Thursday, March 31, 2011

The unbroken chain

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Monday Window

Open a window and spook a hawk.
She drops from the oak and is gone.
You saw her so for just a moment.

You stand looking at the empty tree.
How many hawks left, you wonder?
Pause skitters through the branches.

Romans and all their wondrous debaucheries.
Ageless declarations of love; candles in Verona.
The unbroken chain that delivered you here.

Interrupted journeys, the twist and creak of fates.
Every dead and borning thing throughout all time.
Empires risen, empires gone, another billion suns.

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Buying Cohen’s Ten New Songs at the Swiss border.
Rastplatz goulash and mittelbrät on half-day rye.
Dachau on the signpost driving out of Münich.

Mornings I left you and mornings returned.
The scent of other women that never comes clean.
Beds never large enough to hold such regret.

What am I then, if not witchmeal and würmdust?
Some moment of skin and hair and driving blood?
Kisses I leave to lips that will never speak of them.

Monday never knows what will happen.
Open a window and spook a hawk.
How many left to strand these empty oaks?

Joseph Gallo
January 31, 2011


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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The time that settles between

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What The Sky Will Not Hold


Some, but not all. Any more than we can.
There are physics to account for, the sheer
weight of keeping what cannot be kept aloft
for very long. Some call it rain; others call
it tears. It is the grand exchange of water
up and water down; evaporation and deluge.

The sun finds its tiny beacons to signal
change in weather, change in the aftermath
of a meadow in torrent to a meadow in
diamond. Quail call as lark answers and
every living survivor comes alive as if
nothing and everything happened at once.

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This is the way of our days, our nights,
the time that settles between as missing
or lost to the maraud and accretion that
forms a bearable future. It has always
been this way. Newt finds mossy realms
as lizard seeks the dry solvency of sun.

The sky cannot hold everything. Like us,
it fails for millennia giving everything
back to take it all up again and so on.
What it cannot hold, we seek to embrace.
In this knowing are we laden with the true
mass of the single heart that thrives within.

Joseph Gallo
March 21, 2011


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