Her chariot across distant suns

The Blue Bench
For Roxanne

She will spend a millennium here looking back over the tracking
of but one Saturnalian revolution, in a single orbit of life she will
trace the circles of a star until it unwinds to leave her here in her
garden, alone with a sun that will not leave her side, the small
rabbits timid yet unflinching, the sprouted succulents she tends
and gives her tears to, the winds that visit in their passage as she,
too, in turn passes. This is the way of sorrow as this is the way of
happiness. Both regather from the torn places along the horizon
where the rough-hewn sky jags jadeless along mountains made
holy for their forked firestrikes, trembling before the lost treks
of errant prophets, mute before eyes that rest there marking
the nature of what it is to be redeemed from such conflagration.



This blue bench is her chariot, across the distant suns that pin
their wheels of light to the reflections in her gaze, that seal within
her the knowledge that as all things pass, all things remain possible.

For I know what happens here: all I can scarcely imagine and all I can scarcely conceive. In this place she summits by descendence; reborns in a sacred breaking to become both hers and mine.

Joseph Gallo
December 10, 2008