A treeline in memory

This New World

The light slips out of summer like it did
seven years ago today as I drove through
Germany from Deventer, watched my
first sunset in green Deutschland trying to
imagine how such beauty and horror could
come from such a place—Bach and the blitz-
krieg, Bergen-Belsen and Beethoven, Mahler
and the mayhem that dims along a treeline
in memory now, autumn dropping its yellow
canisters of dying colors and this is Germany
again, seven years later, here in Santa Barbara
with summer in the same place four days
before I met a woman who would teach my
heart love, every motion taken in this new
world another step toward a summer that arrives
in time without me, arriving nevertheless as it
should, as I watch it again depart this new world.

Joseph Gallo
September 20, 2009

When the next world comes

What They Promise

will not leave your name in a book
left open to a sky. Will not bring
shadows beneath trees closer when
the sun fails. Will not turn an ocean
beneath your untidable tears. Will
not speak for you when the next world
comes too late. Cruel this, yes, but I
will not save you from a gentle truth.



Make yourself stand in rain. Let cold
and wet have their way and do not
seek familiar shelters. Let skin rise
above porous bone; feel your hair
matte against your nape. In this way
you will have all anyone can promise.
Keep this against times when no tongue
may tell you otherwise. This is heaven.

Joseph Gallo
October 13, 2009

Deeper grasses to ford

Old Horses
For Nicole & Laurie

Her letter says it will happen before month’s end.
It is September and summer burns itself into autumn
here in the north hemisphere of Southern California.
He is getting old and the arthritis doesn’t allow riding
any longer, she writes. I look up and out my window.
Old horses arrive to funnel and chute in this way.

We find our place for some stabled years and someone
inadvertently leaves a gate open and we tumble out.
Greener pastures, fertile valleys, places where skies
blaze not cloudy all day. There are cold night rides
when ice and wind meet every clop and furied manes
tear razors from stropped heavens. We do this in spite
of such things, ride out to meet makers and breakers
of days and seas and high passes that find us blackened
by backlight in silhouette cutouts that run the ridge
all the way across and back and back home again.



We might pass shrines devoted to safe passage, Marys and
Christs boxed and nailed to treetrunks, their arms crossed
in perennial prayer never saying a word as we track heavy
and hooved into darkness like spent candles and superstition.
How many times did I ride with you from the other
side of such worlds, the two of you saddled by my
breaking mornings as your twilights led time to its
halter, day after day’s end? I’ve since lost count.



Yes, there are deeper grasses to ford as all old horses
know this. We come clanging to the penrail for carrots
and apples, a handful of sugarcube to lip into and past
the steel bit we allowed for so long because it brought
us into togethering. So the tack will hang limp from a
bare hook in the riding house, die reiten haus, as you
might say in Swiss or some language unforeign to my
ear as when you made vows while trailing through the
dew-veiled spider’s webs on one of many blissful mornings
they lay open that way as if a thousand stars had fallen
to lie that way just for you to turn rings among, to sense
and gather their deeper meanings, to marry your days
together against all the ones to come without us.

Joseph Gallo
September 3, 2009