Mirror barbershops,
Reflect space, imitate waiting,
Affix stillness, mimic motion,
Brush hair, touch faces,
Weigh shaving cream
In mirrored hands,
Maroon towels, mix tonics,
Cut conversation,
Amend silence, trim excess
In excess of excess.
Poetry
High Winds
Many broken branches, heavens eroded,
Trees uprooted, the heartwood with rot.
Roof shingles raised, power lines down.
I’ve never seen such wind-blasted light,
Blue diffused into dark, transparent night.
In my mind distance travels like the wind.
Outside our losses, the road of the wind.
State Mental Hospital
A sound structure in architectural
beauty and ruin,
Lovely grounds overrun by weeds,
Narrowing trails through forest,
The farm now fallow and wild.
Ghosts of place move on,
Legends vandalize experience,
Peace remedies chaos,
Kindness cures brutality
Bound to no restraints.
If facts are fake poetry proves true,
Patients shine with health,
Society suffers lunacy,
Institution disperses,
Madness finds proportion.
Homemade Wine
The best thing about homemade wine,
Drinking it at the right time,
When the grape is in Madre Vino
And the moon in its libration;
When the chimes are bleeding
And barrels breathe into ullage,
The finish in the beginning—
The beginning in its prime,
The sunset of your labor
Steeped in field grape red–
Nights of happiest dreams,
Warmest tones, touch and taste;
When the body of the wine
Fills spirit to the rim, it is ageless;
When wine spirits the air
Like spring mornings, it is ageless;
When drinking from the barrel
Inspirits time with roundness, it is ageless.
The best thing about homemade wine,
Drinking it at the right time.
Pavlov’s People
Pavlov’s people eat the world
Bark like dogs
Trained conditional reflex
To salivate and attack
But who can blame them
We’re all Pavlov’s people
Watch us gather at the bell
Caesar
The pack turns on you
Temple of Concord (What Immigrants Bring to a Country)
I dreamt I saw the Temple of Concord
Outside a rural Canadian town.
Farmers stood round the temple
Wondering what to make of this…
Naturally the farmer was compensated
For the foreign structure on his land.
The temple, enclosed in clapboard,
A country church and farmers’ market.
But when I drive near that alien corn
I see the Temple of Concord glowing
Against the green, beautiful in snow,
Though no one else can seem to see it.
Snowglobe
The poems of the old century hold their magic. “Cemetery in Snow” by Xavier Villaurrutia is such a poem. You can think about the poem several ways but because the subject is so singular it is trapped in the glass of its making. Shake it and the letters will settle back in some insensible way, burying the cemetery just so. The poem was probably not so much a matter of writing as of polishing glass, clarifying silence, making each different letter fall the same way.
Pictures at an Excavation
Bright figures swim in a Roman bath
Sunk in shadows of an underworld
Neptune and seahorses mid ocean
A boy on a dolphin leaps into light
Mosaic land of impossible stone
Beings trapped in dimensionality
Beings detached from stone
Gods on the surface of a dream
Supine and recumbent statues
Extruded from swampland
Buried like mystery religion
And backward flowing skies
Tessellated spiral lines
Like nets between stars
Multitudinous motionlessness
Oceans of unweighted time
Clearing the silt of words
From the mirror of mind
Eroding the same earth
A mosaic of merchant civilization
Fish and sails wine and grain
Amphorae amphora repair
Open to the mouth of the Tiber
Fishhead man gulping the sea
RIP Leonard Cohen
Years ago I’d visit Irving Layton in Montreal. We had lively poetry discussions while eating peaches and drinking red wine. One afternoon Leonard Cohen called from Los Angeles. “I’m with a talented young poet,” Irving said– winking my way. I bristled and tried not to show it. I sat browsing a book of poetry. I don’t remember the book. I think it was Canadian poet Bliss Carman. I overheard vague comments about the transparency of time… meetings in Greece… wives… Irving laughed so heartily I knew they were great friends.
Montreal was magical from the first when complete strangers, these two guys from Bogota of all places, helped us move into our apartment not far from the Westmount Public Library– birthplace of Canadian poetry. One of the guys was a documentary filmmaker. We saw a film he directed about the death of beauty. That night they were angels come out of the endless night of wind and snow. Later in the week I saw Mordecai Richler at the library, though I did not want to disturb him. A week after that I befriended an old man in a cafe who turned out to be poet Louis Dudek. I haunted Mile End, trying to feel like Leonard Cohen. I soon met Layton and enjoyed the company of screenplay writer Bruno Ramirez. At the time Bruno was friends with American poet James Merrill. Through another friend I met an Australian composer. We ended up drinking ouzo all night with the staff at a Greek restaurant. He was brilliant on their upright piano and Orpheus when he sang. Just before dawn we shared a cab home. There were thousands of gulls in Westmount Park. I asked the Haitian cab driver to approach slowly but they all flew up like snow, like music, like light…
Ninety-one Snakes
Ninety-one snakes on the road,
That’s like a flag of scales at half-mast,
Like rivulets that begin to rot,
Like vines that bleed and fossil skeletons,
A reptile uprising crushed by a reptile army;
That’s like cold and hungry children,
Warmongers rising from the dead,
Rage in city and country;
That’s like something crawling,
Like violence shedding its flesh,
Like forked tongues and silence of angels;
That’s like watching nature die,
Gill-man rising from a toxic lagoon,
A piscine horror on a bridge;
Ninety-one snakes on the road,
That’s like the Godhead in snakes.
Salvatore Ala 