Why do I love Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise so much?
What has happened to me,
Overnight I’ve become an old man who weeps
For a song without words.
Is it because I’ve known the past,
Or because I know the future—
And that is a bitter knowledge to possess,
To know we will murder each other again,
And that nothing changes
Across landscapes of madness.
Another Vocalise will have to be written,
And another me will have to suffer
The sadness of knowing,
Of hating who we are,
And of what we’re capable—
After all, there’s something tragic about music
If it exists to heal the wounds
That we ourselves inflict.

A house finch on a juneberry tree
Feeding
On the fruit
That has yet to be

for Brigitte

Give thanks for her hands,
For the years they’ve woven,
For the soft touch, the steady grip,
That’s held you through the storms.

Give thanks for the quiet nights,
For the way she rests beside you,
Not needing words to say everything,
In the silence, she speaks.

Give thanks for her eyes,
For their spark, their warmth—
A mirror to your own heart,
In their depths, you’ve found your home.

Give thanks today,
Tomorrow,
And every breath between,
For she is the song that calls you home
And the silence that lets you listen.

Two blue jays land without a sound
then—
a hawk

light
and shadow
tear across the grass

the jays lift
and the chase
disappears
like it was never there

A day of such absolute stillness
Belongs to its own mausoleum.
It’s probably been dead for years
Like the power of any potentate.

Scanning the trees and the ground
It’s just like Keats might have said,
Scarcely has the very smallest leaf
Moved from where it sometime fell.

It’s a day to sit still and be grateful,
A day for thought and restful eremition,
Like a cancer in remission,
The spirit, at rest, beside its flesh.

Just last week in the neighbourhood
I saw an eastern bluebird
For the first time in years
More often they are in open spaces
I’m glad they’re still around
With royal blue and russet feathers
They are always beautiful to see
Now that it is almost April
Winds can still turn from the North
The earth could still hesitate
And ice encapsulate a flower
In a prism of glass
I’m afraid for the eastern bluebird
Will it survive a blast from winter
Will it have time to nest
It might be the last one I ever see
The last one to weather the changes

When you wash an octopus
the water becomes an octopus.

When you boil an octopus
the steam twists into tentacles.

When you cover the mirrors,
the octopi come alive.

When you crack open a window
don’t they all escape?

Samphire makes a long journey
From cephalopod to plant.

The stigmata in my hands—
shaped like baby octopuses.

How many times
have I died for my young?

How many limbs
have I regenerated?

How often have I used ink
in my own defence?

How much blue blood must spill
to save the world?

How many hearts do you need
to survive through our losses?

Blood-dark days and lilies in bloom,
the knife, the gun, the operatic end—
all goodfellas and grandfathers,
all godfathers and millionaires
at yet another Sicilian funeral.

I was young and arrogant,
I dared to walk behind a Mafia boss.
I could have taken the long way
around the circle of captains he sat among,
but I didn’t—he felt my presence.
He turned, slow, deliberate.
The look he cast my way
haunts me to this very day.

It was as if the dead man’s eyes
opened in the boss’s stare,
and I was staring at a cold, dead soul,
staring back at me,
and at another funeral—my own.

Every time we went to his barber supply shop,
he’d ruffle my hair
and say, “hi kid, how ya doin’?”
He knew my father from Sicily.
They went to the same school together,
but after the war, my father became a barber,
and he became a mobster.
He was friendly with dad,
like childhood friends often are.
They’d joke in dialect and laugh.

It wasn’t until later
that I learned who he was,
his businesses were fronts
for covers and covers for fronts.
Anyway, what did I care. I was a kid.

And that was the rub.
Under the RICO Act
I was “guilty by association.”

At ten I turned myself in,
but I never snitched,
and I’m still serving time
in the garden of good and evil.

Another time—young, handsome,
And likely high on laced grass,
At a Sicilian wedding anniversary,
I asked a beautiful mob wife to dance,
And flirted with her on the floor.

Right away, my father drove me home.
“I’m saving you the beating
of a lifetime. Sleep it off.
In the morning, you apologize.”

I couldn’t believe how messed up I was—
The drugs, the homemade wine,
Full of amorous traces of the earth,
And the woman’s smouldering beauty.

When I apologized the next day,
I saw bullets in her husband’s guns—
But in his wife’s dark eyes—
A trace of arousal, a flicker of regret.