One day I’ll know how to write a poem
Which my own family will love,
In which they might pity their own blood
And feel kinship with one of their strange.
If I can accomplish that, who knows?
The world could be next.
Uncategorized
Easter Prayer
Maybe this stillness won’t precede a storm
But open like a door to a wider blue.
Maybe these winds will flatten the curve
And rain sanitize the land.
For all my friends, this hopeful prayer,
From the heart of one to the heart of all and back again.
Cardinal Coloring Book
Though it prefers the tallest branch from which to sing and be seen, and where it is truly cardinal red, these birds can paint the air anywhere. They’re O’Keeffe red, Gorky red, Chagall red… their beaks are dipped in paint. The magic feathers of the cardinal change tone from tree to tree, depending on foliage and light. In flight, they’re flashing red. In shadow, they’re shadow red or cosmos red. Among red leaves or berries, they dye themselves with the light around them. Even their song is red, and so bright you can easily follow the sound to the source. Now that you know you can paint with a bird, open your canvas and fly.
Fate Surmounted by Scorn
So inescapable, escape makes you a prisoner.
So intractable, even drugs and drink
Harden its position.
Such finality, even giving it a God
Is an afterthought to nothing.
Fate’s cruelest trick is not to end life
But to people it with ghosts.
Unfinished River Walk
When the water was low
I walked the riverbed
Down the spine of a fish
Cool airflow guiding me
Over river rock islands
King of a summer river
With crown of sunlight
My thoughts drifting
Into rivers of other days
The faces of people I love
Swam through my mind
Like reflections in fluidity
Born of the river now
Confluent with the current
The scales of my eyes dropped
My childhood returned
Flowed out beyond me
Steeping me in wonder
Laying my feet upon the water
Fish drifted above sandbars
Towing their shadows
Water snakes like wavelets
Were seamlessly absorbed
Mirages of inverted gardens
Whose leaves I touched
In the web of two realms
From the grade of the land
I was sunset bound
Around a deep-banked eddy
Death swirled like branches
And I thought of giving up
Until the river widened
Into meadowland without margins
River grasses swaying
With my own thoughts
In some idyllic weightless
Wetland of buoyancy
And stillness all around
Before a kingfisher pierced
The surface of silence
And the current quickened
Picked up its shallow river
Between steeper banks
And spilled down heavenward
I tracked the river forest
And the sunset took me in
As though I’d reached the end
Of the river in myself
And from where I’d begun
The river was returning
The Day All the Grownups Cried
After my grandparents died their house was rented to people who skipped on the rent and soiled the house in every way possible. That day, when my mom and dad and uncles and aunts opened the door, they were all crying. Even then, a boy, I understood somehow all our memories had been desecrated, and I cried, seeing them cry. We burned everything that day. The fire blazed into the night. The house was stripped. My grandparents had a small, well kept, farmhouse with a lush piece of property complete with gardens, grape arbors and fruit trees. Sometimes late at night a plum would drop from a plum tree and plop into a rain barrel, like a clock that measured endless time, for me now, in teardrops.
On the Road to Poetry
An hour lost is three in subconscious evolving.
Therefore, be on the road to poetry.
It’s a green road that seeds the shadows.
It’s woodlots and meadows
Pronounce the first syllables of music.
It’s abandoned farmhouses
That enter the house of your mind,
The crossroads that make you an artist.
Therefore, be on the road to poetry.
Drive the river road, flooding time.
Eventually the fences break down.
A landscape become its own poem.
Having memorized everything you saw,
A line writes itself, and lives on the wind.
How will the Lonely Die
And how will the lonely die
And those who are afraid
And those who break the law
And those sick among strangers
And those who come out of their houses
And those who die in their homes
And those on the street
Those who rely on others
And how will the lonely die
How will the distressed die
How will those praying die
With their guardian angels sick
How will the anxious die
How will the impoverished die
How will the hopeless die
How will freedom die
More Translations from the Sicilian of Hugo Falcundus
“These African winds cover everything in gold dust. At the same time they open blue clearings, domes, and other dream forms of the Sicilian landscape.”
“Control is maintained with the acquiescence of the people.”
“The sound of the sea doesn’t know the difference between palace windows and gypsy tents.”
“What I love most about abandoned fountains is how the ferns imprint the water
with their presence.”
“I hate the monks and their catacombs.”
“How loudly deceit whispers.”
The King is impressed with himself so often, he could be his own jester.”
“What will remain of Italy? The Kingdom of Sicily.”
“One certain way to know an enemy is to invite conversation.”
Pandemic 2020
Seems everyone is paranoid,
With more and more cases of Covid
Appearing in the news
Like worry with a fuse.
After all the panic buying
Hoarders must be inside dying,
Grave as any virus
Fear replicates like a virus.
But with the elderly at risk
Won’t wisdom grow sick?
And with our sick in danger
Mercy show itself a stranger?
Enumeration can create the feel
That anything is hyperreal.
You couldn’t proclaim a pandemic
Were not death endemic.
Something other than disease
Blows in forests of sick trees.
When these clouds part
Will the sun be at its start?
