Two poems for my father

Hole In Illinois

There's a hole in Illinois,
a man crouched down
looking into it,

looking for the lost bones of Lincoln,
looking for the seam of the world,
looking for the faint pulse of the broken heartland,

looking for letters never sent
from lovers never consumed by love's consent,
looking for the lost lenses of his early eyes,

looking for the secretnesses of all things,
for everything shut away,
put up, buried

in haste or ceremony,
looking for the lost dogs of all his found boyhoods,
scenting the cul-de-sacs of the genetic trail

that brought him here to his knees,
the traceless roots and groats,
from kinwater to tears to earth

to the end of anything nutrient,
at the far reach of an unnamed
and knownless sea,

searching for any sign of something
beyond this background veil of invastitude,
for what he will have been

when he rises up and out of this looking,
that small part or large of him
looking up and out of that hole,

that hole in Illinois.

Joseph Gallo
March 1995


Men In The Moon

If we could be boys
for a hundred years,
together when mother
calls us in,

the late dogs yarking,
warm suppers humming,
the vast corn silent
across the Great Plains,

and, holding our breath
in the tideswell of moonrise,
we could swim up
on the buoy of the red sky,

ride that white ball
up through a roil
of gillsilver stars,
then maybe we could look

across a small century and
from the top of that blazing arc,
step off without a word
and say it all the way down

like sons and their fathers,
true fathers and sons,
true sons
true fathers
true sons.

Joseph Gallo
May 1997