Something about August guts me
The end of summer the start of school
Change imperceptible tranquil days
The carnivals having come now gone
The light of endless afternoons
Weeds grown wild and sturgeon moons
Enliven creation through night’s duration
In August we open our cellar door
We splash wine across the floor
The harvest begun we couldn’t ask for more
Behind the soldier month the bulwark
The moving immensity of this eternal life
Author: Salvatore Ala
Marshland, 2022
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.
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
Chaos and Dystopia
Disguised deluders
Two faces on the same head
A demented Janus
Streets explode borders burn
Truth tethered then torn
Media monetized
Peace pirated
Addiction afflicted
The impoverished impugned
Knowledge kneecapped
Science scandalized
Stupidity standardized
Life levied by lunatics
Lawlessness laughing
Greed aggrandized
Earth entering extinction
War at the wheel of wealth
Genocide justified and gratuitous
After a Live Performance of Ofrenda de Cempasuchil
Ofrenda de Cempasuchil by Rodrigo Loman
(Marygold Offering for Día de los Muertos)
On the road to the cemetery
Marching steps grow heavier and sadder
Processions of musical notes
All ring with the glow of their candles
Flower music turns into fruit music
Baskets of shadow murmur with sound
Crosses of salt are spread over graves
To feed the dead with the earth’s bread
This offering of music flowers
From the crypt like the birth of birth
It lines the pathways with its golden glow
And flows past our reality into another
Suddenly sensation leaves the body
The dance is possessed by ghosts
It’s like bones are joyously dancing
And spirit feels itself in flesh again
We’ve all been made flesh by the music
Remembered by it and reanimated
Mixed into the melody of mortality
Stillness and the silence that sings
Pioneers of the Prairies
Seems to me cottonwoods feel changes
Before any other tree.
Even the gust edge of an approaching front
Sets all its leaves into flight.
It’s the first tree to sound the alarm,
To set the distance shimmering,
Telling us the wind is at our backs
And tonight will be a night of storms.
I study all the trees for signs
But a cottonwood tells me everything.
How soon to find shelter
And how many stars are born to dreamers.
Praise of the Purest Air
Between song sparrows, catbirds,
Waxwings, orioles, and red-eyed vireos
Spring has blossomed into sound,
With birdsong so spirited and alive
You’d think it a religious revival,
Save that these spirits are innocent,
They have real feathers and sing
Of the purest air praise can promise.
My Daughter Writes a Poem
My daughter writes a poem
Rings in the water multiply with each drop
One more songbird is born to the stone forest
One more pair of wings over the smoking crater
Salvatore Ala 