Gaetano Ala played guitar
Gaetano juggled grenades
And gardened in mustard gas
Gaetano smoked Gauloises
Got lost in the gaze
Of a Greek beauty in Algiers
Gained passage to Paraguay
Growing homesick again
For mother Mediterranean
Gaetano Ala played guitar
Gaetano smoked Gauloises
Immigrant and migrant
A grave in every ground
Great-great-grandparent ghost
Gaetano of ancient Gaeta
Gaetano Ala Gaetano
The margins of a designation
Grammarians agree
Wings of time and nothingness
Poetry
Poetic Observation
Lately I’ve been standing at my window to write. Then I return to my desk. Then I go back to the window. After a morning of this back and forth, I realize I’m writing a poem on both sides of a pane of glass.
The Music’s Paid
Breath and brass are familiars
Blending soulful elements
Woods mimic habitat
And voice a common life
All over the world
A percussion is being heard
Strings fuse vibrations
And the earth shudders
Time piecemeals music
To save us from the din
Set in motion
It sways a deafened god
The music’s paid
Let us dance until we love
Mythic News
How can you kill a Daphne Caruana Galizia?
That’s like killing all flowers,
like killing ourselves
to get at it something already dead.
How can you kill a Daphne Caruana Galizia?
She was made from everything
between non-being and substance.
She was made from the fabric of words.
She takes root in truth.
She branches into the immaterial
like prophecy, like genus, like blood…
How can you kill a Daphne Caruana Galizia?
That’s like killing off trees
expecting light to crown its own shade,
like killing numbers
and seeing plurality die:
Daphne Caruana Galizia, Daphne of Malta,
Daphne transformed.
Watchmaker’s Paradox
I return to the watchmaker
whom I’ve killed before,
dead battery and time capsule,
fixed on this escarpment,
a zombie in love with a dream,
nostalgic for a golden age,
arms heavy with toxic snails,
hands moist with murderous gel
and my nuclear arsenal
and hairspring trigger
for his eternal recurrence.
I return to the watchmaker
whom I’ve killed before,
being of his chronology,
mirroring my own assassin,
deep time running under strata
like gear trains through mind.
Crow Feather Totem VIII
This time we find graveyard feathers.
Someone’s spirit is alight.
Someone’s fallen from the night.
Someone flashes into remembrance.
Someone borrows plumes.
Someone wears a feather crown.
Someone shakes the snow.
Someone whistles through bone.
Someone settles into flight.
This time we find graveyard feathers.
Migrations
for my son
Several winter storms broke off
the southern point like a finger of ice,
though Lake Erie’s waves dredge up
the lakebed and resuspend a shoreline.
Last year there was a marsh fire
that burned to its reflection.
This year the reeds and cattails
are born of ash and water.
Didn’t our bird sightings migrate,
the book of native plants grow wild,
the binoculars sprout antlers
and gaze back into us like a forest.
Whenever we return to the park
distance folds time into waves,
like any transoceanic migration
that erases its own path– we are here.
Solar Eclipse
The dead can look at the eclipse.
I stand with my back to the sun,
a shoebox viewer and pinhole
for the shadow play in miniature.
The moon crept across the sun
as though God were inserting
a nucleus into a cell, implanting
renewable energy in the solar engine.
My dead brother wept for the light,
while our loving mother,
radiant through darkness,
offered solace to her dead sons.
At the limits of lunar mass,
trans-elementation complete,
vultures lift off the sun’s rim
as though from the tree of life.
Sonhood
My son steals through the door like a thief.
I sit at my old desk listening to him leave.
My hand is about to write a line of poetry
That disappears before I can put it down.
Storm-Felled Tree
The tree gave up its branches like wildfire.
It gave up its fruit like rain.
It did a last wind dance and collapsed,
Bird nests flying.
At that instant, I saw the tree hover,
Rooted just above the ground.
The insubstantial tree crashed down,
Thunder padding the empty sound.
Salvatore Ala 