What it takes to arrive and remain

Moonset

Who’s awake at that hour, when settled things have
been for most of a night, the slow rotation of beds
pulling the circling dawn up like a warm blanket to
gently wake and stir us from sleep’s deep sisterhood?

Whose eyes but the weary truck driver’s, the paper
delivery man, the earnest baker, the tardy philanderer
making his way along a line of broken white lies that
mark the lanes he rehearses before a westering light?



Yes, who, besides me, sees this fog-veiled moon slipping
impossibly beyond where the mountains surrender to the sea
all they fail to raise out of it, above the raintrodden meadow
where only refracted hues of wet prisms tread soft vapor now?

And for these moments we hold it together, our own, stories
intersecting only in beholding, only in consideration of what
it takes to arrive and remain at such imprecisions, the perfect
convergence of sleeplessness and a summoning of setting pearl.

Joseph Gallo
January 27, 2013

All you can ever hope to be

The Sand Readers

Lift me up into your palm and gaze at my story. I will
not leave you here to walk this expanse alone. My small
sisters, my small brothers, have left themselves for you
to follow. The sea is that way. Everything else is this.

If you listen for the salt of my song, you will find it.
When you do, it may not be where you expect it.
I am paper. I am alphabet. I am the heart of old stars
forged by tears in the hands that hold your arrival.

Names unknown to us have crossed my lips, harbored
in the anchors of my silence like prayers and procession.
Who you were that delivered you to who you will become
can never be known beyond its time, then or even now.



Thus here, in these vast dunes, the future unfolds before
you for the small time it will. Everything is briefer than
you imagine. I will tell you this. The wisdom of particles
will whisper if you but know to listen, to surrender, entrust.

What we do here, where we choose to travel, shall ripple
beyond horizons we have yet to reach. This is what swells
in your hand. The sum of what you cannot hold, the tally
of all I was, all we were, all you can ever hope to be.

Joseph Gallo
December 22, 2012

Come stand with me

Agathla

Come stand with me then, still as stone
in the unseen midnight, where all we are
opens to all that happens, the rocky tears
in our souls orphaned on the desertscape.

Caped in the story that has hardened us,
we withstand what would still us, one
beside the other, root in a place that will
come to serve as sanctuary or home.



Others will pass us scarcely giving
notice, too busy looking into the empty
chambers they inhabit while we become
nothing more than a blur of monumence.

Some will stop to emerge from their worlds,
to stand before ours, some with paper,
some with glass, to make note, to take
note, before losing us to resume their way.

Joseph Gallo
December 21, 2012