After months of lockdown the marsh
Was swarming with abundance.
The lockdown had unlocked nature.
We were immersed in its fever.
There were more birds and varieties,
More wildflowers and dragonflies,
More water snakes, frogs, turtles
And fish in the shadows of rebirth
Than we’d ever seen at the marsh.
Teeming, brimming, the very air
Seeded with a kind of seething,
As the marsh achieved biogenesis,
Its natural state of aseity, and we,
First to arrive after the pandemic,
With a wild surmise, realize its poiesis.
Month: July 2024
Transitory Engagements
All week I’ve watched cabbage white butterflies
Engaged in mating,
Tumbling as one through the air,
Touching and not, falling and rising,
Fluttering faster and fanning the air
With sexual stimulation,
Seeking to become one of their own many,
Like the folding of their own wings, at rest.
Rereading a Friend’s Poem
Time to time I reread a friend’s poem
And linger over it like I’m reading time,
As though I’m sipping bourbon
And seeing him at his typewriter,
Hearing his voice and laughter,
Smelling the viridescence of the room
Just before we’d venture in and wade
Into the tropic waters of metaphor
Like distance swimmers without shores.
His passion is all in the poem,
A lifetime of fought hard for words
And their fading and ruined bells.
Even the typed page into which letters
Seem embedded in prima materia
Carries the faint scent of the grass
We shared at our last council of war
Against chaos and time.
It’s like the poem’s burning the incense
Of the intangible back into my mind.
This Rain
Is a gully-washer a toad-strangler
Raining monkeys bucketing bullfrogs
Spitting bolts and drowning geese
It’s torrential and a soaker
Copious and inundatory
Swamping fish and fowl
Pouring rodents and snakes
Raining devils and pikels
Spewing lives and souls
Even voices and heartbreaks
And the sludge of information
To the depths of loneliness
To the depths of despair
And whatever else the storm picks up
On its way to our destruction
Salvatore Ala 