Whose fortunes bend along other branches

The Vacant Gallery

We’re all making a mistake. As Rome is full
of cats, we go on making them, one after the
other. Fugues of sorrow, flames of joy, our
becoming is our undoing. So we drive into
the country and it’s still there as if it had waited
for us all this time to arrive like a lost miracle.

We come to this mistake like angels carved
from the mistyped angles of light they are,
wings full of abandoned wind they lead us
to fruitless trees we ask yield not for us, but for
those whose fortunes bend along other branches.
Even approaching night descends like a blunder.

But miracles are never for those who need them.
Pray alongside a truck for the man or woman to
become yours forever and it leaves to make its
tardy rounds. The opposite of everything is true.
Rain falls to cure miracles with mud and mayhem.
Leaves are torn from limbs to curry heavenfavor.



Walk with me a bit, through a gallery of memories,
places I rarely visit any more, people I see when I
forget how important they are or never were. Here,
a weeping girl crazed with misplaced love strumming
her moon lute in the wind, forest all about, thunder
beyond horizons she conjures in a pattern of chords.

I can only be your friend awhile, no advice that I
myself have long ago abandoned. The bright worlds
of tomorrow are majestic just enough that a word can
absolve them from their intentions. Youth suffers age
until age suffers youth no more. Sons sit with their
fathers only when scars of embarrassment attend.

In these ways we hurl ourselves into the howling stars.
Nothing hurts and everything does. An old man sits alone
in a room, door open, his back to all he has faced down to
survive. He may have just made love to a French woman
who unknowingly has opened a decade of happy regret.
He must be alone with it now, before dawn brings sleep.

Joseph Gallo
December 19, 2012