Labors we have grown weary of

Mastorna

For Federico

The million million moments, the unconscious
gestures left to the black-&-white of memory,
slow-mo or sped-up, jerkjumps that compress
or stretch the movement of time, liquored spirits
dancing in sun-mazed glasses, wraiths rising
from grilled meats and the red ends of slender
cigarettes, the mute names that die on lips that
once spoke the faces we only remember when
the film runs through the lit places that keep
them sacred and sealed in realms of silence.

We swim through leaden dark and menacing
waters towards the spaces between continents,
empty spaces that offer to hold nothing that
cannot arrive there of its own volition, by its
own calamity, an antioasis where nothing may
thrive but by brevity of will and will alone.
There may we thread tails where we uncoil
labors we have grown weary of, the sentence
of carrying what is at the cost of what may be.



It is hard to be here, to be away from there,
to be where stars slant sideways when we
dare to cock our heads so, to close the wet
orbs that see only what they cannot give
shape to, cannot lend false form or contrivial
contour, a series of enslaved coincidences not
born in the lens that gives it life, but something
else, something undertaken that has, at its heart,
no discernible point beyond the undertaking
of burying everything dead we carry around.

The happy cynicism of a creative mind may
well be the death of me. I will welcome it
without blame or blasphemy, smile and serve
tea and small sweetnesses, steep in eloquence
enough tears to tell the oceans what it was all
for, that anyone who may look upon it will know,
anyone who would skirt its wet hem will feel,
anyone who would dare dive in may bear witness
that it remains, still, not nearly large enough.

Joseph Gallo
September 25, 2012