For all you agree to surrender

Happiness can be measured by the grace with which we lose things. ~Aucassin Verdé

May Is Here

If you listen closely, you can hear summer break like a slow seed. Soon its carapace of spring will be sloughed off and it will emerge as a hiberned cicada to whip the dry air with its searing declaration.

But for now this is the empire of wildflowers. We will walk about as happy subjects within a brief realm of sunlift and relentless pressing as green things rise toward a black palette tinctured in deep oblivion.

Garland your bones then, make wreaths for all you agree to surrender when the sun asks, or not, to return all it glazed down upon you. This is the treason taught by every green turning thing you would dare imagine.

Joseph Gallo
May 8, 2012

Adrift in a white sea

The Unfinishing Man

1

I was not of this time. I knew it that first night
I slept across the lake from France. The smell
of sweated horses and weeping wine barrels; burled
shadows riding across dim-lit country inn walls;
17th century light stained by an absinthe moon.

All night in Nyon, I heard violins in la Place Pigalle,
kisses shuffling between sheetless lips that sang
laced measures of lovemaking in La Belle Époque;
the musketeered bravado swashed by silkish rogues;
the damask camaraderie of high-booted mistons.

2

Modernity has finally arrived to confuse me.
I nearly poured cream into the coffee maker.
Boxed cereal does not go into the refrigerator.
Everything needs a key, yet nothing remains locked.
My machines have at last risen up against me.

I begin stories, etch them out in lines and pages,
breathe moments into imaginary people, give them
brief life only to leave them unhinged in their time.
I do this repeatedly, setting them adrift in a white sea.
It is a cruel habit, this penchant for tidal abandonment.

3

An ersatz wizard once confided to me that I was a tenth
level king. He went on to state that I had befriended Jesus
and was known closely by him, that through the millennia
I had killed well over three-hundred people, had come to
abandon seventy-five others over several sad lifetimes.

And so I take to my form, this, this homage to brevity some
call poetry, a broken lineage of stanzas sketched in verse
and obfuscation, scarcity parsed by sparingness, abstractionism
made flesh for eyes to drink, ears to drown within, the grand
recuse that fails to convince that I was not of this time.

Joseph Gallo
May 9, 2012

Furniture angrily moved

God In Bakansas

They all talk about him. Pretend to know him, to know
his will for them. Contention makes its points and few
seldom agree. Canes tap along the unmarked path,
nothing sounds back, nothing with feel or texture.

One would think a god would make it easier to find him,
opt not to set bear traps and deadfalls, but such is not the
case. His ways are tried and truthless, bending to the will
of no man save he that would bend will to his own ways.



Such is the nature of coexistence. One god comes to
dismiss the many, the many fight to contain the one,
and around and around we go. Verse and citation rise
to rally surge and storm, roil and coil to throw his
mighty weight about like furniture angrily moved.

This happens when one purports to know what cannot be
made to know. So the suit of faith is dealt each table and
it must needs be enough. Beware anyone saying more or
less than this. They, like me, are likely dealing snake oil.

Joseph Gallo
April 26, 2012