At last the church is open to the heavens,
Not since its consecration has a congregation
Been closers to a spirit maker.
Fall leaves fall through rafters
And gather at the altar stones.
Its ascension is part accession.
The night belongs to real estate.
The owner cannot attorn; and so,
It’s clear to us in one lifetime
The insufficiency of faith,
The shifting sands of substance,
The cloud over the title,
Structure amassed in rubble,
On this eighth day of creation
After the first seven have failed.
Poetry
The Botany of Words
A sentence is like a vine
That produces good red wine.
Phrases grow out of roots
And words have shoots
Flowering in the mind.
Words are epiphytes
With jungle overwrites
And the earth is rich and deep
With words that creep.
My hand blackens when I dig
Through a dictionary
Looking for a blood berry.
Deep down I suspect
We are all incorrect,
When in the compost
I find something amiss.
Can we save existence
If the words go extinct?
Authentic Zen Garden
Stuck behind a combine harvester on a county road, strangely I see one of those tiered pagoda rooftops you see in pictures of Japan. Above a cedar fence I see cherry trees in bloom. My mind does a double take. It looks idyllic. The sign reads: Authentic Zen Garden.
After the day I’ve had an hour of inner peace is exactly what I need. I pull into the driveway, but walking to the office door I begin to hear a man shouting in mixed English and Japanese. I hesitate at the door. The man is enraged, quite literally screaming into his phone. I know what to do when a Catholic is angry. What do you do when a Buddhist is losing it?
I back onto the road and drive off. The farther away from the Zen garden, the more at peace I begin to feel. Glancing up I am struck by the light and stillness of the clouds, like stones in the garden of the sky.
An Equal Return
We found a young snake on the road.
We found a young snake on the road.
It was November but felt like spring.
The month had shed its skin.
What shall we do with a serpent
When stars are the tail of the sun?
What shall we do with the earth
When we are beings of a dream?
We didn’t know where to find its den.
It swam from my hand like something Zen.
It’s a gift from the earth to catch a dream.
A gift to the earth to return the seed.
The Fig Tree
for my parents
In autumn they tie the bare branches into loops,
Then build a shelter with wood and tarps–
The tree is my father’s island, the home he never left,
Every leaf is a handshake with his past.
The tree is my mother’s island, the green dress of her youth—
Ripe purple fruit warm as the first kiss on her mouth.
All winter they fill baskets with shadows of a greener time.
They’ll carry in sleep the baskets to their island.
Strip Search
for Victor Hernández Cruz
Strip search because I was full of the drug love,
Strip search because my name is an eye-rhyme with Allah,
Strip search because of Mafia stereotypes,
Strip search because I was carpooling to Mexican Village,
Strip search because I carried a book of poetry,
Strip search because I was traveling to New Orleans,
Strip search because I loved a woman with two names,
Strip search because a black woman offered me a ride,
Strip search for desiring Belle Isle after midnight,
Strip search because I am not a Savior but a Salvatore,
Strip search for bleeding from hands and feet,
Strip search for driving naked and saving time,
Strip search for visiting the graves of my ancestors,
Strip search for the orange blossoms on my bride,
Strip search for the smoke of ablution and peace,
Strip search for defiance at the borders of freedom.
Iceland
Between being awake and awake
I found a lost feather by a remote lake.
Between restlessness and rest
Neither visitor nor guest.
Between dreaming and dreams
Icelandic streams.
Between too late and too soon
Drifting bodies in a blue lagoon.
I stared into a blank bay
In a sea trance between day and day.
The sun shone without substance
Like the image of thought.
Harvest Song
Many leaves in the schoolyard blowing.
Many children at recess playing.
The wind erased the blackboard,
The bell emptied the schoolyard.
Many leaves and many seasons
And wisdom with its myriad reasons.
Even if the lesson is erased
You’ll know, the learning’s not effaced.
Anthology
Flower of kisses
Luminous arc between lovers
Flower of God
Withering when I grasp it
Flower of blood
Coagulates violence
Flower of peace
Elsewhere a weed
Flower of starlight
In clusters
Flower of time
Blossoming space
Granada
When I picture my mother in her thirties in a red dress
Swooning to Mario Lanza’s Granada
On 78rpm, my memories sound
With forgotten revolutions per minute
Turning to roses and laughter and dance steps,
Turning to Europe in the vast sunset of war
And the static of questions childhood could not form,
As history ate through the grooves
With crackles and bomb blasts
And the beauty that cannot last, but does.
Swooning to Mario Lanza’s Granada
On 78rpm, my memories sound
With forgotten revolutions per minute
Turning to roses and laughter and dance steps,
Turning to Europe in the vast sunset of war
And the static of questions childhood could not form,
As history ate through the grooves
With crackles and bomb blasts
And the beauty that cannot last, but does.
Salvatore Ala 