For being here

Dead Fennel

I climb the barren hill. Summer
has taken it all. Scrabs of scattered
thistle amid a ruin in black nettle.

Not a kiss or flower to be had.
Not yours, not theirs. Far below,
a mother calls to her children.

Answers come in windstrain
testing the structure of wings
as kestrel slits a throat of sky.

A world lies fertile in every
direction and none appeal
to me. I am for being here.

Trace rim and slip crown
to slope the downing side
where rabbitskitter scuttles.



Burrows resist sun in black
refusals piercing what remains
unseen within the hidden.

Coyote tracks confirm patience,
resilience, resolve, each hole
collared in hungered adornment.

I move in spirals toward what
becomes arcless and unswelling,
the infertile hill rising behind.

Long stalks bend low like
pilgrims at temple; form a
bleak devotion of dead fennel.

I am home here, dead among
dead, living among what stirs
to be alive within all of it.

Joseph Gallo
October 22, 2010

One mind undisturbed

Crows At Dawn

They fan out like a black buzz saw
water shelter food
So small against a gathering sky
water shelter food
A waking hunger in their feathered bellies
water shelter food
One mind undisturbed by worry
water shelter food
For there is simply no time for it.

Joseph Gallo
October 8, 2010

Beyond horizon and love

Octoberessence

October arrives in skybruise and Gothic fire.
One is a smudge of sky chromality, the other
a spill of meadowing sun. Both are mine this
early morning and I share them with no one.

To keep them, I do this: each vesperous thing
laced in tatted lines against the harshness of
industry and the wheel of the world. Neither
will last for very long, so I am become witness.

Already, sun is claimed by clouds and the fire
is doused. The taffied patch of color is pulled,
too, given over to an smeary viscera of smoke
and heavy vapor that will fail to hold itself up.

One can smell rain if a tilt of nose is set just so,
a vectorary veering toward the west where it will
establish a beachhead in imminent expectation.
Morning and weather and all that that entails.



I see you walking there, a stick of pink at the
base of a long shadow, your feet picking a path
that reveals itself as you go. Birds skit and flush
as you do, disrupting not one step of your traverse.

I cannot join you where you step for you are not
there. I see you as if you were, but neither of us can
bridge this gap of license, span such a shallow surge
to cross from imaginary to a bank of tendered flesh.

So I will settle for a morning in October. It is enough,
I tell myself and whisper to you who are not there, you
who resume your ghostly passage at the pink end of a
long shadow that disappears beyond horizon and love.

Joseph Gallo
October 1, 2010