Overrun by imminent majesty

Last Year

We fled from fire as it descended from hungry
chaparral, summer already curing the oaken sky
as a skeletal stingsect took its place low in the
bones of the southern ecliptic, a crimson star
pulsing flamewise hardened by antarean armor,
its two releasers poised to flood the night with
sustain and persistence as we had not yet met.

We would come eleven months later when love
might well have forgotten us in its mad tumble of
beck and call as it saw to incite the blind prayers
offered by so many others. But the keen fire came,
devoured some, spared some, left us in a wake of
black smoke and incindered charms. Our house stood,
fierce against whatever the sky might counter with.



And the flames knew each of our names, crossed
them off without checking, those of us who were
not to be taken into its strictest confidences, those
of us who were to give everything to them without
complaint, without promise of purpose or safe passage.
It was the cruelest commencement of a season in recent
memory, one that would last well past then and now.

So we met—a poet and a quilter—pressed into stanzas
of seven lines each amid an economy that may or may
not work out either in literal or literary life. These are
things we send upcirrus in drafts of transmutated ash,
toward next year where we might stand to look back at
now and here we are, this way, fleeing from fire again
because to do so is to be overrun by imminent majesty.

Joseph Gallo
July 5, 2009

By the sextant of her hips

She Comes Out Of The Sea
For Marlene

She comes out of the sea, brinesalt and sweat,
tides wrapped about her in kelping bands that
snug her muscles from an hour of paddling.

She may have oared in from Papeete bearing
water from the basket of her broad shoulders,
stranged by the fruit of a smile you barely know.



So you watch her step from the sleek hull, her
form navigable by deliberate observation, pick
her out from the others by the sextant of her hips.

She trods sand negotiating new treaties with gravity,
unaware that your eyes confer Magellanic latitudes
you would cross an ocean to tenderly circumtrek.

This is the prodigal siren come ashore from her
home in the sea, to assuage all that want her for
her ways, for their own, for her tidal enchantment.

Joseph Gallo
June 18, 2009

Mouths that break and open

Turning Koi
For Marlene

We hold and sway together in the doorway, the Earth
counterbalancing each lilt and tilt, left and right. This
could be fragrant island rain or a white moth dusting in
through moonsheer panes of an early June, your breasts
stirring the fine hairs on my chest like turning koi as we
creak wood and kneejoints that have seen seasons
more spry than we have need to conjure or recount.

We are here, this way, now. Together is a point on a star
map that says You Are Here And Here And Here. The fluid
core of a planet emits liquid magnetism, surrounds us in
an iron knuckle that presses us closer together than
gravity alone can account for. So we stay that way and
sway, sway, slowly sway. These are the moments that
outlive us because they give purpose to the all of this.



Ghosts knock on other doors this night and leave us to
haunt ourselves with a sheetless incarnate knowledge.
And the world falls away like a bridal dress at the threshold
of consummation, a careless shoe kicked backward across
the floor to wedge beneath the armoire, the foot traded for
finned wings and nimble kisses, glass mouths that break and
open to all the possible courses they abandon safer water for.

Joseph Gallo
June 8, 2009

Deliverance into purified light

The Giving Of It All

Who talks about dishes and laundry? The brief
devotions spent in ceramic supplication, the
deep stacking of Lycra and cotton, the solemn
setting of prayerful airs to fume dry the cutlery.

How many times have we bowed before delicate
rinse cycles that promise deliverance into purified
light, given our small time to in the attending of
what seeks to present us favorably to the world?



But who talks of these things? Slaves of fallen
empires sought rarefied earths to scour clean
the table settings of their masters, picked at
leavings when gongs were struck to clear away.

We sail out over edges of lost worlds in the
vesseling of protection and nutrient, task our-
selves in the enterprise of continuance, each
day a new cheating of what would reclaim us.

Run water with reverence. Scrub plates with
veneration. Fold linen with loving adoration.
These are the things that bring us day by day
into what we surrender in the giving of it all.

Joseph Gallo
May 29, 2009

An overcrowded table of strangers

The Music Room

In a single life, we change rooms so many times.
Enter and leave, pass through, refuse to enter,
refuse to leave. Each time we believe it won’t
follow us and each time it does. We never know
this until we arrive at the last room we will ever
enter which is also the last room we ever leave.

We lie swathed in the sticky veil of a million laments.
Regret sits on the nightstand like a glass of white
wine we knock over again and again, apologizing
each time as if we were an unwelcome guest at an
overcrowded table of strangers and passersby. How
long has this faint music been playing, we wonder.



As breathing is the grand baton that conducts the
sweeping movements of a life, so is the ceasing
of it the last beat that cues a threnody of stillness.
Even absence holds music. And so we listen for it,
pace the windows to see if it disturbs the nearest
palm or waves back from a green flush of frond.

In one movement, we score so many sonatas.
Bow and blow, finger and finesse, pause and hold,
cease and rest. Each time we believe it is the most
perfect music we have ever heard and each time
we are right and wrong. Faintly, it returns again.
We knock over the glass; enter the room and leave.

Joseph Gallo
May 24, 2009

The way we came in

We Enter This World

wings up and all the doors
removed from their hinges.
No one asks how we got
such sturdy legs even as
cane futures tick upward.

The things we know harden
and glaze as the will to
discover what worries the
curtain softens to stain
as bath suds. Hips clack
with the hitch in our walk
as the prosthetic soul we
claim as our own will not
survive another washing.



We enter this world to gain
and lose everything, just
as every other thing does.
The harried crow will not
feast on robin’s eggs this
morning as we will later
lie, our burdens laid out
on the pillow beside us,
when the sun runs nails-
out down a hurt wall of
dusk unable to hang on
one moment longer.

Just once to arrive without
the rain asking anything of
us. To leave a print of sand
that might run off back to
an old sea that left it im-
precise so long ago, its wet
window vexed and ajar,
exactly the way we came in.

Joseph Gallo
May 14, 2009

Pollinated margins of endearing dusk

May Rain
For Jan

What better sound is there than the scent of rain on wood?
May’s green-grey sky, wobbly as a gathering colt, freshens to
drop its tearcatcher in a dry field as quail hide and let sigh.
Who among us cannot remember uncounted days like these?

This is an old dance, made of steps that tilted their turns
long before days had names and names had tongues to
tell of them. If we could walk side by side, you might say
this is the season that never considers it prudent to stop.



Bees charge their bands by pulse and flock, circle their
singular initials in the midpetals, leave trace and taste
to speak hosannas for the hive, press the sun to settle
undue accounts in pollinated margins of endearing dusk.

If we could sit side by side, I might say nothing at all and
brush my hand across the lattice of your bare shoulders,
place kisses there to simmer saltless on sungold skin, caress
and seal in what comes to pass long before we wish it to.

Joseph Gallo
May 1, 2009