In a mountaintop cathedral
The white candles are bleeding
The red candles are weeping
Pilgrims arrive from all parts
To experience the miraculous
Yet none see the light
Though it burns before their eyes
Poetry
Gabriela Andersen-Schiess
At the 1984 Summer Olympics
in Los Angeles, a marathon miracle occurred,
a marvel of distance and persistence,
struggling, disoriented, vulnerable,
Gabriela Andersen-Schiess
did not win gold, but won the stadium,
as witnesses to loss and triumph,
their hearts breaking and rising together,
joined in the same Mass
of human frailty and fortitude,
seeing the spirit, naked and grotesque,
her limbs cramping and contorting,
a puppet on its last fraying string—
the body on its own crutches;
dying, and refusing death.
The Finish Line our own beginning.
The Saturation of Eternity
Red like the sun bleeding
Green like leaves born of nothingness
Blue like the inside of light
Spilling over the sky
And yellow
Doomed by black to shine with rot
And black
Like a massacre of accountants
And white
Like its own crucifix on a vast wall
Sibling Tax
When my brother died
our family resemblance
was sanguine and transmittal,
costing me more than I knew.
Awake or Dreaming
I won’t know if I’m awake or dreaming.
I’ll be carried by water
A long way out into the open.
I’ll feel what the birds feel
When they plunge into the cold.
My bones will never be addressed again,
My ashes will cease all communication
With faith or doubt.
A star will alight on a leaf.
I’ll be at the birth of time,
The beginning of music.
The natal universe will embody me.
Screaming Winds
The earth is screaming in the wind
Like California fires,
Screaming across continents
Like the sun screaming over the horizon,
Like the future is ablaze,
Like the beginning of the end.
The earth is screaming in the wind
Like California fires.
Poetry and Sleep
In a dream her husband appears
Younger than the day they met.
In a dream he touches his wife
With wordless love in his heart.
In dreams, their child is laughing,
And they’re laughing at their child
And a green park has no horizon.
We believe dreams in doubt of doubt
And don’t live with our losses
But live remainders of dreams
Like we live with moonlight
And traces of distant wind
And sunrise on ashen skin,
Rivers moving deep within.
In a dream his mother sat mutely
Mending the boundaries of his life.
In a dream her brother was a child
And she was mother to her brother.
In a dream, dear friends together,
At first in a familiar backyard;
Later, in an unknown city,
Itself dreaming a collective,
Building inescapable routes.
In dreams, each other, mingled
Of the magic materials of night,
Who vanish utterly into sleeping day
And unremembered poems,
Whomever, whatever we do.
Salvatore’s Hell
My insomnia is getting absurd. It is purely literary. I lay in bed reciting lines of poetry from Keats, Shelley, Donne, Wordsworth, Hart Crane: “Insistently through sleep– a tide of voices– They meet you listening midway in your dream…” Now I know those lines by Crane are literal. My insomnia is like a poem being written in black space. It is like a poem that wants to be translated into light. It is like a feeling that grips my intestines with linked verses and won’t let go.
Please Do Not Disturb
I am reading Larry Levis
With so few motel rooms
On the road to consolation.
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.
Salvatore Ala 