If this doesn't matter

The Little Moments That Save You

It might be the sound of your light silver car coming up
the hill running from velvet asphalt to grind and gravel,
your sunstroke smile behind the wheel. It might be a
holocaust of crow raining black rape on a lone hawk,
her cries your cries and the meadowlost cries of the world.

It might be rainbows dancing prisms on white stucco
from the pear-shaped crystal you hung from an unused
nail waiting for the sun to cycle through the sky in its right
season and when it does, Rumi and Basho and Sherman and
Harjo because if this doesn’t matter, then what does it matter?



It might be the taste of flu wintering in your mouth,
the promises you mean to make to your health, the
sloughing off of sicknesses not quarantined in the
body, ills without names that plague sleep with new
moons that pass mute and black across the night.

And it might be a small stone of hope, some overlaid
worry hammered onto a distant skin of sea that leaves
your own bones untouched to remind your eyes that in
this looking there are no answers save that everyone
tables the same feast, the same morsel of abundance.

Joseph Gallo
January 5, 2011