They could not decide what to take first,
So they took everything.
They took everything and promised to return,
So the others took the nothing
They had left and hid it away.
They had no trouble hiding it.
Weeks later they returned
Demanding the nothing they left behind.
The others refused, they refused,
Claiming nothing was all they had.
So they went away to plan.
They sent their scouts
To search for the nothing.
They searched all morning.
They peered into forests.
They overturned rocks.
They parted the water
But always found something.
Determined to find nothing
They said to surrender nothing
Or be slaughtered,
But the others refused
And prepared for battle.
So the battle lasted years.
They forgot about nothing
And kept killing over nothing.
Bodies burned into nothing.
Nothing was left behind.
Legend has it, nothing was never found.
To this day there is still nothing.
Uncategorized
The Counterweight
If you weigh the stars in the balance
Glaciers are nurseries of the stars.
They are weighbridges to the borealis,
Ice roads into isolated communities.
They’re hydroelectric power plants,
Evolutionary clocks, mammoth museums,
Icebox mountains of organic matter.
Meltwaters surge from the summits
Enlivening salmon in summer streams,
Nourishing the valley with snowmelt.
Glaciers are a kind of counterweight
To their own absence tipping the scale.
Once gone, what could replace glaciers
That we’d not burn in water/drown in fire.
Rosa Ala Arrives at Ellis Island, 1903
Nothing but roses,
Nothing but kisses of red wine and roses
For a distant relative on a ship’s Manifest.
We’ll meet at the port when I depart.
A rose tattoo for your soul,
Bouquets of foaming waves.
Rose per Rosa, o comprato stasera…
Roses covering the deck of the Sicilian Prince
And roses in America.
Maria Juana
Maria Juana,
With you I strum a green guitar.
Maria Juana,
With you I know the sound of laughter.
Maria Juana,
With you I celebrate friendship.
Maria Juana,
With you I know the body is smoke.
Maria Juana,
With you I breathe another air.
Maria Juana,
With you I dance to naked music.
Maria Juana,
With you I live a waking dream.
Maria Juana,
With you there is no lying.
Maria Juana,
With you I raise children of peace.
Maria Juana,
With you I count the sands and stars.
Maria Juana,
With you I am everywhere at once.
Maria Juana,
With you I love beyond the grave.
Maria Juana,
With you I grasp all things.
Maria Juana,
With you I am born again.
Maria Juana,
With you I weave this ancient song.
Maria Juana,
With you I am entwined.
Crow Feather Totem III
My daughter sees a hawk feather on the road.
Just as I pick it up the wind picks up the face of the leaves.
Just as I raise it to the air the trees begin sharing ancestral words.
Just as I pass it to my daughter she’s falling from the upper world.
Just as she takes it from my hand I am falling.
Just as she offers it back to her father she is falling.
Such things are found on the road joining young and old.
Such things happen on the spirit road.
Shadow Line
At the shadow line the storm’s grip is loosed,
Between a sea of light and a sea of darkness
It is beautiful and hallowed on both sides.
Rain falls from the sun and clouds glow.
Winds blow in place and yet we are moving
As though at the equinox of eternity.
At the shadow line is the peace of mountains.
At the shadow line it is the birthday of forever,
It is the anniversary of fire and night,
Sparks fly from the anvil
But the hammer sounds in the distance.
Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery
Montreal
Though I walk amid myriad gravestones,
The summer air is soft, trees cast full shadows,
And the grass ripples from grave to grave.
When a cloud passes, the shadows deepen.
I see Emile Nelligan, sixteen years old,
Brooding because he has fallen in love
With poetry and beauty. A breeze blows through him.
I think of Albert Lozeau, the invalid poet,
At the cold window of his solitary room;
And of the restless young Sylvain Garneau,
Gazing at the sky from his own grave;
And of how lucky I am to be thirty-two,
Hearing voices in the summer wind.
Ah, la belle vie, la belle vie… the dead are saying.
Homage to Pablo Neruda
Proprietor of a traveling bazaar
Of potent elixirs strained from jungles,
Vials in which rivers rage, flasks of cloud,
The granite voices of Macchu Picchu;
And impure things: wheel ruts, blood and semen,
The severed heads of dictators,
Letters from kings, propaganda;
An earthflow of love poems; and elemental things:
Lemons, artichokes, melons and salt;
Also magic potions, locks of hair,
Moonlight fossilized in stone, emeralds
From the mines of Columbia; snake skins,
Ports of call, arrivals, departures…
Lastly, Chile, like a child’s model,
Raised by the whale spine of the Andes,
With its copper-colored people,
Their stone flute music of mountain mist,
Their poverty and dignity…
Your human cry of the human market.
Mother Son Song
Tell me a story mother
All the hospital windows
Are black with snow
Tell me a story mother
Nurses are gathering fire
Doctors are measuring wire
Tell me a story mother
When does our care
For what is ours wear
Tell me a story mother
What we lose in time
We receive in kind
Tell me a story mother
Memory is a medicine
Exceeding what has been
Tell me a story mother
Soil is buried in soil
And grief in toil
Tell me a story woman
Death is the meaning
Of mother in my flesh
Tell me a story mother
The sick are waking
It is night and it is morning
Two Moon Matching Set
1
Moon in Tiffany setting with gypsy lights
And girdle of gold opalescence,
But rarely like this, cupped in cloud-stone,
Out of dark velvet night
This earthshine of all beauty;
Altered stone, at the angle of incidence,
Basalt glazed and ringed in space
With a lustre priceless and enduring,
Because in minimum of magnitude
All star-points gleam alike,
And time is richer by one jeweled night.
2
Shadows at full moon are deeper than meanings.
They embody fullness, erase space,
Build mass and edifice in mind and place.
The mystery behind history, opposing peripheries,
These silhouettes of branches and trees,
A phantom nursery, lunar forest,
Buried trees swimming up from the subsoil
As though through a lake of black glass.
Earth in earth, universe in universe,
Branches rupturing the stars
And we, fortunate to walk among them.
Salvatore Ala 