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