Along forest paths
between city streets
among people
how often I’ve changed places
with empty spaces
diving into shadows
to swim in the backs of my eyes
something told me
they were the cracks
in which death resides
the places
in which truth hides
and I tried to leave a piece
of my dreams in each
for those who come after
How do you think about a poem
when over a hundred little girls
have just been killed in an air raid
how can one say a butterfly
is not a demon born of fire
how can you say flowers
are not noxious faces in the dark
a poem nothing but intangible ego
or that the human race
is nothing but a monstrous face
like a coin without value
I’ve pondered this before
but today it’s crushing me
The days carry heavy spirits,
Evil airs float over the land.
Why today should I find
A feather from the first sky.
Why today this immaculate thing
Like the infant origin of a cloud,
To offer me the lightness of this moment
For having kept my own mind.
for Roger
The used bookshop’s cat has died
Exactly where the dust of time decides.
Alfred sat among the books in silence
Like the living presence of the past tense.
Always in tuxedo, he was mysterious
As Max Beckmann, and as serious.
A collector of voices and browsing faces
He was his own book of thoughtful places.
Goodbye, sweet tiger of the stacks.
Life is fiction and books are cats.
Not that the place changes,
but nature shifts within it,
light altering itself,
reflections rising from the riverbed,
like the Seine flowing in a dream.
And you must be still and fluid too,
like the water on which you float,
detached, adrift,
aware of the necessity
of creating as you go.
The yellow haze of autumn
falls across the field.
All the grass tips are touched
with dabs of Paris green.
Together in the wind
they are the brushstrokes
for this canvas of a golden hour
and spill over the horizon
like the harvest of tomorrow.
What’s barbershop banter without some politics
But the old customer with early onset dementia
Kept changing the subject and we played along
Swept up in the confusion of his memory
And for a short time gas prices were way down
Building was booming
Children played in the streets without fear
People respected one another
And humankind had just landed on the moon
Between water and light,
stillness and waves,
along the fringes of the water,
tracing the line of my origins
to the origins of the end.
I pick up a shell, a feather,
and look out over the lake.
For a moment I’m at the edge,
a living fossil,
my reflection on water
my shadow on land.
By now, I’d expect to be buried
in sleepless nights.
For me the slightest thing
keeps me from sleep—food,
a shift in temperature,
of course, worry and anxiety.
I rise to a grey window
to see what’s really always there,
the vigilance of nature
stirring through the trees.
Then I think
sleep is the anomaly,
what we do dawn to dusk,
live a waking dream,
while only death,
like nature,
is wakeful and alive.
Salvatore Ala 