Neither complete reason or revelation
But falling in love again when we can’t help it
Ambient composite blue transparent to the stars
Between dawn and sunrise sunset and dusk
Constellations swirl in blue-ringed octopus spheres
Between cerulean and cobalt a painted sky
Something levels like the height of waters
Cityscapes hang in Krishna heavens
A mirror’s blue velvet tumbles to the floor
Night sways in the white sheers of a blue room
Unfinished wine drinks the rose of night
Music trickles the ether of afterglow
The blue hour ebbs from the earth’s shadow
We are strangers in the space of a window
Love
Young Love in Ancient Place
I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.
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.
The Study of Languages
My love is like the crescent moons of Arab calligraphy,
Like a language that sand erases.
She is also like the little word houses of China
Shining on their bamboo stilts
As the green rice flashes to the east.
Spanish is for the blood rose of her mouth,
French for the azure of her gaze,
Russian for her madness and passion.
Latin is for the mirror of her beauty.
Ancient Greek is our Olympus,
Our long climb to a mythical sublime.
If I spoke Aramaic I could tell you
Of the myrrh and frankincense of her flesh.
Sanskrit is for the mystic knowledge of her eyes,
Hieroglyphs are for the silence
With which she guides me to her living tomb.
She is like the inscription on a stone,
More obscure as it is revealed.
Salvatore Ala 