reputations?
As for my own poems, they will return to the earth…
A King risks assassination if he doesn’t, in some instances, allow himself to appear easily persuaded.
Deeds should be the leaves of a beautiful world and words the fruits of a life worth living.
Some Lost Writings of Hugo Falcandus
Poets are interested in events “que circa curiam gesta sunt,” meaning they are concerned only with what happens in the court and among the elite.
When the tyrant Kings of Sicily wanted to vent their rage, they had poets executed, beginning with the most celebrated. This was to the credit of the Kings.
It’s true that poets suffer “Theutonicus furor,” which is the pillaging of their sensibilities through other styles.
Poets who are miserly at giving praise are generally gluttonous about receiving it.
A poem is a golden honeycomb.
The critic is he whose “culus tibi purior salillo est/ whose ass is purer than a saltcellar… (The rest has been lost).
The only way to be a poet is to kick poetry to death (or “to kick a poet to death.”) The original text has been destroyed).
Poets who publish other poets have a sense of entitlement.
It was said that at the court of William the Wicked, a Muslim poet read poetry of such beauty and depth that all eyes glistened with tears, though not a word of praise was spoken.
Salvatore Ala 