Dear friends, I have been diagnosed
With Chaosmosis—
My mind can take no more chaos.
I am saturated with the world.
Symptoms include
Feeling infected with the coronavirus,
Your plane has been shot down,
Your helicopter crashed into a hill,
You have cancer and a parasite
Created by chaos eroding the margins
Of just feeling alive,
And the earth in global crisis,
Collapsing to our selfish ignoring.
So far there are no treatments
For Chaosmosis,
Except for symptomatic drugs,
Drugs that leaves you numb,
With a gaze like a flame
Or like an endless wave in space.
Image of the imageless, like an impact crater.
Poetry
Song of the Earth
All our different languages
Yet trees, grasses and stones
Have the same vocabulary;
Blowing snow and mountain pines
Express a shared language;
Cresting waves and rippling dunes
Breathe the same breath in speech.
All our different languages
You’d think the earth
Could have translated hate
Into the music of a wild meadow,
And washed away any semblance
In the waves of our lakes…
You’d think we at least
Could have picked up a few
Beach stones and memorized
Each other’s faces without words.
Void Existence
This is a poem that is groundless
And without adornments, the lines
Expertly spaced like plain boards
As though they weren’t there at all.
The poem levels the surroundings
Without drawing attention
To either remoteness or proximity.
You aren’t distracted by pretense
And breathe evenly over the boards,
Going through one door to another,
Sure of your steps, unconcerned,
Even taking the art for granted
By not inspecting its craft,
Remembering only later in traffic,
The peace of such a pure house.
Fatherly Wisdom
Whenever they come home
My kids leave with another book.
Over the years
The spaces on my bookshelf
Have widened with wisdom.
That’s wisdom:
Not what you own,
What you give away.
Crow Feather Totem XII
My daughter left me a cardboard box
With her totem of feathers.
When I looked inside
Her spirit flew up in feathers
Singing a song about becoming a woman.
My daughter seems far away.
I’m glad she left me her feathers.
I’m sad she left them.
I’m glad she left them
For the wind and sky.
Can There Be Enough Music
When music is silent
People are dancing
When people are silent
Blight is consensual
When truth is silent
Havoc is raging
When wind is silent
Storms are mounting
When thunder is silent
Light is imploding
When waves are silent
Distance is singing
When stones are silent
Earth is trembling
When fire is silent
Water is burning
When rain is silent
Hunger and thirst
When music is silent
Madness is shrill
When stars are silent
The hum is silent
When God is silent
Can there be enough music
The Invisible Woman
The woman begging in the cold,
The woman in second-hand clothes
With tattoos on vanishing skin,
The woman who disappears into denial,
Whose makeup runs with tears,
Who pierces her face with pain,
Who wears unseen depression
On the face of her loneliness.
She’s also the woman hate creates
With all her races and refugees.
The woman who dies
In abuse like Pagliacci’s Nedda.
All we know is surface tragedy.
The woman can be Muslim,
Her veil, a less vulgar place;
Her blind, a global face.
There are more invisible women
Who disappear without names,
Who suffer every indignity,
Who wear identity like a disguise
To distance what debases them.
Far away the invisible woman,
Far away the sum of her parts,
The aura of her being,
Growing fainter are the stars,
The milk of the moon,
The thread of life, the multiplicity,
The meaning of the earth,
The mother who covers her children
With the skirts of her garment.
Summer Light in Winter
Like summer frozen in winter
Summer light on a winter day.
It looks warm and masquerades
As gentles breezes with an icy edge.
It is summer somewhere else
Wafting through our zero weather.
It is bright enough for memory
To cast the shade of summer
And thaw coldness for a spell,
Awakening the atmosphere
For what transience dispels.
Some life enters the skin.
Some memento melts the air.
The glow lingers into dusk
Wearing a garment of snow.
The fullest hour floods with light.
“Plain speaking and clear understanding”
(title spoken by Sidney Greenstreet
in The Maltese Falcon)
We share the being of being alive
Air must be breathable
Water not contaminated
Freedom is the best option
No individual or group
Can claim the truth
One hungry child is criminal
Hate creates suffering
Two wrongs commit a worse wrong
The best seek peace
The base seek power
Farmers are our roots in the earth
Doesn’t matter who is right
It matters we agree
Mathematical Fallacy
for Michael
In my sixtieth autumn, insoluble leaves,
Like more numbers than moonlight can double,
Like migrations unnumbered by time,
Like a windfall of division equal to shade,
Like a rainfall washing out its arithmetic.
In my sixtieth autumn, insoluble leaves,
Like the natural numbers of the sun,
Like the reckoning of the cold,
Like decimals enumerating the wind.
In my sixtieth autumn, the aftermath,
Impossible computations of fate,
False answers and recalculations,
Estimated losses and constant of love
On the road to my own insoluble solution.
Salvatore Ala 