Thankful for autumnal insights,
They open nature’s windows and doors
And like leaves, invite themselves in,
And even blow across our floors.
Thankful even for the fruit that falls
And for the absence in the distance.
I know springtime by its perfect recall
And fear no evil now or in nonexistence.
Photo by Brigitte Ala
RIP to my old friend,
Too many stories to attend,
Late night discussions,
Love life repercussions,
Readings and road trips
And memorable quips,
Surviving a fire bombing,
Living for poeticizing,
Other wild and surreal times,
A few misdemeanor crimes,
Hilarity and sadness,
A touch of divine madness
That defies death,
Friendship its frozen breath.
Shameful to carve a falcon in granite,
To cage swallows in starless stone,
To mummify crocodile and Nile perch
And bury them in the desert, sacrilege,
To imprison lions in mineral,
Predators trapped in pictographs,
Prey powerless to escape pursuit.
The cobra has no spit in sandstone,
The bee has neither sting nor honey,
The sacred ibis sinks into sediment
And vultures weigh a ton a piece.
Scavengers face their own erosion.
Baboons gaze at stonework sunrises.
Sparrows eat the last grains of light.
Figures of famine begin to fracture.
Cartoons of war crack at the core.
All this weighs humankind’s entelechy
Against the weight of a feather.
I won’t know if I’m awake or dreaming.
I’ll be carried by water
A long way out into the open.
I’ll feel what the birds feel
When they plunge into the cold.
My bones will never be addressed again,
My ashes will cease all communication
With faith or doubt.
A star will alight on a leaf.
I’ll be at the birth of time,
The beginning of music.
The natal universe will embody me.
When a watch stops on a book
Something has been overlooked.
The car battery gone dead
Means you can never get ahead.
A dull ache in your knee
Means gravity is not for free.
A button falling off a shirt
With others is in concert.
A name you have spoken
Returns from time unbroken.
The sequence of the numbers
Repeat the numbers of the sequence.
Existence is creation’s coincidence
And being’s kiss from a dream’s abyss.
A decade of teeth eating hearts,
You can feel vileness spewing,
Like being unbaptized into hate
By aspersoriums of acidic waters,
By words used as weapons,
The determined dissimulation
Of propaganda into vox populi,
Garbled garbage recycled
As word meat for the ravenous.
Can’t you hear the gibbering
Of the ape stuck in the man?
Can’t you hear the road rage
In the cataclysms to occur?
Teeth eating hearts, eating money,
Eating the flesh of the earth…
All of us, enemies of each other
And enemy of one’s own self
In the language wherein we’re born.
Here the reeds breathe us in and out
Like the green lungs of a Godhead whale
And on the waters the wind lays down
Its face like the imprint of transience.
The boardwalk steps under our steps
On its way to where we’re going,
Like the marsh’s rolling, nudges the root
That keeps the stillness flowing.
Where every step goes into nowhere
But observation’s proximity to nature,
The waters reflect us, the reeds open,
We’re comprehended by inclusion.
Rinat Dasayev
Dasayev’s save against Scotland
Off a glancing goal-bound header
In the 1982 World Cup
Was like a release in the fabric of space
And a save I now save, in tribute.
Gordon Banks
How do you save the shadow
Of a bouncing ball?
Raise your hand up to God.
How do you save a moment in time?
You save it forever.
Thomas N’Kono
Le chat noir had to save his team
While saving his race
In Europe’s arenas of racism.
He gave hope that hate could end
A goal worth saving.
Passing a barbershop I see my father.
He’s reading his newspaper, as he often did.
He looks trapped by the mirrors
In which he worked, like a living specter.
I ask for a haircut and shave
But my father doesn’t recognize me.
I’ve grown too old to be his son.
As he cuts my hair, I feel the same touch
And his same skill with a razor.
We talk about sports, as we always could.
After the haircut I pay and leave.
I don’t wake the barber from his dream
Or myself, from my own.
Since childhood I’ve been unraveling
The spools in nonna’s sewing box
Needles for the handiwork of the moon
Pins for the sky against the sky
Thimbles for the chalice of the invisible
Measuring tapes for night’s endless garment
Scissors for the unseeming of space
Scraps for the patchwork of time
The white thread from the black
And the blue and white threads
She passed through the eye of a needle
Unspooling her own life in shadow
Salvatore Ala 