Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The scripture of their dark raptures

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Crow on the fence, rain will go hence.
Crow on the ground, rain will come down. ~Anonymous

What Crows Know

They recite the names of storms yet to be borne. Kinfolk of sky,
they read spaces between clouds and summon the scripture of their dark raptures. Threshwater, Oblivionyx, Negridamien, Blackanthra.

By croak and hiccough come wingless wind and runted rain.
The underbellow subtext simmers amphibious before the dying
of the day, throttles what seeks shadow and margin yet untaken.

Huddled on a branch of bent song, they conspire to congress, sip obsidian nepenthe, distribute the baubled spoils of a twilight strewn glimmering
across the new fainted weave of evening, corvus corax notwithstanding.

This they know too well. The slow descent of colorlessness, of things bereft of what makes them what they are when the night retreats and the sun has its way with all that would dare pass brazenly beneath it.

Ravenlore and magpie are known to them. Starling and stealthward feline that would navigate by a wheel of spilled light above them when the moon is late and Polaris is impaled to the evernether of the cricketed abyss beyond.

And they know you. Do not think that while at your window they disregard such offered pause. They know as you do what business you are about and settle for your suspensions while they in turn study the angle of your gaze from theirs.

Give them this. They will leave gifts of cobbled corncob, plastic hairpins, cat’s eye marble, and the necessary tools of their small tinkerings. They will astonish you with their cleverness. What crows know, you may never claim.

For as they know the names of storms yet unvisited, they know also the secret names of God. They were there when the divisions were made. They were witness to all that did and did not happen. And they know precisely with whom to take up all of that with.

What has been taken from them, they will not reacquire. What they have taken, they will not return. What crows know so the children of tantrummed skies know as well. This is their understanding. Be forewarned. None of this has anything to do with you.


Joseph Gallo
May 24, 2006


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Saturday, May 20, 2006

Blessings of high oblivion

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Last Of Snow

Summer and the sun assists the sky in retrieving
everything it ever gave across the passing of two seasons.
Mountains lose their wisdom and what distinguished
them above all other geocracies in what the sky conferred
through hope and hard weather, granted for their suffering in
standing so close to such reckless blessings of high oblivion.

Snow is lost at last and only those summits whose
torments are eternal are allowed to keep their ascended
mantels. It is the way of risen things. Now comes
the scourges and sorrows of living without water,
arid striations seen millennia away, footless impasses
that warn the wary traveler to seek flatter spheres of wander.

We will hold these hoarless ranges to the fury of our gaze,
keep vigil in remembrance of what we left to the tracks we
lost when quest mattered to the motion of our moving bones,
before the sun sipped them all up through the sore straws
of our muscles, when fire held the driftless gospels of our
deepest believing. Some of us never come back. We know this.

We know also that some of us never go. Whether forth into realms
made brittle by the very marrow of our fear, or down into dreaded
glaciations that would seek to make chalices of our sacrificed breath. In this manner does ice carve caverns within us all. This might be confused as shelter or faith, a womb in the rock that would nourish
within us something too easily taken by sun, sky, season, snow.

Joseph Gallo
May 20, 2006


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Sunday, May 14, 2006

A place you cannot see

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This Is The World Slaves Built

The tender palace floats like a black petal in a pool.
Reflected there by what love envisioned for one woman.
This is the world slaves built.

The eroding wall stretches over submissive hills, is lost to the late horizon. Runners bring news exhausted from the very heart of the Empire. This is the world slaves built.

Plantations rise pristine, encircled by white swamp-fed fields.
Cotton, and the many things servitude made soft, is fleeced from the land. This is the world slaves built.

Towers gleam in the failing forge of the sun. Glass and

steel angle and bevel, provide rest for birds and angels.
This is the world slaves built.

Rails disappear two by two into the vanishing one. The other

side of mystery lies at the far end of a place you cannot see.
This is the world slaves built.

Moon clears the purling ridge, unfurls like a stiffened flag.
Unseen manprints rise in the sky and are lost to the foot that trod them there. This, too, is the world slaves built.


Joseph Gallo
May 13, 2006


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