The way the light gets in or out

The Doubt We Hold Dear

We’re always moving and nothing stays still.
A woman you may see for the very last time
stands at the curb, turns, and walks off with a teary
smile into her absence from the rest of your life.

The stories that break our hearts are written this way.
Movies, books, songs, a solo dancer alone onstage.
Nothing stays still long enough. If it did, we might
realize how dizzy we are in our lives, how everything

spins at an angle to whatever we pass for being calm,
settled. So we queue the heart to hurt in a thousand
different ways, lie to ourselves that this is the only
way the light gets in or out, but we don’t ever really

believe it works this way, that what we feel we feel
forever and merely learn to live with it every day.
So she turns and smiles, again and again, almost the
same way every time, as if it never happened at all.

Joseph Gallo
June 21, 2011

As we are and were

Propeller Nebula by Géza Kurczveil, June 2011
(For original unedited photo, please click on Star-Géza
photostream link under Vision in right margin below).

The Small Hands We Leave

Imagine pointing a small box at the night sky,
sitting with it a while, charming the black snakes
out, tending to it as if a million bright eggs were
slowly boiling inside, pulling deep light from the
dark places between the worlds, a frothy quasma
leaking milk across an inky terrain, the fireflush
of membranic ridges laced at the edge of a great
swan breaking laval against unwitnessable shores
through drowsy veins of starwaves, one after another.

These are the places there are and were, as we
are and were among them. Observe this and know
that little of what we do here ever matters beyond
the time in which we do it. Eating, drinking, making,
being—runaltogether in unweavable materials made
of nothing more than mere remembrance. Thus, we
do so anyway for to tend to the great structures of the
stars yet impends before us only when we are done
with this world, the small hands we leave to a sandbox.

Joseph Gallo
June 19, 2011


Special thanks to Géza Kurczveil for use of his photograph &
video and whose stellar astrography inspired the poem above.
(Added music by the late great composer, John Barry from Dances With Wolves).

This blue world

Precious Stones

When
the last day
falls
on this blue
world,
will not
every stone
remaining
be precious?

Joseph Gallo
June 17, 2011

Across the first sea

Washing Of The Feet

You step into my studio, turn point and
swan your head low. “Oh, no!” you say.
I look down as you slip off open-toed
shoes, short-heeled black with leopard
print failing to camouflage graceless arches.

Smeared tar stain your toes and topfeet.
Here the miracles of water might play out:
the leper you changed to wine, a thousand
eyes drowned with light, the trilobites you
caused to sing cantatas in your holy name.

I set a kettle, daub olive oil onto terrycloth,
and begin erasing coastlines and beaches,
the relentless gnaw of a famished tide that
leaves black blood the world over to track
its wander deep into the unfathomed lands.

It is testing, divining what might be there
when it comes to take all, the few moments
we lavish here on this washing of feet, the
living waters we enslave to do our bidding
for no other reason than we can, we can.

Your sighs as the hot wrap lifts away all trace,
the blushed rose stemming from the bloom
of your returning spring, our eyes resting
past stinger and thorn as a pollination of trust
resets the sole and we step across the first sea.

Joseph Gallo
December 14, 2010

Stir tender in tundra

Surrenderance

Morning now as summer expends
its last strafing, presses autumn
to the ground and slays the trees.

Somewhere a half-world away,
winter unflexes its stranglehold;
dormant chutes stir tender in tundra.

You were like this once in my arms,
enveloped in a purse of seduction,
your hunger uncoiled and spilling

from a fog-veiled tower as you
fell rapunzeling out. So does
a season succor the sunwrecked.

What was once green becomes straw
as what once swelled becomes stripped
in the cyclic surrenderance of water.

How else might a lush Sahara
be born in the middle oceans
of a vast, expanseless human heart?

Joseph Gallo
September 26, 2010