Take me back to the earth,
as I lay dying I lay breaking.
Come home lost son and wayward daughter,
it is still sanctuary where I am father.
Birds are born from flowers
and trees wear sylvan robes
of beautiful abandonment.
Friends and ghosts of a delta wedding
glimmer in the moonlit garden.
Blow into my windows wild nature,
raise your children of inevitable
impermanent incongruous nature,
and I’ll be home when I am not
and I’ll be home when I am not.
Author: Salvatore Ala
The Painter after a Stroke
Half the loft in darkness,
Half the flowers watered,
Daylight shines halfway across the floor
Like a line he drew
With a yellow marker.
Half his mail unopened,
Half his cat visible,
One speaker crackles in and out,
A spark of recognition
Comes and goes.
He smiles like a canvas
With a middle margin,
And pointing to a window
Beside his easel
Perfect halves meet.
Tallgrass Prairie in Winter
Under the snow winter is pregnant.
The cold has a smell.
The sun is a copper arrowhead.
Birch bark scrolls tell old stories to the wind.
Rock writing talks to young stars.
When I blink, the ghost of an Ojibwe brave
Runs over the field without moccasin prints.
Near and far the patter
Of sleet on dead oak leaves,
That’s also the sound of a tallgrass prairie
When you’re really listening.
Clouds Over London
... neither God nor No-God
Louis MacNeice
Not clouds but burkas naked on clotheslines,
Hawksmoor gloom with Horus eye,
Warzone Luftwaffe left-over thunder,
Lions’ heads on building tops,
Quorum of the heavens… London fog
And a neighborhood in London fog,
The ghost of Hitchcock at the window
Of his house gave the shadow of a doubt.
Nothing was real, not buildings or streets.
Only a waking sleep from cab to cab
And a destination from which you depart.
Not clouds but statues wet in flesh
And veil, as in “The Winter’s Tale,”
Or the dead likeness of a changing guard.
North of the city an explosion; south, a beheading.
Astride the block a shadow slumps.
The head of God, a cloud in a basket.
Young Love in Ancient Place
I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.
I Found a Severed Hand
I found your hand, Susana Chávez Castillo,
It was crawling north, somewhere in Arizona.
Right away I knew it was your hand,
It was clutching at a page of poetry.
It was writing in blood on a thirsty desert.
The names of your murderers appeared
Long enough to be recorded by the stars.
No one escapes the justice of the universe.
No one escapes the god of the black spaces.
I found your hand, Susana Chávez Castillo.
I buried your hand in the desert
And it bloomed with thorns, like a cactus.
Conversations with Men with Brain Injuries
You who reason and speak
Speak for us who have no names and no names.
You who come and go
Walk among wheelchairs in random space.
You who are alone
Open these doors to see who is alone and alone.
You who are lost
Find yourself among the lost who are lost.
You who are jealous
Look at what men owning nothing own.
You who hate
Imagine hatred when temperament is all tenderness.
You who are in pain
Ponder this painless abstraction.
You who have God
Consider a God of global amnesia.
You who are searching
Exit the mind and it is still mind and you are saved.
Music Mountain
for Alan Blind Owl Wilson
I’m going up to music mountain
Where all my friends have gone,
Where the air is pine-scented
And you’re high all the time.
They say the mountain is tuneful,
You can hear the fire of the sun,
And at night the humming stars
And beyond them, God’s blues harp.
Another Night at the Opera
At the sickbed of romance
The famous tenor split his pants,
The bodice of the soprano burst,
Letting air out of her aria first…
Tonight seven cell phones,
Twelve bleepers, sixteen coughs,
Forty yawns and eleven sneezes,
Accompanied by gassy breezes,
Joined the hissing, boos and jeers
Amid the music of the spheres.
When the mezzo-soprano began to trill,
Half the mezzanine took ill;
And the basso singing solo
Fell flat on his profondo.
Tonight the chorus was in chaos
When the andante lost its pathos
And the allegro lagged along
Far behind both act and song.
Even the conductor was confused
When the composer left bemused,
And the librettist wrote a letter:
“The opera could not be better—
Save for the flautist blowing Rigoletto,
Found toying with his piccoletto.”
The Counterweight
If you weigh the stars in the balance
Glaciers are nurseries of the stars.
They are weighbridges to the borealis,
Ice roads into isolated communities.
They’re hydroelectric power plants,
Evolutionary clocks, mammoth museums,
Icebox mountains of organic matter.
Meltwaters surge from the summits
Enlivening salmon in summer streams,
Nourishing the valley with snowmelt.
Glaciers are a kind of counterweight
To their own absence tipping the scale.
Once gone, what could replace glaciers
That we’d not burn in water/drown in fire.
Salvatore Ala 