Where history makes your pillow

One Autumn

is pretty much indistinguishable from another.
You might arrive home from a long day in the
sky to see the sun slip through a slot that anchors
off the western end of a landmass you know too
little about. You might be traveling to Nürnberg
eight years ago, write a poem that never sees the
daylight, something weepheavy and rainbooted
about sleeping where history makes your pillow.

This one splits a dawn pepper tree at the junction
between beauty and a perfect fluke of precision.
A shallow blade of solaxial realignment instills.
Shadows lengthen and you’re sixty-feet tall at
the start of this season, well on your way toward
Sphinxworn riddles you will leave unanswered.
On the ground, a mourning dove haunches sejant,
stoic and still as six-thousand year old limestone.



Something in you deifies her and you think perhaps
you will bring her oxen and washed vegetables, set
before her all the promises of this and the next world.
But the sky reclaims her and she is flown with your
untendered offering as two oaks exhale imperceptibly.
In the distance, an ocean drowns a thousand Mojaves.
A thousand more Saharas lie beneath those. As in love,
there is yet time for completion and commencement.

Joseph Gallo
September 23, 2010