At a party a disgruntled poet lashed out at me. A month earlier he asked me to read his voluminous collection of chess poems. All chess poems. I was polite. I praised. I suggested he start sharing his poems, self-publish, get them out there– sharing your poems is a good way of growing as an artist. That didn’t prove to be praise enough. At the party he went on the attack. “And what do you do? Share poems with crazy people on Facebook!” I had never thought of my friends as such. Maybe I was crazy. I looked at him and thought— “how crazy are you.”
Love in the Catacombs
Alone with her among mummies
Pegged to walls in period clothes,
Gruesome as their living counterparts
Must have seemed to lovers then,
Soon enough each other we touch,
Among skull and bone mosaics
And friars spying round corners
With devils riding their backs,
We nick a moment of passion
From damned eternity in this crypt.
At the start of voices we must stop.
At the possibility of prosecution
We heed a prudency of practical sense.
The monks can have memento mori,
Their truth has vulgar demands.
We climb out of the underworld
And wash our feet in an ancient river,
Forgetting darkness and silence
For the light and traffic of life,
For our bed and room
With its wide windows on the sea.
When we wake we discover
Love shining into darkness like the sun.
Francesca
Francesca and Francesca and Francesca
All the Francescas in my life are beautiful
Are stubborn and fierce and free
All are made out of the clay
God whispered with three syllables
Santa Rosalia
Monte Pellegrino in sea fog.
The streets of the city in shrouds.
Fierce grief and black wings
From hidden balconies.
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
A village girl has died!
Santa Rosalia! A girl like you!
She dreamt of black grapes.
She heard the howl of a sick dog.
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
Giuseppina has died!
They are washing her feet.
She wears a coral necklace
And a red ribbon in her hair.
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
The guests are throwing corn
And carrying trays of food.
Giuseppina! Who is waiting
For you in the casa nuova?
Candles by the bed,
Serenading from the street.
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
The almonds are bitter
In the mouth of the groom.
He heard the bell and the clock
Of the church chime together
And a voice whispered: “It is she.”
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
The groom has gone to the mountains
With a torch of orange blossoms.
He cannot mourn.
He has gone to the mountain.
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
The mother of the bride
Is tearing out her hair.
Giuseppina is sleeping.
They have fed her honey
But she will not awaken.
They have brought her lilies;
She will not awaken.
Santa Rosalia! Santuzza!
A girl from the village has died!
Madame Butterfly
In my rendering of Madame Butterfly
There is no heartbreak and suicide.
Through panel rooms the sound of waves.
On a silk screen, the blue moonlight.
One gust of wind and it is spring.
Butterfly wings flutter on bronze,
The temple bells are ringing,
Flower and song flow into one.
No gods appear in the libretto.
No tear drop moistens a sleeve,
No ceremonial dagger falls to the floor,
No shadow feast will be served.
All night the nightingale floor is singing.
My Life in Opera
Growing up in a house of pain,
You sacrifice everything for love.
Like the time my uncle tore open his shirt
And begged his brothers
To let him return to the love
He left in Buenos Aires,
Like the time my mother
Was scratching at her eyes,
Like the time my father both raged and wept.
Days were scenes without direction.
One day a cousin would stab herself
Or an aunt jump from a tower.
I didn’t know what was real;
But what passionate singing I heard,
Tenors, sopranos, baritones–
All around me in full voice;
And there I was, in love with Tosca,
Condemned to death,
And just twelve years old.
The Uncanny
The composition by Koshkin
On The Fall of the House of Usher,
Was tonight the most haunting music
The guitarist performed;
Though it wasn’t the wild ringing of dissonant chords,
But the blue flash of lightning
At the window of the recital hall,
Which for a second
Made the guitarist look like a dead man
Picking a bone guitar.
Sun Halo on the Ides of March, 2008
Was is it an allegory of divine providence?
Or error of reification? At best, an appeal to probability.
It would take Plutarch and Shakespeare
Together to create so parallel a stage,
A theater with as many clouds and beams,
A shoreline for such drama and articulation,
Everything convergent on our arrival,
The return of art to life from art in life,
Doomed ice on shattered waters,
The vivid sun halo and vast light,
Sun dogs and rainbow zenith arcs,
It obscured both history and tragedy.
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.
Grandmother
Quieter than the quietest of quiet things,
My grandmother was a whisper.
We shared a bedroom for five years
When grandfather died and I was a boy.
Quieter than the quietest of quiet things,
A hand smoothing out a sheet, a breath,
Is yet too loud for how she woke
While I was sleeping, then never woke again.
Salvatore Ala 