Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Those left yet with us

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Goodbye, My Chen
For Siobhan

Late meadow holds the last light of the day
and you are not worried about what’s for
dinner, or fretting about washing your hair,
or waiting for a call, or checking the clock
to see when to take the right medication.

Larks are birding duskfall and I stand
and take a shot of my late July shadow
thinking about your need to never again
take another breath for the struggle to persist
has at last ceased as has this tireless drawing.

My daughter is pulsed with the remembrance
of your last squeeze of hand, the moment you
slipped back into the elemenessence from
whence you came, the door left open for us
to nudge bravely and leave gently ajar.

A flutter at the window and I rise to see
a scattering dove, a grey rabbit feeding on
short grass, wind brush against the drytop,
this day, like every day before it, a taker
of those left yet with us for the leaving.

Joseph Gallo
July 25, 2013

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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

As it is in our nature

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The Irony Of Plans

We make them because the sea awaits us with redwoods
towering toward our travel, the short passes we will skirt
their broad trunks with, the grain of our days reaching for
a weathering sky. We will make them because we cannot
feel the worry of worlds beyond our seeing, the loved woman
dying down into the end of her days, the open curtain carrying
her regrets and triumphs across an endless lapping blue.

We will make them because they will not ask us to, but
expect it, nonetheless, as it is in our nature to do what the
living do, what the living can, what the living squander
in trodless sandals we kick off at the end of another day
in a long line of another days to come, if they will, and
come and come until we are done with them and they
with us and we come to become undone together.

We will make them in the usual way for it is the happy
business of the living and we are the living, deep in the
herd of days, the stragglers picked off one by one outside
us as we mill and turn and course inside the blessed meat
of safety and reprieve for the day that will not have us will
have us in its day, in time, and we will give the day its taking
and, unto the end of enduring, be done with such concerns.

Joseph Gallo
July 18, 2013

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Monday, July 01, 2013

For all who will sit their place

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Necessity

In a rasp of dry weeds, coyote
hunts for whatever will give
itself away. Hole to hole she
moves and stops, stops and
listens, listens and targets.

She turns her point-eared
head side to side, follows
the subtle burrow beneath,
tracks it in its blind motion
through acres of her hunger.

Motionless now, she rears
back in an arc and prepares
to pounce, forepaws first,
into the late spring dirt to
cave in and crush her quarry.

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If she has preyed well, she
will pull it out by the head
with canid teeth and wolf
down her small prize in thirty
seconds then slowly move on.

The cruel plenty of summer
waits with waterless patience.
She will follow it underground
for sweet rabbits, gophers, squirrels,
taken in harsh shadows of the sun.

I will follow, too, for famine
claims no allegiance, sets its
table for all who will sit their
place, before or above, when
the season of necessity settles in.

Joseph Gallo
June 16, 2013

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