Someone in some future time

You may forget, but let me tell you this: Someone in some future time will think of us. ~Sappho (c. 600 B.C. ~ Lesbos, Greece)

Slowly, Let Me See The Moon
While Dying
For Nicole

Broken moons bring good luck.

If this is written
in the burning eyes
of a starlorn lover,
her soul reflected
in the river
of her longing,
thrown high
into a glassy milk
of flowing nebulae,
tell her space is necessary.

For such fires require room
to fan their brilliance
across the spectrums
of a dark and novan kiss.

Wounded suns bear their fire.

Move toward me,
if you will, slowly,
and let me see
the moon while dying
in the majestic breadth
of your stratified arms.

Tell her
it is there
I will shelter
in the eave
of the cosmos,
all creation
flashing above us,
together steeped
in this new surrender,
a surrender that bestows
the victory of Beauty,
the ever-blazing
eternal beauty
that forged
two souls
into

one.

Joseph Gallo
January 2003



Happy 29th Birthday, Niggi

Things unknowable and ordinary

The Cosmology Of Matrimony
For JoAnn

It takes all of creation, a silicate divot of rock on Europa,
the trailing veil of a dusty ball of Oort cloud ice hurtling
through a vacant quadrant of nowhereness, a white hair

in the middle of a mole on the face of shepherd asleep in Tibet,
things unknowable and ordinary, every molecule vital in setting
to motion the scattered atoms in the nebulous heart of a young

boy who unwittingly summons it all to bear and bring forth the
perfect moment in space, time, and a third grade classroom, the
moment he, in the vital throes of an adoration fermenting tenderly

in the eighth year of his singular vintage, crosses the vast room in
a vectoring orbit to blaze before his teacher, press himself close
to the center of a star and say: Miss Galuska, will you marry me?

Joseph Gallo
June 12, 2006

The true sugar of love

The Sugar Of Love Disappears

She goes to Munich on business and buys you a heart-shaped gingerbread cookie, which she carries back to the hotel and packs into her bag four days later for the train ride home to Luzern, which she unpacks at home, carefully wraps and repacks into a box, which she then ships to America where you open it and your room fills with the scent of gingerbread from Munich as you read the rounded words Ich Liebe Dich spelled out in white sugar frosting like pearl skywriting swelling across a confectionate faultline, which you can’t eat because to do so would devour the metaphor of love and the metaphor of love should never be devoured while the savor of its cherishing is yet young and frolicsome on such full lips, while sugarmites thrive and find their way to break down the nutrient chains that keep lovers and polypeptides connected in some invisible and mysterious way that matters only as much as the reason birds cannot fly upside down and water doesn’t seep from the salt mines of the eyes, so you straighten the ribbon through the holes, hang it from a nail, look at it everyday for a month, then once every other day, then once a week until it becomes ordinary along with everything else you’ve collected or been given except that sometimes your lovelorn eyes land on it and it holds your cursive attention long enough to mouth the words Ich Liebe Dich and imagine them in her mouth, where your mouth once foraged for gold and treasure and the motherlodes of plunder, imagine their perfect soundings as if summoned from a rift of abyssal pain, a deep deep beauty in blonde and blue, and then the phone or the mail or the thousand unmatters that merit your breaching from such immersion, and the hook snags you up and up into shallow minutiae and the mites wait patiently for you to pack it, pack it up carefully into a box that you will forget to open until a year and a half later when the smoke of your disappointment rises up and out of the room like the curled spray of seaworn words that gulls and mites take into their mouths, the Ich Liebe Dichs they devour and churn and grind with their mitochondrial teeth until nothing but shell and trenchwater remains, no trace of krill or kiss, no white flume of love etched in frantic foam or the pelagic sweat of chimneyed whales uprushed from chasmic realms sludged with all the sugar love ever sent to the bottom of a sunken heart, a place even bathyscaphs dare not venture, where tales abound of monsters and a time when adventurers tracked too close to mysteries better left that way, a fabled land where the sugar, the true sugar of love never disappears.

Joseph Gallo
June 10, 2006

The smoky march of swollen fire

Authority Informed By Grace

First you have to live a somewhat predestined length of life, full
of experience and failure. Near misses and tragedy make for fine
stanchionwork inlaid with loss and a willing tongue for demagoguery.

As the flesh capitulates, the smell of iron stills the rousing sun. Surrender appears looming on the stallioned resumé like an army swaddled desperately in the lies of its boots, cracked and stirruped with campaigns complaining

by the smoky march of swollen fire. This is the name you must wear now. It is torn like a lanced shirt pricked with an ancient blood not of your taking. Elasticity leaves the skin in waving white flags as the deep weapons of desire

lie themselves down alongside the will you can no longer carry with the same mounted air and bravado it took to make it. The women who midwived your manhood are no longer drawn by the instinct that summoned them without you.

Everything will come to more earnest failure as the middled stories recede into dusk. Yet these are what will bring new eyes and ears to gather amid your tell of sagas and what will keep them close to the tales that seek their departures as the light leaves

you to huddle and fend for the parts of you that can no longer be held. Arms take on other meanings and what they mean they take by some authority informed by grace, hewn in the rough warrants of their color, splintered dearly by the grain of their embrace.

Old does this to a body. Days lost to the underdarlinged nights that darken not to be endeared or endangered by such foolish sentiments as you have given yourself to as if they were some madrigal of tribe, some emblem of clan, that made of you a ripe target

for your own sorrowed arrows. Kiss it all in the modern vernacular that enslaves the words that once danced the page for lark and liege for you cannot now cobble a simple utterance. It is lost to you. You have given yourself over to the worst things imaginable.

But this is not the worst of it. That is yet to come. Somehow, in all of this, you have stumbled into a lapse of reason, fallen headlong and face down into the common trap of errorsome wisdom and you’ve only to render yourself essential and victorious before

all that comes forth to conquer you. I speak to myself. And to you, my many selves. The middle of a life is the invastitude we seek to lose ourselves within so that we might emerge matterful and bright when the darkness convenes to grant us space for that tiny star.

Joseph Gallo
June 6, 2006