Lives far dearer than our own

Sleeping With Women

It’s the waking up that changes with each one.
Before you realize there is more than one bed story
to tell, aftersleep already has its way with you.
There is a we to account for and it takes time to arrive
there laden as you are with dream residue and the
thousand melancholies you wake to alone dispelled
because there is another who may well be waking
beside you, or is already sending the scent of French
roast percolating down hallways at altitudes that cause
you to sleep in longer for having fought oxygen
the night long, your sea-level sensibilities always slow
to acclimatize in her ravenous red bed. There are the
mornings when men rise risen to their purpose before
the mind has keened and a woman’s mouth has taken
there to pull you through triumphs you’ve no earthly
business proclaiming, but in yielding do so nevertheless.

There were cabin windows hoared with breathglaze
teeming on glass that sainted the early light passing
through to rouse diffused hosannas in the conifers
that led in time to tables and breakfasts whose sating
was certain to relieve you of ever requiring another.
But there is always another hunger, each day seemingly
born to it. I’ve been cast up into such constellary
atmospheres that I was sure I would hold my place
forever among the gleaming ancients only to find
myself in fallen reflection dawning on the watertop.



Remember her limbs lengthening in low amplitudes
as snow-horned dragons stirred and settled reasons
for washing one’s hands of dispossessed messiahs,
pale and purring as she did so, golden fire spilling
down the perfect architecture of her Sybilance as
she told you, without speaking, of things to come,
charting full the course of what failed futures were
found within the shallow steerage of a false destiny?

I have slept with women I could not sleep with, this
is true. They, too, have slept with me. We were one
and alone encumbered by all those we brought with
us into our becoming and subsequently dispersed in
our unbecoming. This is the way of lying beside, of
lying alone together, of holding on for lives far dearer
than merely our own. Were it otherwise, I might have
wished it so. To sleep with a woman is to sleep with
all you may become and all you may yet never be;
to sleep with a woman is all there is of whatever might
yet pass for truth in this round and dreaming world.

Joseph Gallo
November 23, 2008

Those who no longer walk with us

Paxat Point
For Donna

Though it has been years since we walked here, alone,
with others, we know instinctively where to step,
which paths to take or avoid knowing they eventually
all loop back along one another. At our age we cannot
help but bring those who no longer walk with us along
for to know us is to have to know them, if such mattering
accounts. Between spines of wind that bring Siberia to
chase a summer already a month gone, we find our voices
have ears with long fingers that trace the spotted maps
of our histories, mention exxes and girls long since gone
from our lives, picking, choosing, men who have moved to
other lines that cross checkpoints where memory intersects
with regret or the lack of it. History is like this—the good
embracing the bad; conclusions left to the teller or writer—
as we find ourselves changed by each tenuous recounting,
each tender circumstance. How many ways are there to say
someone once mattered or matters, that they still orbit some
lost nucleus of love like a stubborn electron refusing to
settle a negotiated entropy or surrender to some scheme
of logic one would rather not have to admit to believing in?

But where were we? Oh, yes, rooting about the fallen burls
tangled in twistbacked gnarls while towering trunks creaked
invisible doors among bending eucalyptus, some branching
business migrating room to room high in the eaves of a
foreshortened sky. I speak cedar for some minutes, leaving
raven feathers from Santa Fe for new ones cawed of California
crow that fit the flute just so while nothing presses or pushes
too wildly against the blind shutters of a heart, content to let
the tones play themselves without narrative. I take your hands
and tell you your fingers are made to speak the language of air,
that your dancer’s frame is built to make sense of the unseen,
while you nod quietly, considering it possible and then so.

We move towards the cliff’s edge where the blow bellows
leviathan, where flukes leave their white reminders of passage
seven worlds away. People and dogs pass and disappear down
a maze of traces where we find foundations long abandoned to
their absent purposes, concrete slabs with nibs of rusted iron
waiting for some civilization to future them to ruin once again.

We are careful, without meaning to be, but careful nevertheless.
What we say and hear we choose with a fathomless understanding
that everything is connected in some dissonant manner we can
never fully know. Without saying, we agree to fail in this way,
to watch as watch can, let bygones teeter over the edge sailfirst
and praise the fearlessness of the unruddered tiller, marvel at such
dead reckoning. “Paxat is whale in the Chumash tongue,” I offer.

You gaze serenely past the behemoth hole in the middle seas
of my soul and remark something I cannot now recall. It was
some canter of single-footed grace and balance, something
I’ve not proper sounding for, nor saddle, nor bridle, nor breath,
nor breach that can swallow a pearl of sky worthy of your kiss.

Joseph Gallo
October 13, 2008

We are a story never done

Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something. ~Pancho Villa

La Revolución
For Fidela Arroyo & Me On My Birthday

Open the door, she might have said. It might be Palm Sunday and who can say what was said on the last lips of anyone who wasn’t in your presence when they said it. Oh, my or Get me a drink of water, please, any one of such things said without fanfare accorded such luxury before turning toward so long a general eternity.

We have written of this before. It is like an old photo we take out on special occasions kept usually between pages of a book we haven’t read in a long, long time. Again we remind ourselves to read it someday when the sun’s hammock is placed just so beside a dirt porch in the mountains above Chihuahua, say a small village called San Pedro Madera, where a grandmother might live in the memory you keep of her. What was it she said at the very end from behind all those tubes and hoses, the whirring of her heart-throttled blood moving like the sweetest syrup in some dusty nieveria through spigots shaped in the heads of animals and milagros, each dispensing some disembodied dulcetta of afterlife?

It may have been something like, “Hay viene! Here comes Pancho Villa!” riding in as he did in the middle of the night, rousing everyone with a racket of reins and hooves and mad bandoliering ricocheting from hoisted bottles of pulque and the green bitters of trembling young cactus absenta torching their saddled whooping, burning their swooning steeds with a ferocity that whipped into town until it joined smoke with wood and found the true structure of revolution where nothing comes back the way it went, not her breathless six-year-old wonder at seeing such a thing, chiaroscuro men on horses, the cheering of the town people, her catching bloodfire without knowing what it was all about but that it was good, it was good; not the sombrero moon throwing itself into the ring like a lady’s scarf after the mounted lances have prodded the hilted stance that finds three feet of steel before it nor the dull stained horns that charge headlong into oblivion because there’s no use saving anything for some other time now, and she remembers, we remember, and we remember together that what is not said is what remains behind to remind us that we are a story that is never done being fully told.

Joseph Gallo
November 6, 2008

Some part of you slowly being forgotten

Who i stand with today

The True Country

Quail move into brush, ghosted with wings,
sloughing grey light faster than they can absorb.
It is Election Day in America and the islands
are cut into silhouettes on a coarse and worried
ledge of ashen sea. Clumps of levitated water
move in the sky lazing through a swath of
ferrous aqua. Fritillaries sun themselves black
and orange on violet blooms of something
I have no name for so I call it astracantha.

I love this licensure, after a night of rain when
every possible thing beads swollen at the end
of this common pen. I might career it straight
to Africa, skirt the hem of Sahara’s white apron,
or crash it solemnly into Mariana’s kissless trench.
I vote for this today. This. Not for someone or a
group of someones, but for this. This cannot fit
into a polling booth nor should it be made to.



Wind from sea, sun from sky, blooms flocked
with November bees engaged in purest industry.
These are my brothers. These are who I stand
with today: invisible quarry bevied in thickets;
indomitable rock jutting up from wept water;
victorious vapor untethered and resplendent
in the vast acreage of the one true country.

Joseph Gallo
November 4, 2008

The grand passeggio of the sky

She In Italy
For Celestina

Singing tomatoes and billowing bread maraud through
the streets, an armada of aroma slicked with pressed
olives and the roughshod skins of travelers who have
come a long way to be vanquished by it, savor the rich
defeat laid at their noses, scuttle the ruined temples of
their mouths surrendered now to a will of their own.

It is summer late in the high hill country, the patina
of a spurred boot scrubbed by the green sun as the air
from Manfredonia and Foggia fights overhead, one
swinging salt, the other molten blood. She’s in Italy
and to see her step among stones in the heart of town
smiling like the village she bears within her is enough
to ignite another sun in the grand passeggio of the sky.



I wonder if she will kiss someone as she would me
were I there sipping the pale vintage of her napled
neck with my eyes and the softly caesared caresses
of my Roman mouth. I would surely raise emblems
within her, bold shields of conquest unfurling above
winds that press her towards that part of herself she
barely knows, the supple terrains that know their true
contours only here among her people, the rich republics
of her noble blood, seasoned and set towards relic stars
that have yet to rise and reclaim their unnamed provinces.

I would see her now, in leggings and breastplate,
a soldier of life scouting the living of it here, where
she was born, before she ever set foot in this world.

Joseph Gallo
September 16, 2008

The connectivity of practical things

Novembrum

Scenting sweet afterrain, grey schools of cetacean clouds
make their seasonal migrations through pelagic skies.
Is this what the sealorn day is to bring to an imagination as
unchartable as mine? Are such unliftable words necessary
to embrace the merest adagio of a drawn abyssal bow
that is the mid-autumnal rift of a sunlost November?

Some days I’d rather not be a poet capable of settling
for lines such as these. I’d be as happily served to rise
up from trenched PVC pipe purple with primer, conjoined
and plumbed with nothing more than a passing glance at
what the nature of natural events impress upon a mind
more concerned with the connectivity of practical things.



Instead, I watch Mexican men cut down a dead oak and
marvel at what lack and opportunity teach us. Any one
of them is likely to be a master of sushi making or a framer
of houses more opulent than he is capable of inhabiting.
Chain saws screeve as rounds fall barreled and brontosaural,
are carried and pushed away into curing stacks set for some
hearthened cremation possible at some later drift in time.



When the scattered skies return and silence reclaims the
small field our owls once sat sentineled above, I can hardly
recall the grand branching that erupted there, the broken
acorn that died amid the foolish rings of its own heart, the
sharded rain that fell on it just before its own felling, the limber
brown-barked men who never stopped cutting once to look up
except when whales wept as they passed so high above them.

Joseph Gallo
November 1, 2008