Stars lift their skirts

Vonnegut Five

My work has been far too serious of late. Sentence after
sentence, the loss of Vonnegut, five soldiers killed in one
day in the filthy cradle of civilization, another psychopath
to wend our collective ways through yet again. Nature and
mirth have evaporated leaving only the lizard glinting in
his spring mating colors dangling limp and broken from the
beak of a shinebuffed crow, blue as black in the gentle sun.

In the evening, I hear the yawning of new blossoms outside
my window and misidentify them as night-blooming jasmine,
nebulous moonflower, petaled archaeopteryx or some common
fossil of my great and storied ignorance. This does not dull the
scent and I sway like a drunken curtain before the open glass as
the stars lift their skirts to show me what they’re truly made of.

There’s a white dog been laid up on the side of the road now
six months, hit by a car and left to stink like catted-on carpet.
His black eyes are still open and this poem wants to ascribe
Egyptian dimensions and metaphorize him as Osiris’ flat
watchdog in some vigilant afterlife. But that isn’t light either.



Seriousness has so many colors that seem to overrun all the others these days. Life becomes a stain and the only way to get it out is by copious amounts of laughter. But such lathers are expensive and unavailable to those who have too much. It seems only the poor know how to laugh anymore and they’re not laughing much either. This piece is fraught with seriousness and there’s no way out.

Let’s try this: I came across this marvelous quote attributed to Dorothy Parker. It goes like this: The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. That isn’t ha-ha funny at all, but it holds a kind of serious light-heartedness at the core of its condensation. I hope to see a rainbow this spring so I might have something radiant to write about. I’ve written many rainbow poems and nearly every one got serious by the second stanza. Any new one won’t stand a chance.

Now I’ll have to make a title for this piece so I can be done with it and it with me. This is how it goes every damn time. The poem and I reach an impasse and by the end of it agree to halt linguistic hostilities and reconcile towards some mutual truce wherein I cease teasing it into what it wants to be in spite of whatever I do. So I’ll go up and sit with that dog on the road, warn Osiris when the pungent moonflower crests.

Joseph Gallo
April 18, 2007