In all we seek to do

Reading In The Sun

Reading in the sun, I suddenly notice my bare feet.
Did my father have feet like these, I wonder? I move
the toes to cast pedoliths down the fronts of an aging
shadowscape. The pages turn Bulgaria and its Gypsies,
a country not given to triumphal excess, its borders tight
and provincial as crows in a stand of nearby eucalyptus.

Sometimes, for no reason, the moment catches me this
way and I am flung light-years across a small cosmos.
I think of you, your smile, how we spent the past few
days in my little studio, the young hours still piecing
us together as if we were essential remnants of a puzzle
someone, many years ago, might have stepped away from.



The sun will stand still tomorrow, I think to myself.
Summer arrives and with it the footsteps that will take
us with it. We will press our travel into the prints to
follow where they followed, where others before us
wore their names into the bone-strewn regolith that
still bears their indelible markings in all we seek to do.

This last day of spring is my country now. It will claim
me as you claim me, yours and yours alone, taken without
apologies to yellow stars or axial tilt, the fireborne chants
that hum from our lips as they fuse to form shapes given to
crucial brevities that remain insolvent, free to fail and amass,
unheard songs pealed from penumbral realms of a dying sun.

Joseph Gallo
June 19, 2012