Massurrection: four poems on easter

Nightmare Pills

We take these to keep them away, the visitors
that come in the night when we lie vulnerable
and naked, unweaponed and enemy all about.

We swallow them and they work, mostly, shutting
off the nightlights so that they can’t feel their way
through scattered clothes we leave on the floor.

Undressing is the worst part, cracking buttons and snaps,
zippers that give away our positions in the dark, release
the scent of what, in the collapsing quiet, we truly are.

It will be this way from now on, when unicorns and rainbows
scatter in concussion waves of RPG’s and evaporate in the face
of firepower until dreams are no more than an afterword.

What the pills take is something more than what we do. They
steal and keep what once belonged to us, the morning-glories
of victorious sleep, the bleak tribes of all our necessary monsters.

Joseph Gallo
March 23, 2008



The Grieving Glove

The story might be hidden in the third finger,
stuffed way up at the end where what once
fit there traced the slow miles of my skin,
mapped positions once occupied by desire.

Was it something that caught your fibrous
distraction, made you not notice gravity feeding
on the crushing cold of your naked hand? Or did
a pocket disgorge part of what you keep for later
when mattering whispers need in the dark?

In a more genteel time, perhaps, the face
it affronted with a leather slap meant more
than keeping the pair whole and inviolable,
steeled to the tip of your touch, mated for life.

And so found here, curbed in a guttered street,
left behind on a hurried bus, abandoned in an
absent café, we reach a human place and feel for
the story, rub the genies out to tell us three lies,
listen for the grieving sob of a mateless glove.

Joseph Gallo
March 23, 2008



Tugging Home
For Alfredo

The stars want you back. They miss you.
You are a lost orphan and they wish to
reclaim you. Meet the milk of your true
mother; gaze into the eclipse of your first
father. You were family once, remember?

You danced in crushing waves of heavy light,
drowned together in gravitational pools of
quasmic joy. Swaddled in rich neutronia,
flung out by theoretical bands of heresy,
you were element and mineral long before
such things were ever confused or named.

The stars want you back. And you will go.
Some bonds never break and, inexorably, you
will heed their summon to return only to do it
all over again. With proton arms look to that
happy time and embrace all you will ever
become, everything and nothing together.

Joseph Gallo
March 23, 2008



Sugarletting

So Easter is ham and candy. Someone’s messiah
agrees to hang nailed to a tree so that the kids
can poke holes for sugarletting, the sweet savor
of afterlives dissolving on a bitter tongue.

Painted ova and subterfuge exact the cost of eternity.
Hidden among hedges and kindered warrens of ceramic
planters, they are sealed along crooked walks no miracle
will ever heal, places even a pious rabbit would not go.

We let imagination overtake sensibility, buy that
impressionable witnesses saw what they saw, consent
to take blood for the very believing of it and do so
for two millennia without so much as a backward doubt.

Once again a blindness betrays the season and we
stand eyeless in the risen sun, cure hams cracked
with brown sugar and benevolence, secret everything
we fear in hopes that this candy might somehow help.

Joseph Gallo
March 23, 2008

Where her pearling sisters lie

Explaining Football To A Bee

is difficult enough, more so during playoffs, but if you must,
leave a sliding door open during unseasonable weather and
forgo any unnecessary talk about global warming since she
wandered in looking for pollen and will likely struggle with
the spread formation or the play action option of a blossomed
offense seeking glory in the honeyed pistil of an end zone.



As she must not return flockless to the hive, ask her to sit beside you and give up the futility of testing such high clean windows that won’t open her an out anyway. Offer corn chips and hotwings, something cold to quench her fevered thorax, plead with queenly reverence not to buzz so loudly because this whistle from the officials might impact the outcome and, as this is as relevant a business as any involving photosynthesis and the punting game, she would serve well the keening catacombs where her pearling sisters lie polymorphously cool in cellulose hexagons as this might present a considerable evolutionary jump in interspecie communication if she could but recognize a nickel defense masquerading as a four rush seven-drop, something few bees truly appreciate for all the industry of their gather interfering with the dying passage of a game clock, the slow sun burning a green hole of guacamole in the table an hour before the beer brats are ready, the taco bar rife for hunger’s dull and deathly sting.

Joseph Gallo
January 13, 2008

The clever helix of what was

Traveler’s DNA

There were gaps in the sequence driving through the sun
blinding green of southern Oregon—a decrepit gray barn
kneeling in the final throes of entropy; a neglected fence
insisting something belonged to someone; a feather-splayed
hawk haggled over by crows in the roaring road—and other
things a traveler sees before I again picked up the thread.

This year the numbers align as they had been that winter
in Switzerland and today, Monday the tenth, day and date
match the fifth year since my leaving her for America, for
every familiar thing my fifty years had known until then.



The memory has become manageable now, only slow lettings
from the eyes as most of it is neatly contained by the tempered
heart. Time teaches us these tricks, which I employ, in spite of
an inability to deny they are merely that. Veering through hills
burdened with blossom and wild mustard, I reexamine the old
sequence again: She follows me onto the train at the bahnhof
in Luzern, we embrace, kiss, goodbyes, I watch her pass through
the windows until she disappears, settle my swimming vision on
my bags and the absence of detritus on the floor, she reemerges,
takes my face in her hands and kisses the deep surprise into my
mouth sealing it forever as the most romantic moment of my life.



Yes, it’s all here—the shades and hues; the scent and weather;
the delicate presses of lips against the grander picture that holds
all lost lovers so. And now even the music matches, the mystery
of mood, the anchoring of motion, all of it now in hill country,
country that insists there are new vistas ahead as those behind
collapse and eclipse, elevations one cannot prepare for or foretell,
journeys that untether as yours alone, hers alone, ours no longer
but in this dear rememberable manner. What makes us, therefore,
is comprised of what has gloriously undone us; the vagaries that
pass for science and romance; the clever helix of what was and is.

Joseph Gallo
March 12, 2008

Wherever it is not america

Come sleep with me; we won't make love. Love will make us. ~Julio Cortázar

Kymmetry

It may have been the way the southern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo lulled you into love, the low arcs saddening dark and drowsy in the slow womanly dawn, or the faint voices that flurried through the window from the east that snugged you closer to me in your breaking sleep.

Days of raven, nights of devilclatter. Remember how you once tied me up while storms dragged chains across the roof cinching the rope taut as hallelujahs? I remember how you hurled windsqualls at me as I flew overhead on my way to Europe to see another woman, how I knew it was you bewitching me from buffeted folds of Santa Fe snow. You would deny this with a slivered laugh dipped in kitchen contempt and I would pretend to misread it in cursive capitals.



Buckets and buckets of carried water to the piñons and blighted juniper that bit your legs with their sad tales of drought, ran withered rasps across your arms with a stubbornness rooted in sand and clays you would come to call enemy. But the hours we spent making sheets in wet skin that wrapped us in long afternoons slipping past languid waving curtains that spooned summer heat through the groves of our pores was enough to bring monsoon to a desert tongue.

I have missed those days as I have found ways to keep them. But you are not keepable and there is only the endless redoubt of loss and the learning to live with it. Paris will have you and wherever it is not America. I envy them that. Thus I wear my faux beret in secret places I cannot imagine exist. These are the synclines of our spent angels jutting up from realms we cannot map.



This day I give them to you, gifts to celebrate all we lose every day we forget to hold them against the sky, forget to gauge our true size in the meaning of what we struggle to discover. You to your places, me to mine. This is the way of it now. We will not make love for we have already been unmade by a deeper unlastingness.

Joseph Gallo
March 4, 2008