You who reason and speak
Speak for us who have no names and no names.
You who come and go
Walk among wheelchairs in random space.
You who are alone
Open these doors to see who is alone and alone.
You who are lost
Find yourself among the lost who are lost.
You who are jealous
Look at what men owning nothing own.
You who hate
Imagine hatred when temperament is all tenderness.
You who are in pain
Ponder this painless abstraction.
You who have God
Consider a God of global amnesia.
You who are searching
Exit the mind and it is still mind and you are saved.
Music Mountain
for Alan Blind Owl Wilson
I’m going up to music mountain
Where all my friends have gone,
Where the air is pine-scented
And you’re high all the time.
They say the mountain is tuneful,
You can hear the fire of the sun,
And at night the humming stars
And beyond them, God’s blues harp.
Another Night at the Opera
At the sickbed of romance
The famous tenor split his pants,
The bodice of the soprano burst,
Letting air out of her aria first…
Tonight seven cell phones,
Twelve bleepers, sixteen coughs,
Forty yawns and eleven sneezes,
Accompanied by gassy breezes,
Joined the hissing, boos and jeers
Amid the music of the spheres.
When the mezzo-soprano began to trill,
Half the mezzanine took ill;
And the basso singing solo
Fell flat on his profondo.
Tonight the chorus was in chaos
When the andante lost its pathos
And the allegro lagged along
Far behind both act and song.
Even the conductor was confused
When the composer left bemused,
And the librettist wrote a letter:
“The opera could not be better—
Save for the flautist blowing Rigoletto,
Found toying with his piccoletto.”
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.
Journey of Life
You want balance, but this abandoned bicycle
In Amsterdam borders on paralysis.
It is Chaplin pretending to be the Fuhrer.
It is whoever survives, whoever escapes…
It is a flower cart that flowers in the same spot.
It is modern art, the unraveling of modes,
Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” reconstituted,
A bicycle trellis in European horticulture,
An instrument for the music of rarest days.
Someone left this bicycle and didn’t return.
Someone locked this bicycle here and died,
Or moved, or moved away and died,
Or became a novelist, like Michel Houellebecq.
It’s a sacrificial lamb, a contract with loopholes,
A love letter from the bicycle crazes.
The wheels of the sky ripen among vines.
The pedals are powered by the sun,
And with wind, deep-rooted to the spot,
The lock is slowly unlocking, like space.
Sunwise
for my father
Leaving home, sunflower fields on the right.
Returning home, sunflower fields on the left.
How else can one explain the difference
Between a road in space and a road in time?
Terrace Garden, Lampedusa House
Tigris or Babylon or well-watered Eden,
Flowers tumbled over balustrades,
Leopard lilies sprang to the pads of their feet,
Hibiscus blossoms flared in damp sea air,
Miniature lemons orbit a space
In perception for the beauty of the singular
And the shadows of a brightening dusk.
From this terrace you can study the stars,
You can contemplate a meaning
In the shifting mirror of night’s tides.
The conjunction of the constellations
Culminates in a double star of vision:
Everything that changes stays the same—
The flower of the heavens has but one eye.
Natural History
We are bone, love, we are earth,
Our breathing slows and we are stone.
We are flesh, love, we are spirit,
Our eyes close and we are mineral.
We are burial places, love, we are fire,
When we kiss the ice ages recede.
We are half lives, love, missing links,
When we touch the earth grows fecund.
Nobel Anecdotes
Seamus Heaney
After his reading I asked the great Irish poet if he admired Rilke. I was young and the question was sincere if perhaps naive. Heaney’s eyes caught fire. “Ah, lad, there’s lots of wonder there,” he said and put his arm round my shoulder. In an auditorium full of his admirers he talked to me for a good ten minutes about the wonders of Rilke. Heaney’s own wonder was infectious. Someone said it was liquor. Someone else said it was a leprechaun. Whatever. A light leapt into me and it burns with gratitude.
Czeslaw Milosz
At a Czeslaw Milosz reading I counted more than a dozen priests. It was strange, almost cultish. They all had books to be signed by the famed poet contemporary of Pope John Paul II. The reading was splendid; Milosz, spellbinding. After the reading I joined in line hoping to have a book signed by the Nobel Laureate. Milosz, old and sick, had returned to his aisle seat. The procession inched forward. When it was my turn I handed Milosz a copy of his collection “Provinces.” He glanced up but remained in profile, like a priest in Confessional. I wanted to make my confession– the concession of a minor poet. Telepathically I did and he understood it all. Ego te absolvo. I was free.
Firebird Sunset
That’s the Phoenix! That’s the myth!
That’s what the storybooks
Have been trying to tell me. The firebird
Nests in the searing winds of time.
It migrates to the forests of the sun.
It lives in the drop of fire behind the eyes
And perches on the volcano in the ribs.
You’ll know the firebird by its ashes,
By how the sunset beats its wings
And flames out like a cosmic fire.
Better to start living , to start loving,
Better to be consumed with joy
Than live another day without rebirth,
Without music that catches fire
Or words that cast a burning shadow.
Salvatore Ala 