For the time we thrive to hold back

Though the years give way to uncertainty / And the fear of living for nothing strangles the will. ~ Jackson Browne

A Thousand Weeps

Life is a thousand endless weeps, each an ocean born of storms.
Sad birds drip song from a piano and another snow moon rises.
Beyond the trees, those howls are harm in the key of hurting.

What brings us so close together is what presses the night worlds apart. All lights must eventually go out and the remnants be lost as shadows. Flint fire then for the time we thrive to hold back the kiss of ruin.



Dead barns seized in the grip of leafless alders, the quiet contagious. Winter stalking anything that moves, waiting to bring it to season. A far off screech holds the mouse tight against a wisp of hopeless hay.

These tracks, neither coming nor going, keep their travel just so. To venture out into the wild is to live a life as if it were the only one. Run your fingers along the stars and see where the light bleeds through.

Joseph Gallo
February 21, 2013

The way down to heaven

No sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason. ~ Willian Shakespeare

The Architecture Of Sighs

Space about space, perhaps a single stone of breath,
rooted among the vanished places that last as long as
the longing does. One might go off to seek them out
only to find an emptiness enduring, a void reverberating,
fit only for the building of what a moment allows to last.

We place windows high in a register of reaches, where
the light can pour in to lift out song choired by lovers
engaged in a silent music only a bedchamber can hear.
In this way are sensual arches seen, balustrades coiled
along staircases that reach all the way down to Heaven.

Joseph Gallo
February 18, 2013

A quiet place be kept

Eat The Paint

That madness conferred by
the world be yours to claim.

That mocking crows scatter
before your westering easel.

That no curved line may fend off
a thousand cuts of the straight.

That small things shut unto your
eye may bloom large in others.

That a quiet place be kept for you
in the time no sound may intrude.

Joseph Gallo
February 13, 2013

An end to what you may never know

The White Place

For Georgia O’Keeffe

You will go there because you are expecting a misread
palace, perhaps, or because the coy moon will draw you in
like a bluffing poker hand, sere and uprising against lofty
bright craters that echo everything you cannot shout into them.

You will stay because she did—she of the wandering days
alone in the high desert where paint pored from her veins
the way promises of gold did in Old Spain, in Old California—
stay for the sheer ruin that comes from such misguided reliefs.



You will amble the desolate colonnades, windows thrown open
by rain and wind, the delicate osseotecture pressing fiercely down
above you tempering blood and reverence in equal measure, your
unscarved head bowed, your desire to sing arrested by insistent silence.

You will never leave because to do so would mean an end to
what you may never know, the price of what is possible too great
to merely barter away with departure, an imminent rapture keeping you always within what being here seldom fails to consecrate.

Joseph Gallo
January 27, 2013