In this infinite minute

In these days of charity and heartfire, of family and loneliness, in the widening aftermath of tragedies both natural and national, the new year has arrived. It is 2005. Inconceivable. It’s hard to watch Oregon snow sifting quietly from the sky while thinking of the magnitude of the recent loss of human life in Southeast Asia.

As I let the flakes settle and melt on my face, I am shrouded in images of ashfall at Bergen-Belsen, the crematoria ruthlessly elementalizing countless incinerated souls; caught in a time warp of silent fallout at Hiroshima & Nagasaki; imagining what horror fell from the sky 65 million-years ago when a dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into the Earth at Chixalub ejecting a deathly fume of dust and flame that extinguished the sun and nearly all life on our azure blue globe.

But this is snow, only snow. And, aside from glaciers that dream in the deep meditations of their icebound sleep, it remembers nothing.



After a quiet, cuddlesome New Year’s Eve at home with Celestina, savoring her home-made tetrazzini and Italian pane d’olio oliva, watching the French film, Amelie, talking and laughing about a gazillion things, I spent the late afternoon of this first day alone with Bogart & Bergman, sobbing for their heart-rending love of sacrifice and circumstance in Casablanca. I wept like a partisan whose need to fight has been victoriously removed. There’s something about these themes that get to me more now than ever before. Ever since I fell in love with Nicole.

I thought about our farewell in Switzerland, at the Luzern Bahnhof the morning of March 10, 2003, recollecting every wrenching detail: the image of us hugging goodbye, crying and kissing each other that cold, rainy morning as I waited to board the train that would take me to Zurich for my flight home.

The structure of the memory goes like this: We are both in the doorway of the coach, holding and embracing one another, saying our thank-yous and looking into one another’s souls, which swim just below the teary surface of our reddened eyes, trying to be brave and unblubbering. Then, as our fingers slide slowly across the terrain of our last touch, I watch her walk out of the standing coach and onto the busy landing barely moments before the train is scheduled to pull out.

I bend slightly forward to follow her through the passenger windows as she moves sideways and backwards, our eyes locked on each other, both of us waving and blowing our final kisses through the air. And as I think to myself that these are the last moments my eyes will behold her until late summer, trying to savor the quickly vanishing point in time, an eternal minute passes.

In this infinite minute, as I resign myself to settle into the heart pain I must carry all the way home, Nicole suddenly reappears in the doorway to kiss and hug me just once more before the train at last departs. That image always gets me. It was the most romantic moment of my life. And there’ve been many with Nicole.

Thus, the following poem for her, as a testament to romantics everywhere forever sealed in the tender histories of their time together as lovers. Such a grand thing, Love. No pain is more beautiful.

This Awesome Burden Of Knowing

Somehow,
the dear
recollections
I have

of you
bring such worry
to my brow.
For that

is where
fear
is barrowed
into the deep

places
I may never
again
hold you,

but
there.

Joseph Gallo
July 13, 2004