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?
Poets
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.
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 