Sunday, September 30, 2007

This festooned satyricon

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Some Lost September

Just over there, explaining to the man about my elaborate headpiece, no concern that I’ve no idea of any one of the five critical double-yews. His face is huge, not orange, a phonebook full of chins, but this is not China. I tell him the bones were from a range steer named Gus and that he died like years ago on Chama scrubland and that I happened upon what twenty weathers left of him and now his cleaved pelvis adorns my crown.

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“I carried Gus, split marrow powder spilling, clacking in my arms some half mile through micro-cactus that would just as soon punch leather in your sandal as hide in sparse summer dung-grass.” The man’s eyes widen, but are largely unimpressed. He has something else on his mind. A serving girl approaches offering refreshment and hors d’oeuvres, her silver plate magnetizing his will. He trumples off and I turn with a calcified flitter. Evening air washes over me like the proximal sound of jets.

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Back here now and tell me how many times you’ve awakened to your senses teetering on a ladder? Longing and lustworn, the residual images of your mouth and nose running slowly up the inside of female legs so smooth and fragrant you were certain you had found God’s doormat? Or found yourself wandered in some festooned satyricon of disjointed enjumblement, crystalline light ricocheting off the absurdities like impossible tableware set in heliotropic Neptunian twilight?

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This is how it is at the end of this brutal September, this tender September, this month of dead summers and thriving autumns when the retreat of starry scorpions splashes the edges of some Pacific thing you try holding onto but foolishly relinquish in a forced poem or song you have no business writing in the first place. But you do it anyway because passing things die strong in you. They kick and cling, scratch and snake, squeeze sweat from gaping pores you would flush an ocean through if you could do so with grace or cunning. Thus, one sweep of a reaping pen lays waste the till of another misspent labor.

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The headpiece is heavy now and gravity is having its way. The chores of the day await your attendance and snapping birds outside don’t give a quirp about any of it, not at all. Instead, their seasonal foraging confers a hollow guilt because you choose to mine these few lines from a dream that was never there, that no one else alive or living can ever know about unless you do. So bones break away and heads are bare. You have this and this is all you will keep. Nothing of so little value ever came from something of so little worth. But keep it, keep it dear and close, nestled gently against oblivion’s suckled bosom, archived in some lost September.

Joseph Gallo
September 30, 2007

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Something we hear in the sky

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Never Mind The Fall

Never mind the fall
Things die that’s all
What reaches for sun in the spring
Returns to retrieve everything.

Never mind the call
Of birds winging south in the fall
It’s something they hear in the sky
That doesn’t concern you and I.

It lives in the wind
Where all things begin.

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(Chorus)

If lovers had wings
It would change everything
We could just fly away
Leave tomorrow today
Leave tomorrow today
Leave tomorrow . . .

Though all things drift to sleep
Love springs green and deep
As summer yet sings in the heart
And cannot keep lovers apart.

Come lie close to me
Beneath these changing leaves
Where no one can see us alone
As we dance between cradle and stone.

Always been this way
Night turns into day.

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If lovers had wings
It would change everything
We could just fly away
Leave tomorrow today
Leave tomorrow today.
Leave tomorrow . . .


Joseph Gallo
December 21, 2000


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