In a mountaintop cathedral
The white candles are bleeding
The red candles are weeping
Pilgrims arrive from all parts
To experience the miraculous
Yet none see the light
Though it burns before their eyes
Poetry
Horses at Night
“that strange gratuity of horses.”
Hart Crane
I stop as the horses thunder past,
Heart lifted with them, breath caught.
Horses made of moons and meadows
Chase the wind
At the speed of their own black light,
Or glowing, gleaming chestnut
Coming out of fog,
Following the sun to its stable of fire.
Space and earth leap in their strides;
Their hooves storm like hailstones.
The mist clears in their wake
Like the mane of a lightning bolt
Over the trembling pasture.
A white horse turns to shadow,
Galloping over the salt of stars.
Then they’re gone,
Like night into deeper night—
Yet their fire lingers behind my eyes.
Snowbound in Montreal
Once, I went out into the blizzard
to buy milk, bread, and some black hash.
Then I didn’t leave the apartment for a week.
Snow erased the street below.
Buried in Dostoevsky, I read
“The Brothers Karamazov”
as though I were on Moscow time.
I didn’t need the outside world
to know what was cold, what was evil,
what was passionate or profound,
— and the hours drifted elsewhere
as if in Russia.
Naim Süleymanoğlu
“Thou art no Atlas for so great a weight.”
—William Shakespeare
Condemned to hold up the canopy of the sky,
Burdened with the strength of Hercules
In so small a body as mine.
Resolve among my virtues.
To lift such weight is to defeat gravity
Inside yourself, to rely on spirit
To shoulder the heaviness of life—
Heavier still the will to quit.
A Poem, Today
How do you think about a poem
when over a hundred little girls
have just been killed in an air raid
how can one say a butterfly
is not a demon born of fire
how can you say flowers
are not noxious faces in the dark
a poem nothing but intangible ego
or that the human race
is nothing but a monstrous face
like a coin without value
I’ve pondered this before
but today it’s crushing me
Larger Than Life
Just a trace of Spring
An inkling of a sprinkling
A tinge of thaw
A smatch of song
A reek of warmth
A quickening
Motion before meaning
Like a bird’s breath
An airy nothingness
Larger than life
The Rebirth of Song
I know that the birds will return,
Each one will have a drop of sunlight in its beak
That will appear as song
And that the song will also drip with rain
And in each drop there will be a green tinge,
A new horizon
And the nectar of the sun in every note.
Prime Brokerage
Billionaires on their trophy yachts
sip Grand Cru and pick delicacies
from Flora Danica plates
and Baccarat crystal.
The seas are their escape
at freedom’s own expense.
Asleep, waves accumulate a price
too expensive for their assets.
The rolling sea erases time
like Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains.
How far away we are from them—
our feet on a public pier,
their decks beyond the buoy line.
Their anchor lights
glint in illiquid distances.
And in our gazing, unseen shapes
stir from the depths,
sea-monsters of discontent
rising from envy we barely know.
Wealth means nothing
to the waves and their changes.
They carry their own interest,
whisper listing to the caves.
At the bottom of the sea
lies the Graff of their extravagance.
When the Sun Cracks
The sun flowers through ice
Some say it’s a white rose
Others a pink lotus
Or a yellow water lily
No one can agree
At first just a spark
A deep-frozen glint
A diamond point
Later petals and rays
Who knows what will happen
When the sun cracks
The surface of the earth
And the flower
Burns through all light and air
Animal Darkness
Three deer on the property
stand in animal darkness.
They could have just appeared
having never been born.
Without moonlight
they are animals
of their own shadows.
If not for hoofprints in snow
I would not believe it.
Three deer on the property
stand in animal darkness.
Salvatore Ala 