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For an appetite of small talk

2012-02-09T20:32:00.000-08:00

The Beautiful City

It took Fellini to tell me I never saw my father dance.
All the days of our lives were less than the days I’ve
given my son. He has seen me dance. So when he writes
some lost memoir of me, it will be about never seeing
me do something else. Perhaps, what he’ll remember is
just not seeing me. In La Città Bella, we sit and dine
together, as families everywhere do. We discuss the day,
the million bits of minutiae that comprise the better of
an hour, over pasta and garlic bread buttered with smiles
the day has worn rich by its living. There might be a
girl named Nicolina, a boy named Marcellino, a veiled
woman with no name at all passing by the open window,
strangers marking the tiny divisions between now and
the next now. The clinking of eloquent silverware making
for an appetite of small talk, persiflage, if you prefer,
the white ceramic plates glinting glossy gas lamps from
across the galaxy. Underbrow, something like worry
wears my underface when I reread the first line of this
poem: I never saw my father dance. There are grottoes
carved out of human hearts. Mine is built this way.
So is my son’s, I know it. If I could, I’d tell him that I
could hold passages of strings in my legs, that my hips
were able to round the tango out of a woman’s feint lilt,
that my blood knew tamboured beats well enough to keep.

The Beautiful City remembers everything for us. It keeps
us fast to its guttered bosom, bids us come inside as the
sun slips into the last birdcalls, presses the dusk against
our throats like a brazed stiletto, holds the last door open
‘til we’ve scuttled in breathless, our chests heaving with
good fortune. There is weeping rising up from the basement.
Or is it drifting from the attic, we cannot tell. Temples of
tangrammatic flesh make puzzles of what we can’t decipher
from known shapes we are born to make. In this way are we
set outside ourselves from time to time, to be tendered with
rarity and feasts lost to a barren tree of extinct knowledge.

I can’t say what I mean, but you know, you know. Just
open your mouth, your blouse, your prison filled with
all you forsake for happiness like a cigarette fast asleep
in bed. Such are the sentences of sons and fathers to sons
again. In The Beautiful City, it will all matter, all of it.
The air will thicken with cympasia and silence, the drawing
kiss nepenthe sings to the nightingale’s sweet forgetting.

Joseph Gallo
July 8, 2011

This place of quick forgetting

2012-02-03T12:02:00.000-08:00

Netherponding

1
That small lake in Holland still holds her
three trees along the bank. Ordinary lake,
pond really, nothing remarkable, nothing
to recollect why it matters all these years
later. A scattering of ducks where the canal
glazes in from the north, a single bird braving
the middle waters, one paddled foot after
the other, until the dark vectors of its passing
disrupts the diffused light a reluctant sun placed
there rising to flatten out into long v’s of flight.
The halt old man, the hasty lovers, the tardy maid
who might have angled through the fields to pass
this place of quick forgetting, the deafening
calls of dawn or dusk pressing duty to the
hurried feet, life an impatient visitor in need
of tending to at all costs, even this one.

2
The moving of a single chair changes the room,
releases the house from within itself, turns the
world toward a point of direction it has never
known along an arc that trails off into what has
yet to be. Clean the window glass and a star
settles the sill. The door ajar is neither open,
nor shut, allows neither light nor shadow to
enter or leave. Halls hold posture, offer fleet
transition to all who would seek such promises
of it. The rug untrod stays to its purpose, cares
nothing for the foot that has not traversed, or
for those that will. Shelves settle deep into
themselves, hold all we might need before we
ever know the ache of such reckless needing.

In these things come what it is to live for such loss.

Joseph Gallo
January 8, 2012

Singed in umber gypsy

2012-01-31T09:00:00.000-08:00

Silence In The House

Silence moves through
the house like a thieving
monk, the mutestruck
cricket huddled where
candlewax won’t fall.

Songlessness swells
to swallow windows
snapped shut against a
terrible calm pressing
in from all sides.

So are the days when
ewes’ milk is scabbed
in hoarkissed memory,
a vervained aftertaste
flushing your damassine
mouth where word nor
wind dare pass beyond
a thousand bled breaches.

Sip fool’s water then,
the weepworn issue
of what days to come
might bring in rain
or the lack of it.

Mind your new mother,
her hushthread skirts
dancing the dimwashed
walls like a thin shadow
singed in umber Gypsy.

Pass here without feet
for to step through is
to violate the first law.

Joseph Gallo
December 27, 2009

Come back from the living

2012-01-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life — he is so busy recreating it. Only as I write do I realize myself.
I don't know what that does to life. ~Anne Sexton

Ann With An E
For Anne Sexton

Here are stories that probably never happened,
this right life in a wrong time. Hold the tears
of a dying sun and tell me how you do it. Can
anyone know how you savor the oblique hips
of islands, the moist lips of clouds, the failure
you feel before it all, that perfect beautiful failure?

I miswrote your name, you know. It's Ann with
an e, so I had to go back. Life is one refix after
another. I don't know what this does to life but
to break it open for good so that all that goodness
tumbles out. The moon knows enough to make
this obvious to some. Six decades in the books
and, somehow, I've not gotten any better at this.

But I haven't ended it yet. I haven't not thrived in
the many ways life tries to take you out of its story.
Some of my life happened; some, did not. I can't
tell you which from which, only that I am not Lazarus
come back from the living to tell you nothing you
don't already know and may yet remember you do.

Joseph Gallo
November 10, 2011

That silent thing between us

2012-01-18T18:46:00.000-08:00

My Favorite Dog

Belongs to Marty who lives just
down the dirt lane. He’s Holstein
black and white and bares lip-curled
teeth in a greeting smile whenever
he sees me. Bosko knows me as an
old friend, extending his paw, unasked,
for me to shake. His are the eyes of a
wise old man and he sees the old man
in me and we have that silent thing
between us that knows what that all
means, different species be damned.

This morning, the sun hasn’t quite yet
breached the night-black line of an
eastern tree ridge and Marty’s truck
has conked out. I’m shooting photos
of a blue blossom that has erupted in
a flower pot over the last few days,
set the camera down, and go to help.
Bokso does all that stuff as Marty tells
me it might be water in the fuel line, how
it’s been acting up and sputtering over
the past week, nup, nup, nup the endless
minutiae that comes with talking motors.

Bosko settles into my slow gentle grooming
of the sides of his face, that warm bath
in a dog’s brain that constructs a bridge
that crosses time and space creating rifts
that souls are soaked in, filling up with a
shared knowledge of what really matters
in these worlds. We push the truck back
a bit, let it settle as we talk about Bosko’s
hind leg and hip, how he’s been favoring
it over the past few days and he knows
we’re talking about him as he presses into
the swanning comfort of my hands gliding
along his narrow face, leaning his weight
against the back of the passenger seat as
two traveled fellows share the consolation
of what it is to understand our brief places
in all of this, the reassuring touch that
it will all come to be as quiet as the seas
between stars and nebulae, that that’s okay,
and when I suggest Marty try the key and
it fires up, that these parting words and
goodbye pettings are only for a brief age,
an age of man and dog and dog again,
when all things find their unconditional
levels as water in a fuel line, as how the
broken sun finds blue burning in a nightflower.

Joseph Gallo
January 8, 2012

As if the years had not unpinioned

2012-01-06T20:29:00.000-08:00

The Letter L

She walks in, young, laden with books, the open
door pressing her scent inside before she’s crossed
the threshold of the café. She smells like you, like
the perfume I bought for you, that scent that was you
and you alone, the perfume that after eight years still
clings to the sheer black brassiere you sent me from
Kriens before we ever shared a kiss or made love,
the deep nose that makes me ask her what it is, if it’s
known by a singular woman’s name, a name I cannot
readily recall until she tells me Burberry, but that isn’t
it, so I look at my keyboard and the letter L whispers
Laura, it was Laura Biagiotti, yes that’s it, and I tell
her it smells as if it comes from the same aromatic family,
that it takes me wholly and completely as when a bell
sends an angel from an opened shop door that one turns
to watch walk slowly in, young and beautiful as if heaven
itself has not had any adverse affect on it whatsoever,
and this heaven, this brief heaven, is you seating yourself
across from me in another woman’s skin, the two of us
leaning in as if the years had not unpinioned us at all, the
bouquet elegant, persisting, a fragrance fallen and divine.

Joseph Gallo
October 27, 2011

What is asked of us and nothing else

2012-01-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

Lastlessness

Sometimes Santa kills the family. The little
girl’s Christmas bike is found and she, three
days later. Fog skirts the channel waiting for
things to cool further. There is plenty of time
for occlusion before the new year arrives to
take summer memory from the man who lost
his daughter to brain cancer. Optimism yet skims
the sunworn surface deep moisture provides.

I wish we didn’t know these things, never had
to excuse it with a That’s life. What is asked of
us is so often inexcusable. The last day of the
year is no different than the first or any one that
falls between. But we want it to be. Pity the child
born to the day everyone wants dismissed so that
new numbers may play out their better fortunes.

Odd to think a sun or a cluster of stars cares for
any of it. We foreswear them nevertheless and
honor by their celestial bidding all we would
promise to their cold natures, give over to such
perfect uncaring believing hope is forged this way.

Five hawks may pass overhead tomorrow morning
and it would still portend not a thing. The northern
flicker in your oak may call out to you only to skitch
away the moment you come to the window. Only the
absent vulture leaves its black smear in the sky, hangs
the whole night before sweeping away to soak up sun.

Saturday doesn’t know it’s Saturday so it works just
as hard as Monday. Coffee tastes the same, but we
swear it’s richer, emboldened by some darker victory.
This is the lastness of life, the end of things suspended
beneath a commencement yet to arrive. Grasp your
small bowl and pour out the sun. It will spread to run
off your table and onto the floor as it always has.

Joseph Gallo
December 31, 2011

Firstness

It used to matter: the first drink, the first
call, the first meal, the first kiss. Every-
thing was new again and this time we’d
get it right. No more swearing, no more
smoking, no more infidelity, no more
random acts of cruelty. The number of
the year would make it all possible as it
will this twenty-twelve. Today I resolve
to make a healthy vegetable soup, first
thing, and if not today, then tomorrow
for sure. It will last the week and be
supplemented with chicken breasts and
fish. Natural vitamins, low-fat, packed
with a nutritional content only a new
year can confer. The first choice is
the lasting choice, we tell ourselves.
Tabula rasa, clean slate, blank book.
No scribbling, everything on the line
and between the sacred margins.

Months from now, we’ll look back and
most of us will remember it used to matter.
We’ll recall with some distant fondness
that we were going to do this, had pledged
to accomplish that, and that now, because
spring is here, the new season of fresh growth
serves a far better beginning point as summer
lies poised on some faraway beach waiting to
caress us with the bowers of its bounteous fire.

I start my list: carrots, celery, peppers, onions,
red potatoes, zucchini, garlic, lemon, wild rice,
barley, Italian herbs, sea salt, vegetable broth,
pinches of this and that. Yes, I will look to the
firstness of things and see to it the dreaded
worstness remains far afield and unencroaching.

Proper diet, exercise, adequate sleep, more music,
more poetry, more short stories and songs, the
singular company of women, sessions of solitude
and contemplation amid my beloved nature. First
owl screech, first skirl of coyotes, first hawk flute,
first quail chitter and roadrunner clatter, first cloud
dragon, first orange and black monarch, all these
firsts yet to arrive and to be duly noted as such.

Somewhere in all this, the first lie, the first defeat,
the first lesson once again reminding that firstness
is but an illusion as everything is anew to its time.
Let this first poem stand for that and nothing else.

Joseph Gallo
January 1, 2012

So that forgetting might come

2011-12-26T18:44:00.000-08:00

Early Morning Somewhere

Early morning Sedona or Mexican Hat,
the light a murmuration of dragon skin
asleep on your back, your bare arms goosed
with cool flesh an open window allows.

Horses restless in an otherwise empty pen,
wind on chain on a fulcrum globed in black
iron and the absence of everything apparent
like the brevity we keep to share together.

The road endures our lassitude, waits like
the feralbone cat we fed coldcuts to as we
parked just the night before, the crown
of its graceless back purring arched motors.

Coffee, kisses, some shared words, the pulling
moment smeared in the rearview. The windshield
spreads the future before us like a present, torn
and ribboned by our ruthless unwrapping.

So many mornings in the world, every day
so many more. We leave them to others so
that forgetting might come, the endless
reminder that nothing holds on for long.

Joseph Gallo
November 4, 2011

Across a blue line

2011-12-25T12:44:00.000-08:00

Christmas Morning

Low winter angles stoke light in the studio.
Islands spill across a blue line of horizon.
Chimney-smoke ghosts through the dozing houses.
Bees plunder blossoms in wild rosemary.
Roadrunner warms against an ember of sun.
Red straw where the coyote kill took place.
The mouse foot left behind by a stealthy owl.
The miracle of the everyday arrives in the ordinary.

Joseph Gallo
December 25, 2011

On that very day

2011-12-16T22:01:00.000-08:00

If I Die On A Monday

If I die on a Monday, make sure
you’ve got enough groceries for the week.

If I die on a Tuesday, make sure
no one mentions I was born on that very day.

If I die on a Wednesday, make sure
you put the trash out on the curb by nine.

If I die on a Thursday, make sure
that little ficus on the patio gets enough water.

If I die on a Friday, wish everyone
in the office a great weekend for me anyway.

If I die on a Saturday, please don’t
be too upset if the lawn doesn’t get mowed.

If I die on a Sunday, think of me
when you drive by that little church I never went in.

Joseph Gallo
December 16, 2011

This dear and difficult world

2011-12-13T10:03:00.000-08:00

Inscription

No one misses Martha Heckett anymore.
She died years ago as did all of her friends.
My young mother knew her when she
attended Church of Christ, the single mom
with four kids who needed all the help she
could get. Martha and Brother Bill were
there and helped. Brother Bill bought us
groceries a few times, always welcomed
us at the Sunday chapel door. Martha gave
mother a bible. Every so often, I would
have to move that bible to get to another
book and found myself opening it on
occasion. Not to read words of comfort
or inspiration, but to read what Martha
had written inside to my mother, some
small moment laid out in heartfelt cursive.
I can’t recall the words, but I liked reading
them and remembering Martha’s kind face,
a face lost to my recollection now as all
memory of her has left this dear and difficult
world, as my mother’s children have left
to go about their lives. No one misses Martha
Heckett anymore. But her inscription endures.

Joseph Gallo
November 9, 2011

We lose the world in doing so

2011-12-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

The Lies Of Coffee

Tipping the cup back it whispers,
like a clever snake in a perfect tree:
Everything will be alright.

Of course it will, even if we
lose the world in doing so,
says the warm trembling palm.

Liquid pilgrim enter the temple,
throw yourself against ice-marbled
lakes, the mislaid promises left there.

We watch the red wound of the
coming day as the white balm
of the full night falls dead away.

Sip by sip, grounds percolate in
the desert of the soul, leave dunes
to worry themselves unseen.

These are the lies of black coffee
and hashish, the worn paths that
vanished long before you lost them.

Setting the empty cup down to
be washed, it spills all it holds:
Somehow, everything will be alright.

Joseph Gallo
November 10, 2011

Beneath your knowing

2011-12-04T22:06:00.000-08:00

Novembrus

Sun hangs like pelvisbone
in the air, a spongy pad of
butterscotch for color, the
sky whiter than normal.

No ravens, no baubles to
bother with. There is enough
to fuss about in this relative
calm, the thuzzing distance.

Somewhere beneath your
knowing of it, something
tugs at your dread, a loose
sleeve ragged from worry.

Your cuff is a wing for
the wind to strum and you
allow it for no other reason
than it pleases you to do so.

A lone red coyote trolls the
field, hole to hole, where
gophers and ground squirrels
bob and spy like tiny whales.

You look at one another
and there is that knowing
again, the one that says this
is neither sign, nor omen.

Joseph Gallo
November 15, 2011

Waiting is the psalm

2011-11-28T11:03:00.000-08:00

Nothing Hunts

Nothing hunts when
sky forbids. Quail and
coyote deluge together.
Predation suspends law.

Hawk sequesters in her
cathedral of eucalyptus.
Vole and rabbit share
underground vectory.

Rain sounds the over-
note and everything
voices as one. This
will be the day’s song.

Vulture pulls patience
from a barren bough,
senses its wait will
prove to be longest.

When sky forbids,
nothing hunts. There
remain some things
in this world eternal.

Joseph Gallo
November 20, 2011

Everything Hunts

When sky allows,
everything hunts.
Eat or be eaten,
sings out the sun.

One season eats
the next, takes all
the brief nutrient
left from the other.

Each creature re-
positions for the kill.
Waiting is the psalm
now, sung or spoken.

We would seek
kisses taken in rain,
sight thriving grounds
known and robust.

Not all food is taken
into the mouth. Some
is left on the lips of
stars to glisten fire.

Everything hunts.
You will take your
place beside all that
would appear noble.

You will hunt when
they hunt, wait when
they wait, eat to one
merciful day be eaten.

Joseph Gallo
November 22, 2011

The endless war of enduring

2011-11-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

Flags And Boxes

She never thought in all her life that she
would be a widow. It is a word delivered
home in a flag-draped box let gently down
from a plane as if the moving any faster
might wake up whatever was inside.

Whatever was inside was her husband,
what remained of him, what she cannot
bear to behold, nor will they allow it.
So she thinks of him asleep inside,
a deserved nap after so long a flight.

She might tell him later that one of their
daughters made a coming home picture
for him, a plane blazing across a lemon-
drop sun, coming from some place with
a long funny name, jetting toward a heart
laid out in favorite colors on the ground.

The two men who came up the walk only
days before never got to see that picture.
They saw only its borders, the nubbed
crayons scattered on a table they sat
across a wife from, a wife who would
unwillingly trade one W word for another.

These are the tales of flags and boxes,
presidents who can’t be there themselves,
grateful nations who might pause along
a road waving stars and stripes before
returning to the skirmish of living every
day, the endless war of enduring it all.

Joseph Gallo
October 9, 2011

My terrible forgetting

2011-11-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

After The War

These years later, I can’t imagine what we might
have talked about on the road through Tuolumne.
We rose up and up from a night in Lee Vining,
the little motel we scratched a small make of love
in, the morning shower we made fogged-glass
faces that enjoyed mining ribs just the night before.

Yes, we talked, we made love, as if the war might
erase it all before we were through leaving ourselves
to whatever history might make of us, the war of
brevity, the war of vanishing days that take from
us everything we fail to keep through long relentless
nights that scrub it all down to the next bare dawn.

I may well have pointed out some peak or other,
your eye tracing along emerald mountain meadows
cut through by black brooks bled from stubborn crags
still summered with snow. Tales of westward pioneers,
the bloodbound recount of the Donners, your questions
tendered softly has if speaking too loud might rouse
them down from high couloirs unseen from here.

What remains from all of that is a lingered scent
of morning light on bedsheets, dreamspun curls of
gold that held your nape and shoulders like rings
of baysmoke uncoiling over low coastal hills,
sourdough breadbowls of chowder we shared as
we walked between a din of gull and Pier 39 seals.
That, and my forgetting of it all, my terrible forgetting.

Joseph Gallo
November 6, 2011

As it does with everything

2011-10-31T20:35:00.000-07:00

I blame the moon for making things obvious. ~Kyle Kimberlin

Belluna

It must be the rotund starkness against unerring black
that allows for such contrast to swallow both eye and
reason. She was gone from my side a long time before
I noticed and for a long time before that. Standing as
we did there on a cliff, salted light on the sea below us
racing with worry all the way to a horizon that swelled
unseen in the distant darkness, our words snapping off
peaked reflections that brought us to such departure.

Early October and summer gone, she went with it and
that was that. I might have written poems and songs
that tore bits of fabric laid out with love in craterglow.
The scent of hyacinth and lavender, anise rising up
in a coil of chaparral dragon that blew wind from a
desert we could not see from here. I wanted the moon
to lie, to tell me love would continue until sweet ruin
came to take it all back as it does with everything.

Joseph Gallo
October 24, 2011

That's what he's getting

2011-10-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

If God Lives Inside Us

If god lives inside of us, as some people say,
then I hope he likes looking at pictures of naked girls.

If god lives inside of us, as some people say,
then I hope he likes hot wings 'cos that's what he's getting.

If god lives inside of us, as some people say,
would it be too much to pay half the rent?

If god lives inside of us, as some people say,
I hope he recycles and keeps the noise down after ten.

If god lives inside of us, as some people say,
it’s probably the reason I can’t lose these extra pounds.

If god lives inside of us, as some people say,
if I say something you don't like, don't blame me.

It’s probably him.

Joseph Gallo
May 6, 2011

Left to the whims of elements

2011-10-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

King Of California

It will surely be gone by morning, what I saw
coiled in the road on the way up the hill tonight.
Some owl or coyote will find it, a rat perhaps,
and it will make for a cold small morsel. It was
the first of its kind I’ve come across this season.
Someone in their haste either didn’t see it trying
to cross the road, its marked rings unmistakably
serpentine, a little king of California barely a foot
in length, bleeding out there in the lane, caught
by its own misfootedness as it searched the creek
or tomato field for the smallness of mice along
the glass meridian of its rough belly, scenting by
the minutest quaver, the instinctive twitch, the
scurried rustle, the signature that spells organic
combustion within living biology, the abatement
of hunger that forks the will to do what it must.

I stopped to look down at it, observe if there might
yet be any snake left, but there wasn’t. Too much
had leaked out to glisten under the sweep of my
headlights, would continue to under a three-quarter
moon after I closed the car door to leave it with a,
“Poor fella.” So many kings have been left behind
with far less. The one in the temple ruins, the one
on that small hill of crosses. This one will be left
to the whims of elements as all the others were.
No prayer to sweeten the journey, no song to
sugar the tremble of scale or shiver of bone, no
disciple to carry the spirit of a message that was
never left beyond repeating that a snake of kings
was killed tonight, that’s all, a poor king of snakes.

Joseph Gallo
October 16, 2011

The catch of a kiss

2011-10-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

October First

brings you an apple and the stain of a kiss.
The apple is from Cassie, who, realizing
she is running late, plucks a red one from
the autumn basket in her hotel room to give
to the driver waiting patiently for his last
charge to arrive, the others excited to begin
the half-day’s tour in the back of the Jeep.

She appears at last, the round ripeness
of her lips poised and rouged behind the
extended fruit that as I take it in my hand
releases the catch of a kiss as morning sun
clears the trees to light the stain of a scarlet
butterfly that stays ‘til noon on my cheek.

These are the gifts given and received
when the season turns its business to
the ripeness of dying, when all that was
delivered for two seasons comes due,
the becoming given over now to taking,
when bees and sugarwasps feast on the
crush of what swelled so long on the vine.

I take these and keep them for as long as
they are mine, the red feast of eating apples,
the rich banquet of a single kiss, the short
season that gathers in the human heart, the
long season that surrenders it up, the deep
harvest that yields its brief nectar of living
to savor through the winterbearing to come.

Joseph Gallo
October 2, 2011

No hurry, no linger

2011-09-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

Old Man Crossing

Up ahead, the light turns yellow and I begin
to slow knowing I’ll catch the whole red.
A gray-haired man with a cane steps down
off the curb and makes his way toward the
other side. He moves as slow and steady as
seven or more decades have made him, no
hurry, no linger, as he sights the other side
midway through both the traverse and the
automatic countdown, 8, 7, 6, flashing in
red numbers on the pedestrian indicator sign
denoting time remaining to safely cross, 5,
4, 3, never looking up or to the side, entirely
missing my patient and ageheld regard of him,
2, 1, 0 as he arrives at the high curb, lifts his
heavy leg, steadies balance with his cane and
stops a moment to look back across such asphalt
treachery, turns to regain his directional objective,
and begins to move again as I am released by the
green to make my way to wherever life may take
me by chance or design, behind him, perhaps, by
by some invisible path through time that will set
me to a steady countdown, 60, 70, 80, head down,
looking neither left nor right, making my way,
tap by tap, slowly to the other side of the street.

Joseph Gallo
September 17, 2011

How little enlightenment gets in

2011-09-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

Deep Morning

Let us in our shallow softness ponder how deep the morning is. It arrives in fine layers, atomized wafers, interplexed and pulsating, just outside our seeing of it. Birds move through deciphering patterns given to their familiarity, hunger and the diminishing of it, continuance and the increasing of it. I sit at the glass with coffee and marvel how little enlightenment gets in. Sip by sip I detach and immerse in all I cannot comprehend. The information idles before me in all its glorious complexity and simplicity, but I lack the trick that turns magic into a spoonable science that fits my bowl.

So I sit and scratch as I’ve seen cheetahs do on the savannah when prey eludes them. The brain heats up to peg into the red and I give it a cooldown by noticing how fog flushes the trees, how a hawk holds place in the near sky on a branch made perfect for her perch. It is enough not to know. I savor fresh ground, under oak, in my cup. In the distance, quail call and answer and I resist the urge to join in. Diffuse light gathers to sharpen the green. It is enough. It is enough.

Joseph Gallo
September 21, 2011

Majestic and detached

2011-09-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

Harvest

The young woman is inconsolable,
there on the sidewalk shuddering by
the front of her clean white compact.
Her young companion seated beside
her lost as to what to do as the officer
keeps stolid vigil a few yards away.

In the street, a white-sheeted form
lies motionless, an interminable still-
ness only such quietus confers upon
the newly deceased. Above the flashing
emergency lights and onlookers hushed
as though deprived of oxygen, the
full moon rises, majestic and detached,
pulling sheet-white light up behind it.

Joseph Gallo
September 13, 2011

Rivers enough

2011-09-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

Nine One One

Ten years later, it’s all over the television again.
An assault of the senses trying to make sense
from a magnitude of nonsense as mad as talking
heads can make it. I refuse to participate, telling
myself I did it then and see no need to do so now.

If I capitulate, if I enjoin in the throng of sorrow
revisited, of madness remade, from somewhere
a small still voice whispers to me: The terrorists
win. A decade ago I stood in a stadium wearing
dark blue. Not the white of purity for I had lost
that decades before. Not the red of sacrificed
blood, for that endless ocean has rivers enough
to feed it. Instead I opted for valorous blue,
a shield against fear, a window to the possibility
for courage, and took my place in the human flag.

I stood with my deep blue kinsmen and wondered if
we could be seen from space. As the photographer
took his place atop the ladder, fiddled with his lens
settings, instructed helpers to straighten stripes and
tighten the stargaps among us through his megaphone,
I kept solemn and still and resolved. I thought of how
every construct of mind or hands is but an illusion of
permanence. In a world where nature allows for the
unspeakable, are we surprised that we lend our voices
to the inglorious din so willingly? So today I choose
to remain here and now, let past flags take their place
in lost skies, remain apart from the barrage of coverage.

In my mind, I approach a roundabout. Everyone stops,
no one proceeds. We look to signs for guidance, for
permissions, and they become clear: YIELD. If we but
yield left, we may yet get it right. We may yet get it right.

Joseph Gallo
September 11, 2011

The light just beyond

2011-09-05T14:59:00.001-07:00

Stop Sign

The Japanese woman stops as she should,
no cross-traffic, no pedestrians, stops and
sits. I wait. I wait. She’s waiting for the
sign to turn green, I think, so I wait, wait,
and wait some more, then sound the horn
that will change red to go with a perturbed
grimace that she catches in her rear view
mirror as she lets her foot fall and the car
lurches forward as if late for last Tuesday.

I move forward and stop and quickly go
as fast as my miffedness allows (within
posted limits of reason, of course) as I
watch her make the light just beyond the
underpass in time for me to catch the red.

I sit cycling in a quiet stew when it arrives:
What has this woman done? What chain-of-
events has she unwittingly unleashed upon
me? Am I going to now join up with my
fate already in progress? What highway
mayhem might I encounter on my way home
because this lady waited for a stop sign to turn
green for a half-minute longer than it never did?

Hyper-vigilant now, the light changes and I
merge onto the slow lane of a freeway that
is the rest of my life, looking lane to lane for
the safest route, checking my mirrors more
frequently than normal, arriving home a short
time later. But it follows me, follows me into
my studio, this morbid sense, this feeling, this
idea that latches on like a succubus pressing
the octagonal fear button over and over: What if?
What if? What if? So I sit down, put my head in
my hands, breathe in the stillness, until, from some
deep red place in my mind, a stop sign appears.

Joseph Gallo
September 4, 2011

Fleeting lips of unfathomable futility

2011-08-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

27 Lines On The Beach

No trace, no trail, no imprint left by tracker or
explorer who raced toward keepless promises
of legend, no marker visible save the sun’s
bright flag claiming this alone as her province,
this littoral of bare flesh midriffed before the sea,
ebbless salt glistening in thin layers blonding sparse
strands of tiny hairs that raise their villous yearn
against a surge that surrenders in rapt allegiance
to fall at her naked feet from two worlds away.

This is you standing before the threshold of our
emergence, where every footed thing walked out
from before we thought to remember doing so.
This is your home as it is mine, as it is home to
every dreamer who dared in our unfolding history.
As we left sisters behind to stroll the deep currents
that wash over us in moments that siren the heart
to soothe their moon-torn stormcrests, so we left
brothers to buoy the bottom of a crabless kingdom.

And so we stand, together in this brief epoch, a
moment of delirious prospect made possible by
luminous shapings of forces we cannot enumerate
by calculation or position by starmap for to attempt
such would be to place a kiss of chance upon fleeting
lips of unfathomable futility. Thus, before you, a
primeval beauty awaits the smooth fin of your foot,
a tidal sky summons you to come forth and breathe
again what once flooded gills to build the first sigh.

Joseph Gallo
October 15, 2010

Whatever falls back to the ground

2011-08-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

Mother Of The Sun

One might ask in a room that keeps
a disembodied voice, your father’s,
perhaps, Who is the mother of the sun?

The stranger who bore you will release
a basketful of answers that might leap
up as if into a thundered April sky.

Whatever falls back to the ground
is your answer. We open petals to
read them aloud to one another:

This one says, I grieve myself in love,
I grieve myself out of love. Another
reads: Life is lived larger than itself.

Tomorrow is made mostly of sorrow.
Laughter reminds us this each time we
shake it out across the trembling stars.

The sweet life is sweetened only by
the dulcet distillations of our tears.
We want life, we want love, and get it.

Granite satyrs temper the morning as
boys search the wet grass for ragged
flags surrendered mere hours before.

Girls walk stone bridges like their
mothers before them as if keeping
vigil against a forgotten invader.

Darkness is the mother of the sun.
Her children are born beautiful, sightless,
drowned by loving waves of relentless light.

Joseph Gallo
July 31, 2011

Worlds beyond this one

2011-08-11T22:30:00.000-07:00

Wind From The Sea (Detail) by Andrew Wyeth

Mostly Nothing

Being mostly nothing, I might attest to my time as such.
There were lofty shadows, the lacework afternoon
moving in curtains before an open window above me,
a feel of mother that has never left me in my need
for shelter and comfort found perfectly in a woman.

There were footsteps and misadventures in locomotion,
the fevered spinning set to bones at play, voices
sealing skies forever in a memory of ears and eyes,
weathers without name, days without purpose beyond
getting to the next and the thousands that follow that.

Look at me now, a year from sixty and already marked
by weariness of worlds beyond this one, scourged and
sainted in pressings of flesh well-forgotten and missed,
so dearly missed. Mostly nothing allows for this space,
to come at last to some embrace of mostly what I am not.

Joseph Gallo
August 11, 2011

Helga (Detail) by Andrew Wyeth

A place to fail

2011-08-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

In The Beginning

No light, no space,
then you. In a window,
sun, summer, a frieze
of seasons, your eyes.

Smile and name, your
absence, your memory,
your becoming, your
continuing, your departing.

Perfection resists, each
atom obeys, variance,
change, compression,
until each persists.

Love needs a place to
fail. In us, it made space
to achieve, to succeed, to
attempt divine permutation.

Then light, then space, no
you. In a window without
glass, without frame, a seeing
of things appearing to become.

Joseph Gallo
August 7, 2011

Soft masticating sounds

2011-07-20T11:26:00.000-07:00

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
~Opening sentence from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye

Farm Story

I remember thinking it was about farm life and farm machinery, some yarn about a family living in Nebraska craning their necks to watch passenger planes streaking high overhead on their way to the ends of the continent, places with a there when you got there. Neck aches amid endless seas of wheat and barley and rye and people stuck in simple lives that went nowhere a field could not take you.

Combines and sickles, tractors and overalls, supper served with scratch biscuits and fresh-picked vegetables, drawn-water wells, windmills rusting in a sunset, and the soft masticating sounds of locust and cicada. The catcher had to be some contraption that caught the winnowed grain, gathering thresh and chaff to be baled and stacked and loaded into creaking barn rafters. How boring.

So when our high school English teacher said the class would have to read it, I thought of how I was ever going to get through the chore of interminable life on a farm, the comings and goings, the nowhere of it all. So I stuffed the damn thing into my backpack and left class at the bell just one in a pack of twenty puckers. Might as well have poured unsweetened alum-laced lemonade down our throats.

But it wasn’t about that at all. Some days later, something had changed. Thin chutes of green defiance slowly pushed up through the class. Boys pulled top buttons from their shirt holes free and girls looked apprehensively at each of us. There was swagger, a callow bravado that crept into denim pockets like loose change, just enough to, say, embark on a journey across the country, or the very world itself.

In the two weeks we read and discussed, disagreed, challenged, a kind of happy regret seemed to cast a perceptible shadow across the teacher’s face. He knew what he’d unleashed and seemed content it was now rather than later, like a father keening his eyes on a young son after his first deer kill when success teeters between grief and the irrepressible rites of passage, uneasy of who now sat before him with pitchforks in their eyes.

Joseph Gallo
July 16, 2011

Summers without end

2011-07-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

Inklings Of Hope

I would write love poems for you in green
ink. As the turning years would fade them to
a color of lost hope, it would pain me to know
that in your withered hands the saddest lines
might appear, full of promise and the ironies
that stand as foals in wobbly spring pens, the
new bursting fields alive in the sun, the single
red cherry plucked for your savoring along the
foreshortened length of summers without end.

Lovers embrace their tragedies every day and
we are no different. We held the letting go dearer,
perhaps, because the trick of passing through our
comingled atoms came easier for us. When my friend’s
father passed in his bed I gazed down at his broken
body. I did not think of vital processes ceasing and
becoming stilled, but rather of the lovers that once
held him as if he were a temple of devotion, the still
green poems inked in his heart never again to be read.

Joseph Gallo
July 12, 2011

Branches in a wood

2011-07-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

A Nice Day

A nice day might be the sun
blotted out by Pharaoh plague,
starlings on a viral wing tapping
at the window wanting in to
a dream you’ve not yet slept
through, or reawakened from.

A nice day might be cancer
singing the rim of a cut-glass
vase, its piercing song breaking
off branches in a wood two
worlds away, the place you
set for it at your humble table.

A nice day might be a woman
curled as sweet bacon in your bed,
the smell of her like mornings
spent camped in tents when
all creation enters before you’ve
found courage to raise the flap.

A nice day might be the book
you bought but will never make
time to read, the having of it,
the looking at and holding of
it enough to satisfy the slowly
shrinking fit of your worn soul.

A nice day might be you arriving
through a side door to your life,
how everything looks different
this way, the perspective happily
askew giving rise to new promises
you consider keeping this time.

Joseph Gallo
July 5, 2011

To no served purpose

2011-07-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

Dog Days

Be curious with a courtesy, uncurtailed by
whatever might curl in a curve on the porch,
a neighbor’s dog, perhaps, gone missing for
a nap, a cursive wagging of her name in taps
against the wooden deck where your aimless
rocking might lull a beast to sleep the sun past
panting and a sweated glass of iced melonade.

A bowl of fresh water, then, set beside for her
awaken that she might find your company suitable,
her place misladen, a half-drowsed lapping before
nosing her way home undiminished for having
spent a dogged hour at your feet, a rifle propped
to no served purpose against the doorframe, the
wife inside simmering something kettle black
that rouses the slumbered hunger within us all.

These are the dog days we spend like chicory,
trading with hill folk and mountain men who
tag along with setters and pointers, heelers
and scouters scumbling terrain we’ll never
see but through our own eyes, eyes made
useless as summer cicadas drawing bows
across a raucous cacophony, crickets that
tear holes across the chalky night, the barks
that alert us that everything approaches.

Joseph Gallo
July 4, 2011

The way the light gets in or out

2011-06-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Doubt We Hold Dear

We’re always moving and nothing stays still.
A woman you may see for the very last time
stands at the curb, turns, and walks off with a teary
smile into her absence from the rest of your life.

The stories that break our hearts are written this way.
Movies, books, songs, a solo dancer alone onstage.
Nothing stays still long enough. If it did, we might
realize how dizzy we are in our lives, how everything

spins at an angle to whatever we pass for being calm,
settled. So we queue the heart to hurt in a thousand
different ways, lie to ourselves that this is the only
way the light gets in or out, but we don’t ever really

believe it works this way, that what we feel we feel
forever and merely learn to live with it every day.
So she turns and smiles, again and again, almost the
same way every time, as if it never happened at all.

Joseph Gallo
June 21, 2011

As we are and were

2011-06-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

Propeller Nebula by Géza Kurczveil, June 2011
(For original unedited photo, please click on Star-Géza
photostream link under Vision in right margin below).

The Small Hands We Leave

Imagine pointing a small box at the night sky,
sitting with it a while, charming the black snakes
out, tending to it as if a million bright eggs were
slowly boiling inside, pulling deep light from the
dark places between the worlds, a frothy quasma
leaking milk across an inky terrain, the fireflush
of membranic ridges laced at the edge of a great
swan breaking laval against unwitnessable shores
through drowsy veins of starwaves, one after another.

These are the places there are and were, as we
are and were among them. Observe this and know
that little of what we do here ever matters beyond
the time in which we do it. Eating, drinking, making,
being—runaltogether in unweavable materials made
of nothing more than mere remembrance. Thus, we
do so anyway for to tend to the great structures of the
stars yet impends before us only when we are done
with this world, the small hands we leave to a sandbox.

Joseph Gallo
June 19, 2011

Special thanks to Géza Kurczveil for use of his photograph &
video and whose stellar astrography inspired the poem above.
(Added music by the late great composer, John Barry from Dances With Wolves).

This blue world

2011-06-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

Precious Stones

When
the last day
falls
on this blue
world,
will not
every stone
remaining
be precious?

Joseph Gallo
June 17, 2011

Across the first sea

2011-06-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

Washing Of The Feet

You step into my studio, turn point and
swan your head low. “Oh, no!” you say.
I look down as you slip off open-toed
shoes, short-heeled black with leopard
print failing to camouflage graceless arches.

Smeared tar stain your toes and topfeet.
Here the miracles of water might play out:
the leper you changed to wine, a thousand
eyes drowned with light, the trilobites you
caused to sing cantatas in your holy name.

I set a kettle, daub olive oil onto terrycloth,
and begin erasing coastlines and beaches,
the relentless gnaw of a famished tide that
leaves black blood the world over to track
its wander deep into the unfathomed lands.

It is testing, divining what might be there
when it comes to take all, the few moments
we lavish here on this washing of feet, the
living waters we enslave to do our bidding
for no other reason than we can, we can.

Your sighs as the hot wrap lifts away all trace,
the blushed rose stemming from the bloom
of your returning spring, our eyes resting
past stinger and thorn as a pollination of trust
resets the sole and we step across the first sea.

Joseph Gallo
December 14, 2010

Stir tender in tundra

2011-06-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

Surrenderance

Morning now as summer expends
its last strafing, presses autumn
to the ground and slays the trees.

Somewhere a half-world away,
winter unflexes its stranglehold;
dormant chutes stir tender in tundra.

You were like this once in my arms,
enveloped in a purse of seduction,
your hunger uncoiled and spilling

from a fog-veiled tower as you
fell rapunzeling out. So does
a season succor the sunwrecked.

What was once green becomes straw
as what once swelled becomes stripped
in the cyclic surrenderance of water.

How else might a lush Sahara
be born in the middle oceans
of a vast, expanseless human heart?

Joseph Gallo
September 26, 2010

Uncrossed stations of the season

2011-05-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

Silence Wearing Its Sneakers

The greenhouse sails the eucalyptus across
the meadow where a spring of sun leaks light
along a drying copse of withered lupine.

The shadow of a hawk hunts everything
it touches, snakes gophering on polished
vinyl bellies, young rabbits testing the world.

Somehow the new season has come in
a side door left ajar since last year,
a door so very few of us ever notice.

Winter candles cease chanting hopeless
hymns of hope, flowers wax worryless
obscuring black wicks and spent wishes.

In the deep channel, ships pass iced
in light, disturbing water’s reluctant
forgiveness when the mist hides all.

A starflung moon buffs a sleeping
owl’s wing and brushes the still limb,
silence wearing its feathered sneakers.

Do not concern yourself with day,
with night, the uncrossed stations of
the season for it matters little now.

Stand instead and take the air that
is given you, the greenhouse sailing
across the meadow, for it is enough.

Joseph Gallo
May 11, 2011

Through the slow hours

2011-05-09T13:19:00.001-07:00

Cuddlology

It is mid-afternoon and we sail a sofa
through the slow hours, after mowing,
or washing the car, walking dogs we don’t
have, fixing leaky hardware or tending
to some minor caulking around grouted
tile we’ve yet to finish extending along
the rest of a counter or foyer. Thus we lie,
side by side, me behind you in faded denim
shorts with shredded white wisps of fray
brushing against the skin of your legs where
my hand smoothes settled acres of girlflesh
become woman-summered gardens, supple
and ripe for tending with care and adoration.

We doze in a napping wheel spun with
brief dreams fit for such laze and letting
go, the pleats of our paisley breath falling
in measure to a kitchen clock around the
corner we are not even aware of. Songbirds
bring us back and we do not move, remaining
instead this way knowing such afternoons
may never come again and there is yet time
before this one slips into what evening brings.

Joseph Gallo
May 9, 2011

Somewhere this road doesn't go

2011-04-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

Cebolla Road From Chama

We stop for roadwork, wait
for wind and cricket talk to
take us on to Ghost Ranch.

After ten minutes, the fat Indian
waves us through, nods slowly
from his sun-worn ocher bandana.

Everywhere is somewhere we want to be.

So we arrive to find the ghost
evicted, the gate closed with a
Sorry For The Inconvenience.

The road does what roads always
do: take us further from being
there; closer for having been.

In the distance, anvils of rock
rise and temper steel mesh skies
swollen raw with unforged rain

too coy to test lower altitudes and
shielded eyes. Late May sun lances
itself in red-gold strikes across dark

mesas and we are hopeful this day will
lead to night, to comfort and a restful world
holding all we have come to expect of it,

all that it may grant those too dependent on
such hope. We have seen days like this,
days holding something other than what

our future had planned. But we learn to swallow
disappointment like brown canyon water, full
of unmapped tastes from somewhere upriver,

somewhere this road doesn’t go.

Joseph Gallo
May 2000

Notes left for a piano

2011-04-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

Swiftsatie

Play Satie’s Gnossiennes and a hundred swifts
may come from nowhere to turn a skywheel
overhead as you look and listen to move with
precision and meter seemingly attuned to Erik’s
notes left for a piano to trace the moments he
spent, perhaps, watching swifts come from
nowhere to turn a skywheel high overhead.

Joseph Gallo
April 8, 2011

Love by love we learn

2011-04-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

Gnossienne Number One

Life is like a swan
Gently gliding on
Slowly passing by and then
It turns to look and then gone

Love is like a cat
Partly this and that
Purring to the touch until
It disappears and that’s that

The rain retreats
The city streets
Are empty
As dusk descends
The music ends
And nothing

A million stars turn on their tiny lamps
The roof tops gleam
In smoke and steam
It’s moonrise
A wave spreads out as evening sirens walk
They seek to make
What give can take
The tide sighs

The town returns
All that it yearns
A voice calls
The alleyways
Begin their plays
As night falls

This is how we live
Grieving all we give
Love by love we learn
Half of life is if

The bells have stopped
The doors are locked
We’re closing
The shades are drawn
The tramps have gone
They’re dozing

A million stars burn out their tiny lamps
The river dreams
As then it seems
To stand still
A watchman strolls a dock to wait it out
With no regret
We just forget
The tide spills

The dawn returns
A new sun yearns
The birds sing
The nightman leaves
A child believes
In something.

Music by Erik Satie
Lyrics by Joseph Gallo
April 5, 2011

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie
(b. May 17, 1866, Honfleur ~ d. July 1, 1925, Paris)

A canción in a fugue

2011-04-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

My Grandmother In Her Kitchen
Forty Years On

My grandmother is in her kitchen. She’s pressing
handmade corn tortillas. She’s crushing fresh-picked
chilies in a granite mortar. She’s alive. The stone
pestle makes a tectonic sound. She looks like my
mother looks now. Her attention leaves room for me
as she looks up and smiles. I can describe the kitchen,
but which one? She had so many in those young days.
I was sure she was part Gypsy, roaming the small tight
worlds of East Los Angeles, each house an adventure
in redecoration. Four or five times before I was twelve.
I suddenly realize where my truck-loading skills were honed.

So I pick a kitchen on Indiana Street. Split-curtained window
over the sink, ordinary drawers and cabinets, tile-top counter,
white and mint green squares hand-set, made to fit. I trace
my fingers along the many junctions skating an index
in grout canals. Glass jars with strange powders, Mexican
spices whose purposes I cannot guess at. She turns a tortilla,
throws it hot atop others into a small straw basket lined with
a white cloth, and replaces the woven top. Everything is
magnified by eggs frying in a black iron skillet, tempered
by the release of crushed red chilies that I elect no part of.

I’m only eight or so and my palate hasn’t quite warmed
to such things yet. A half-tube of red chorizo lies
wounded on a cutting board. She spins around and lops
off a piece mixing it in with a small wooden spoon.
She turns again to add water and fresh-diced onions
and tomatoes to the mortared chilies. Miraculously,
Wonder Bread is toasting in two slots transforming to
a divine char. Grandfather is wise enough to remain in
the nook where just now, I notice him. He has a cup in
his hand and a spoon lies on the curve-cornered table
still wet from the instant Nescafè he stirred in. A reign
of brooking bacon rules heavy this province of kitchen.

Grandmother is moving in a slow fury now, part still-
life, part hummingbird wing. She is conducting. She
is magnificent. All melodies find their singular thread
to weave a single canción in a fugue of breakfast.
Plates appear in a vision of ceramic virgins amid
shimmering flatware and glasses of blood-orange juice.
I hear torero music in my mouth. My belly is smiling.

Joseph Gallo
September 28, 2010

My Maternal Grandmother, Fidela Arroyo

The unbroken chain

2011-03-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

Monday Window

Open a window and spook a hawk.
She drops from the oak and is gone.
You saw her so for just a moment.

You stand looking at the empty tree.
How many hawks left, you wonder?
Pause skitters through the branches.

Romans and all their wondrous debaucheries.
Ageless declarations of love; candles in Verona.
The unbroken chain that delivered you here.

Interrupted journeys, the twist and creak of fates.
Every dead and borning thing throughout all time.
Empires risen, empires gone, another billion suns.

Buying Cohen’s Ten New Songs at the Swiss border.
Rastplatz goulash and mittelbrät on half-day rye.
Dachau on the signpost driving out of Münich.

Mornings I left you and mornings returned.
The scent of other women that never comes clean.
Beds never large enough to hold such regret.

What am I then, if not witchmeal and würmdust?
Some moment of skin and hair and driving blood?
Kisses I leave to lips that will never speak of them.

Monday never knows what will happen.
Open a window and spook a hawk.
How many left to strand these empty oaks?

Joseph Gallo
January 31, 2011

The time that settles between

2011-03-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

What The Sky Will Not Hold

Some, but not all. Any more than we can.
There are physics to account for, the sheer
weight of keeping what cannot be kept aloft
for very long. Some call it rain; others call
it tears. It is the grand exchange of water
up and water down; evaporation and deluge.

The sun finds its tiny beacons to signal
change in weather, change in the aftermath
of a meadow in torrent to a meadow in
diamond. Quail call as lark answers and
every living survivor comes alive as if
nothing and everything happened at once.

This is the way of our days, our nights,
the time that settles between as missing
or lost to the maraud and accretion that
forms a bearable future. It has always
been this way. Newt finds mossy realms
as lizard seeks the dry solvency of sun.

The sky cannot hold everything. Like us,
it fails for millennia giving everything
back to take it all up again and so on.
What it cannot hold, we seek to embrace.
In this knowing are we laden with the true
mass of the single heart that thrives within.

Joseph Gallo
March 21, 2011

A small tale in mistiming

2011-02-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

Not Always To The Swift

The rabbit I ran over last night was
eaten by a coyote before morning.
Something dies that something lives.
The ground is already wet enough to
have washed away the incident on the
asphalt drive, my car easing down, the
spooked bunny barreling from the green
slope catching tread under the right rear.

It’s funny how you can feel the vibration
for hours after, replaying what you could
have done different, slower, faster, not at
all and, returning, seeing it still lying on its
side splayed out before headlights as if it
were merely asleep but for the brushstroke
of blood faintly swifted from its eary head.

This morning leaves no trace, no epilogue
to the small tale in mistiming, nothing to
remember but the furry lift of a wheel for
the briefest of moments still ringing in the
bones. Pink trumpettes have closed their
horns, petals bowed against the prediction
of rain. Somehow, they know, they know.

A red coyote pads through the mist-flushed
meadow, drowsy, measured, two paws
after the others, its belly round beneath
a tawny sage fringe of fur as if a small
rabbit were curled up asleep inside.

Joseph Gallo
February 15, 2011

To little or no avail

2011-02-02T12:08:00.000-08:00

The Wisdom Of Waiting

A string of black phoebes sit
the wooden trellis facing south
where the sun forgets it is winter.

They turn their heads in vigil as
if something were coming, some
moment they cannot arrive at.

Wind stirs wingfeathers
as they brace and keep perch,
waiting for it to appear.

Nothing comes. Sun, sea,
soundings from the meadow.
Still, they shift anxiously.

These are the days when life
pauses to consider itself, strung
along a trellis, to little or no avail.

I step out across the landing,
climb up onto the crossbeam
and settle myself among them.

Joseph Gallo
January 16, 2011

The night's thousand sisters

2011-01-31T20:13:00.000-08:00

The Same Question

Three owls ask over and over, there
on the bare moonslivered limb.
Eventually, one foolish mouse will
answer and that will be that.

I lie in the dark answering to no one,
the question posing and reposing,
each silence different than the one
before. I answer Mary and Rebecca,

Jan and Celestina, the one whose name
is seldom uttered in the light of day
anymore, she of the visiting dreams
and odd coincidences I tell no one of.

Camlen and Jenny, son, mother, the
night's thousand sisters who bear
the brunt of mercy doggedly into
the dawn. Out in the oaks, they ask

again, this time with one less voice.
The meadow is lighter by an ounce
of carelessness, the scurry filled in
by accommodating crickets that

shovel gravel the long night through.
Somewhere, in my studio, a tiny snap
breaks the bleak and I source it quickly.
Something is laying waste to something

on a shelf too high for it to be there.
I listen. It continues. Cubbied mouse
bones kept there, taken and cleaned
from owl scat. I venture an irony:

a mouse is rooting through my things
and has come across a long dead cousin.
I find a reverence I did not know I had
and stand down, grieving in kind, head

bowed for all those who have gone the
way no answer may follow, the many
still sought in dark places where even
thin moons dare not pass too recklessly.

Joseph Gallo
January 27, 2011

If the end is to be

2011-01-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

Yarning

They pull and loop, pay out the spool
line by line, the colored thread, the
puffy yarn, row after row the women
follow the pattern, no deviation if the
end is to be what the beginning promises.

All over the world, tables and circles are
paying it out exactly as this one, twist to
front, enter at this juncture, the math
precise and held by purposes much
greater than theories and stitches.

In this way the world is made new again.
Follow their talking and you traverse
mighty rivers of families and places,
children and parents, the branchless
meander of time spent praising root

and water, needles deft with dance
and the abandon of it. This may go
on all morning, beyond the vagaries
of passing weather and imminent
holidays, right through to completion.

Few things ever finish. This moment
might be worn as the one that follows
or the one that passed while you were
thinking of the one to come that never
arrives until its place in the pattern says.

Joseph Gallo
December 23, 2010

Another thousand troubles

2011-01-25T12:30:00.001-08:00

We Leave Houses

We leave houses behind and everything
in them. Nothing follows us. Whatever
is left on the walls is left to them. Keys
on the piano keep their mute threnodies
and nothing can draw them out that is
not given first to what might behold them.

Meanders are lost forever to rugs that
retain no imprint. Why you passed here
and for what matters to nothing and no
one. Doors remain shut or open just
as you left them. What others might
do here cannot matter and never will.

There on a sill, the dust you disturbed
when you made for the window to see
what or who was doing what and why.
The water you drew for slipping into
or drinking has run down into places
you never dared imagine traveling to.

There porch mats are rendered mosaics
in broken leaves and falling suns leave
fingerprints along unpainted pickets.
Abandoned sofas inter the chitter
of children who once jumped there as
if tomorrow were but a bounce away.

And so we leave houses and everything
behind. Nothing follows that will not
itself leave everything behind. In this
way a future is born, thrashing, flailing,
beset by another thousand troubles that
enter this world from the one you left.

Joseph Gallo
November 20, 2010

If this doesn't matter

2011-01-11T13:11:00.000-08:00

The Little Moments That Save You

It might be the sound of your light silver car coming up
the hill running from velvet asphalt to grind and gravel,
your sunstroke smile behind the wheel. It might be a
holocaust of crow raining black rape on a lone hawk,
her cries your cries and the meadowlost cries of the world.

It might be rainbows dancing prisms on white stucco
from the pear-shaped crystal you hung from an unused
nail waiting for the sun to cycle through the sky in its right
season and when it does, Rumi and Basho and Sherman and
Harjo because if this doesn’t matter, then what does it matter?

It might be the taste of flu wintering in your mouth,
the promises you mean to make to your health, the
sloughing off of sicknesses not quarantined in the
body, ills without names that plague sleep with new
moons that pass mute and black across the night.

And it might be a small stone of hope, some overlaid
worry hammered onto a distant skin of sea that leaves
your own bones untouched to remind your eyes that in
this looking there are no answers save that everyone
tables the same feast, the same morsel of abundance.

Joseph Gallo
January 5, 2011

Birds to take such a sky

2010-12-31T22:14:00.000-08:00

Last Days

They arrive on wings of the sun to bleed
blue across channel waters. Silver never
found birds to take such a sky as this. All
they have promised, they have delivered.
All they have delivered, they have withheld.

I was given to an autumn’s day when gold
wanders too close to alchemy and fire, when
slain leaves fall to wither and waste and
what stirs in the hearth spits blood into
the eye of whatever god dares gaze down.

These are the last days when the inexorable
finality of things come to pare their toll, exact
what will never be rendered unto Caesar or
queen, sweep away the very wind from your
roof to scatter grimacing devils gathered there.

Have them then, each to the hilt of their tender
dregs, one upon the other, dawn to the dying
of the dark dawn, for they will have you. Take
what is yours to take for they will take what is
theirs to be taken. Surrender then to this and live.

Joseph Gallo
December 31, 2010

Broad avenues of absent sun

2010-12-26T12:27:00.000-08:00

Winter Returns

This is a familiar coat. Soft, white, laid out
before broad avenues of absent sun. It fits
well, still, my foreshortened arms and the
brass buttons hold fast against the wind.

This is a familiar sky. Poured in gray mix,
crushing gravel with each step beneath it,
an aggregate hardened with elliptic cycles
set to a muted cadence burning dead starfire.

This is a familiar loss. Night comes early
to reclaim all it was denied for so long,
emissaries sent to secure the horizon,
stream its name against distant quadrants.

This is a familiar season. Freshened with
a deep resolve to move as it will, kith and
coat notwithstanding, it will stay some,
leave some, and in the end take it all.

Joseph Gallo
December 22, 2010

A small empire of remembrance

2010-12-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

Autumn Comes Green

We forget what green looks like
when summer strips the grass,
presses its dry hayed hand against
the heatworn hills. Comes rain,
not much, but enough, and every
thing changes. The empty ground
between the oaks rises up in small
jade blades like outcast serpents
thrown out from a spit of seed.

This is what stills the season to move
me to take notice of what notice may
take me. It’s always been so. Some-
thing comes, something leaves, and
we take note of it all. Stones float
off to the stars and owls perform
rituals as rabbits pass in sacrifice to
canid gods the whole night through.
It has happened this way for millennia.

Sleep evades and you come to mind,
a small empire of remembrance pushing
through an oaken space between what
takes and what keeps. You are leaves
and grass and clover, a stealth of saxifrage
wheeling beneath Orion and a cowering
crustacean that slips over the far horizon
to sting a morning not yet bleeding light,
full of rain and green and sweet forgetting.

Joseph Gallo
October 22, 2010

Just enough to tell

2010-12-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

This past Monday, one of our elder neighbors was removed from life-support. The doctors had placed him on assisted breathing since he fell suddenly ill in the days after he had run his car into the creek that runs below the hilltop rancho.

After being released from an overnight stay at the hospital, I'd seen him pass my deck in the late afternoon walking after his Jack Russell terrier, Spencer, who was perennially after critters. He seemed fine and I had been surprised to see him up and about only a day after after learning of the circumstances surrounding his impaired foray into the creek.

Thus, our landlady informed us Monday morning that after two weeks on life-support he would be removed from the machines that have kept him alive. It was scheduled to take place at three o'clock that afternoon.

Five hours.

From the time she told us until they would do it. As per his DNR directive, his pre-written wishes and instructions. It would allow for family to arrive and make their final visit if they wished to.

Frank expired at 8:20pm on Monday night.

I began the piece below at precisely three o'clock on Monday and finished it about fifteen minutes later. I then went out to my car to run some errands. As I did so, a single quail flushed and furied from a bush to my right. I stopped and tracked it into the low bushes down the hill.

Then a small low movement from my left caught my attention—a lone small rabbit emerging from behind one of the parked cars. It sat there and regarded me for several minutes as I stood and augured the not too subtle signs. Some call them omens—inexplicable coincidences that make themselves known in some auspicious way.

These things happen.

When my friend and caregiving client, Alfredo, died in January 2008, a single blue heron had come to land in the meadow next to the rancho. It stayed all that morning and into the afternoon in spite of a lingering rain. It briefly returned the next day as well. It seemed to me then as if he was communicating, by some natural coincidence, that everything was alright.

I did not know much at all about Frank as he lived down the road on the property, but not in the main house where I rent a small studio. We spoke rarely, but waved hello to one another once or twice a week as he would drive down the hill everyday with Spencer standing lookout at the passenger window. Our lives simply did not cross or trespass the seeming boundaries that came to be in place.

I've learned more about him in the days he's been in the hospital than I ever knew before. Ex-military, estranged wife and children, loner, and at seventy, far too young for all of this to come to such a sudden finality.

Strange how such things happen.

So, given the small augury of the animals that made their presence known to me after writing the poem below, I now share this, as I should, because some greater purpose may well be served in doing so.

It is, I suppose, a very human thing to do.

Last Hour
For Frank

In the last hour, I might walk past
your window. You may look up to
see the last of me, some shape not
too surprising, just enough to tell
you it was me. I’ll be looking for
the dog, the wiry little Russell you
never cared much for because he
wasn’t the heeling type, always
after rabbits and quail, something
to root through the bushes for.

You will look up at your clock
at precisely three when they’ve
agreed to disconnect apparatuses,
the trappings of continuance, let
me ferret on my own. It won’t
last long, we already know that.
In this last hour glass will glint
late autumn sun as the sea will
catch and throw it back in small
crests of distant waves. For some
days you will remember me.

Each time you pass the curve
where I ran off into the creek,
you will remember and venture
to imagine how it might have
happened—me sniped by drink
and meds and age and few and
fewer reasons to go on this way—
there where the oak trees droop
above dried mud tracks that rain
has now worn down where the
tow truck pulled the car out after
the EMT’s had already taken me.

In the last hour and the hour after,
I might walk past your window.
You may look up to see the last
of me, some shape quite surprising,
a small rabbit, perhaps, or last in a
string of scurrying quail, just enough
to tell you it was me, it was me.

Joseph Gallo
December 6, 2010

For no perceptible reason

2010-11-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

Paris, or Fredericksburg

There were days the sky hardly noticed us. We moved
beneath it as if we had no business doing so; small things
performing small things for even smaller reasons.

Behind it all, a kind of silent narration that one catches
only between words, the ends of them, the beginnings,
but little of their middling narrative essence informing.

It might have been Paris, or Fredericksburg, the days
slipping around us like rushing rivers of time as we
took sustenance from wind and screeching cicadas.

Who you are does not matter for these lines. Neither
does who I am. We may be any of numberless forgotten
people who thought life might be a coat worth returning.

Some day, I suppose, I will do just that—walk into some
small shop on some side street I’ve never been on before,
open the door and say, “Here’s your coat back, thank you.”

There are days the sky hardly notices us. We move
beneath it as if we were born to do so; small things
performing even smaller things for no perceptible reason.

Joseph Gallo
October 12, 2010

The voice of god

2010-11-11T23:11:00.000-08:00

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen-hundred and twenty-two. I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day.

When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen-hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veteran's Day.
Armistice Day was sacred.
Veteran's Day is not.
So I will throw Veteran's Day over my shoulder.
Armistice Day I will keep.
I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred?
Oh, Romeo & Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.

~Kurt Vonnegut from his novel, Breakfast Of Champions

I hold with this, all of it, even that part about Romeo & Juliet, while acknowledging that what he expressed about all music being sacred was written well before the advent of rap music with its vapid cliché-riddled celebration of thuglife and its relentless decimation of the English language.

Also because I, too, was accidentally born on this very day in the year nineteen-hundred and fifty-two, in the eleventh minute of the twenty-third hour, which is, for you mathophobes, 11:11pm.

By the way, the end of the excerpt above can really only be read one way, in spite of those who have tried to read and interpret it another.

When he says "God spoke clearly to mankind" he means that silence was that voice. Silence as in nothing but the stillness of a gentle breeze uninterrupted by anything more divine than that.

I got it immediately, the first time I read it back in high school.
And I still do. Bastard could write, eh?

I know he meant it this way because, like myself, Vonnegut was an avowed agnotheist. Which is why he's in Heaven now, you heathen infidels.

Joseph Gallo
November 11, 2010

Spaces between worlds

2010-11-01T09:22:00.000-07:00

Whisper November

On the blue horizon, islands change
shape. The woman becomes a table,
her round hip flattened to hold candle
or tea cup, a sheet of writing paper as
the dawn pours bright ink over stirring
terrain to whisper it is now November.

One line after another, the story takes
form. What were middling beginnings
pass into ends that recede beyond the
deep cobalt kiss that joins sea to land.
It is the time you might come to me,
this season of spaces between worlds.

You might take my face in your hands
and press your lips of empire into my
surrender, take all I would yield gladly
to certain conquer. Birds and rabbits go
by and the heavy sun shakes off the dew
left from a hallowed night of weeping.

Before yesterday, there was no you.
No me; no us. And now November
whispers a season we might never
have traversed. Pomegranates leave
hived kisses in the trees that we might
happen beneath them, bough by bough.

On the blue horizon, the woman changes
shape. The island becomes a wild rose,
her curved petals folding in to hold bee
and tea ant, a sheaf of coiled parchment
as the wind inscribes its gentle name to
murmur only that it is now November.

Joseph Gallo
November 1, 2010

For being here

2010-10-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Dead Fennel

I climb the barren hill. Summer
has taken it all. Scrabs of scattered
thistle amid a ruin in black nettle.

Not a kiss or flower to be had.
Not yours, not theirs. Far below,
a mother calls to her children.

Answers come in windstrain
testing the structure of wings
as kestrel slits a throat of sky.

A world lies fertile in every
direction and none appeal
to me. I am for being here.

Trace rim and slip crown
to slope the downing side
where rabbitskitter scuttles.

Burrows resist sun in black
refusals piercing what remains
unseen within the hidden.

Coyote tracks confirm patience,
resilience, resolve, each hole
collared in hungered adornment.

I move in spirals toward what
becomes arcless and unswelling,
the infertile hill rising behind.

Long stalks bend low like
pilgrims at temple; form a
bleak devotion of dead fennel.

I am home here, dead among
dead, living among what stirs
to be alive within all of it.

Joseph Gallo
October 22, 2010

One mind undisturbed

2010-10-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Crows At Dawn

They fan out like a black buzz saw
water shelter food
So small against a gathering sky
water shelter food
A waking hunger in their feathered bellies
water shelter food
One mind undisturbed by worry
water shelter food
For there is simply no time for it.

Joseph Gallo
October 8, 2010

Beyond horizon and love

2010-10-07T21:37:00.001-07:00

Octoberessence

October arrives in skybruise and Gothic fire.
One is a smudge of sky chromality, the other
a spill of meadowing sun. Both are mine this
early morning and I share them with no one.

To keep them, I do this: each vesperous thing
laced in tatted lines against the harshness of
industry and the wheel of the world. Neither
will last for very long, so I am become witness.

Already, sun is claimed by clouds and the fire
is doused. The taffied patch of color is pulled,
too, given over to an smeary viscera of smoke
and heavy vapor that will fail to hold itself up.

One can smell rain if a tilt of nose is set just so,
a vectorary veering toward the west where it will
establish a beachhead in imminent expectation.
Morning and weather and all that that entails.

I see you walking there, a stick of pink at the
base of a long shadow, your feet picking a path
that reveals itself as you go. Birds skit and flush
as you do, disrupting not one step of your traverse.

I cannot join you where you step for you are not
there. I see you as if you were, but neither of us can
bridge this gap of license, span such a shallow surge
to cross from imaginary to a bank of tendered flesh.

So I will settle for a morning in October. It is enough,
I tell myself and whisper to you who are not there, you
who resume your ghostly passage at the pink end of a
long shadow that disappears beyond horizon and love.

Joseph Gallo
October 1, 2010

Where history makes your pillow

2010-09-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

One Autumn

is pretty much indistinguishable from another.
You might arrive home from a long day in the
sky to see the sun slip through a slot that anchors
off the western end of a landmass you know too
little about. You might be traveling to Nürnberg
eight years ago, write a poem that never sees the
daylight, something weepheavy and rainbooted
about sleeping where history makes your pillow.

This one splits a dawn pepper tree at the junction
between beauty and a perfect fluke of precision.
A shallow blade of solaxial realignment instills.
Shadows lengthen and you’re sixty-feet tall at
the start of this season, well on your way toward
Sphinxworn riddles you will leave unanswered.
On the ground, a mourning dove haunches sejant,
stoic and still as six-thousand year old limestone.

Something in you deifies her and you think perhaps
you will bring her oxen and washed vegetables, set
before her all the promises of this and the next world.
But the sky reclaims her and she is flown with your
untendered offering as two oaks exhale imperceptibly.
In the distance, an ocean drowns a thousand Mojaves.
A thousand more Saharas lie beneath those. As in love,
there is yet time for completion and commencement.

Joseph Gallo
September 23, 2010

The small scrapes we survive

2010-09-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Autumn Now

There is time in the wind. The passing of it; the gathering.
Limbs bend and creak and the trees do so as well. A dove
coos alone on a branch, the whole sea torn blue behind her.

Whitecaps and clouds use the sky as a mirror. Water and
salt do what they’ve always done. Before gods were given
life; before caves held their pigmented animal stories.

I’m a little ahead of myself, but the season has already
arrived. Stand up right now and look for yourself. The
light has shifted and the shadows retooled. This will go

on toward winter this way; longer, more angled, shorter,
more carved into the small scrapes we survive to see it
unfold. Listen and you may sense something outside your

senses. Chant and the sun may turn toward you to seize
an eye, burn its name into your skin as a way to remember.
It is autumn now and that is simply how things are.

Joseph Gallo
September 8, 2010

A pooling darkness, a small pebble

2010-09-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

Reincarnation

So we go along for some years and a few
more after that and sometimes the shade
begins to drop down and the light in the room
dims and dims some more as shapes take on
others while others lose cohesion to recombine
with a pooling darkness, and a small pebble
forms in the shoe of your soul and grides and
rubs raw until it pokes through to tear leather
built up over years of careful cobbling, some
tender, some knurled in anger, and the dimming,
the dimming continues as your feet hurt and the
room goes dark and no one can see in and you
can’t see out because the shade has welded shut
and the cord has slipped the ring and nothing will
raise it again, not Jesus, not Dos Equis, not Slap
Chop, so you sit with it until you can’t sit with it
any longer and no one cares that can change it
because there’s a certain comfort seasoned in all
of this, the cussing, the short patience, the contempt
for how things ever got to this state of brokenness,
and life keeps pressing the buzzer and kicking at
the door and you’d give it all if it would just go
away and suddenly the shade coils up, snaps
open, and the whole thing starts all over again.

Joseph Gallo
August 7, 2010

Light but not all of it

2010-09-07T10:27:00.000-07:00

Room At Last
For J.D. Salinger

You may sit smiling wanly at the edge of a bed
among grey-white cloudskins that gather there,
the walls nearly as barren of artifice as the motives
of a mirror, and as you sit you may know that no
one may ever see you in this moment until they
might happen to come across evidence of it, some
lines on paper, the butt of a cigarette left for a maid
that will never come to part half-opened curtains
that let in the light but not all of it, just enough to
preserve what shadows you have befriended, better
company kept against all who might have blamed
you dry of this precious contrast for only time is
allowed to move unparsed here, to riffle through
drawers, read over your shoulder, soften the click-
clack of a black typewriter, making sure the bolt
is turned and some veneer of mattering maintained.

Joseph Gallo
August 9, 2010

A feather that fell

2010-08-31T08:19:00.000-07:00

A Morning In August Many Years Later

There was the scent of your skin as you slept,
how it roused me from mine to leave me stranded.

There was the parting of your lips as you sat silent,
how they opened a world I never dreamed possible.

There was the longing in your gaze along the shore,
how the sea answered back with an endless horizon.

There was the single strand of hair still kept in a book,
how it wraps around a feather that fell from your heart.

Joseph Gallo
August 31, 2010

All it has passed over

2010-08-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

Moon Falls

under its own weight, laden by the tonnage
of all it has passed over through the night.
Is it always this way, you might ask. Yes,
always. The night is long and all that can
happen does. We survive; we don’t. If we
do, then a poem becomes possible at the
end of it. You rise to stand in a glory of
your own nakedness and gaze out across
the undimming field as the great thing slowly
slips behind eucalyptus, casts the figure
of a lone raptor high in silent obsidian as
sky fails to hold it up and if you press silent
enough you may hear the faint scratching
of dawn skittering in the bush, a stirring
industry convening in the bramble and, amid
this small miracling, your breathing belies you
and you are something new becoming, like all
of it, untested and graceless, congealing before
a breaking of fire and it is good, this; very good.

Joseph Gallo
August 24, 2010

All that remains to be seen

2010-08-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Every flower feeds a sun
Every spidered blossom spun
Every petal comes undone
As in the end lies what begun.
~Aucassin Verdè

Every Flower

They come and come some more as if the season
were a volcano erupting along the horizon pitting
everything with a scattershot beauty that leaves no
eye unwounded. This one might be handed to a
brown-eyed girl, the future streaming in her wild
windborne hair while that one might be set in a vase
on a nightstand beside the bed of a dying father.

We might go on this way, naming and arranging, but
what’s the use? Is it better to leave the young boy’s
hand empty, his heart unfettered by the innocent perils
of photosynthesis, or place him before the turning
shoulder of a girl that will know the cut fruit of a
thousand fields before the fragrant pass of her time?

So the petalcock casts it starry net and for a moment
blinds the gazer against all that remains to be seen.
We go on this way over and over until the dream
ceases to release us and we press the ghost up through
the dissipation of common rain to fall into the stigma
of a thousand year pistil that leads back to every flower.

Joseph Gallo
August 12, 2010

All that falls as between

2010-08-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

The Fabric Of Happiness

We arrive at this day for no other reason
than it is here as we are. This may be our
only chance to cherish such fortune as to
awaken to what has just now become possible.

So we take this day wherever it will take us:
into willing arms of sunrise; reluctant bosoms
of evening; and all that falls as between. It has
always been so. Such is the fabric of happiness.

It might be rain, so shall we seek to thirst.
It might be sun, so shall we seek to make
shadow. This is all this day has come to say.
Do not turn away. Do not turn away.

Joseph Gallo
July 11, 2010

Nothing happening that has not happened

2010-08-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

All nature helps to swell the song and chant the same refrain;
July and June have slipped away and August’s here again.
~Helen Maria Winslow (1851–1938)

August Here Again

and an early fog rolls it over like an underslept log.
I listen for the usual meadow murmur: this sounding
that; that calling out this. Nothing happening that
has not happened in fifty-eight previous Augusts.

I might paint today, or strum strings to break it up.
If I walk out now, I can stand unseen in the middle
of that meadow and let it all swathe me in nowness
for that is the only different thing about this August.

It arrives to arrive, promising nothing, expecting less
than that. You may meet a woman who excites your
body, but leaves you lacking in the seat of your soul.
You might think this would be enough, but you know
the truth of it, that a seabound river has far wiser plans.

Now the meadow is lifting off, crust and earth tearing
away from the underground scattering gophers, quail.
I watch it hover, bleed roots and worms, as if this
happens every day. Slowly it disappears into gray
and I am left to fill the hollow mercy of this hole.

Joseph Gallo
August 3, 2010

White flags waving unseen

2010-07-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

Mornings Like This

when July slips through the hills like an iceberg, her
fire gone out, the sun kettled in a grey gauze as I rise
dappled with gooseflesh after days sweating rivers.

Rabbits venture out reluctant to give up the night's
warmth curled among their kind, emerge with tapered
ears loath to heed the chill clarion of such early quail.

Across the far meadow, a talonary shape sits a limb
of tall eucalyptus. Everything alerts she is there, yet
something inevitably forgets to hoard caution.

In the lowlands, gracklechitter fugues in triple-stops
as crow pepper in a disharmonic counterpoint of mad
calliope whose music drifts up from the faint distance.

Mornings like this might never come again or may of
their own accord. They are not for us to summon or
dismiss, but merely arrive to absolve and immerse.

A thousand poets try and a thousand poets fail. We
stand averse to surrender the collapse of this quickened
looking, our small white flags waving unseen on paper.

Joseph Gallo
July 19, 2010

All our sorrowless stories

2010-07-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

Waiting is unlike anything else. It takes no short-cuts through time; always the long way around through where the story lies. ~Aucassin Verdé

Which Bird Breaks The Light
For Jan

She sends me poems from the in-between place,
the place where pens are dipped into petals that
yield hues given them by rains, rains given their
reasons to release by all our sorrowless stories,
the fancy tales we tell in our sleep and send up
from deep pillows as breath to the waiting sky,
a sky happy to receive whatever is sent for it
knows it must hold everything that matters.

There are some things one can give only to another,
for that person alone and no one else, carried on
shoulders of titans, dawns seen by only their eyes
as they lie draped in veils of their mingleness like
lovers who cannot guess at which bird breaks the light,
light that cannot sense such gentle shadows as they
share, the curvature of rare geometries lost to the
failing perfection of pale tapers that chant them silence.

These are the lines she would choose, the patterns
of words that adhere to no set purpose, their dear
appearance seemingly random and without compass,
veering wildly margin to margin, mattering without
meaning to, but mattering nevertheless, speaking for
the parts of her she once believed might be missing
forever, long-slept yet stirring like the mute piston
of a bulb that moves both earth and sky but to become.

Joseph Gallo
May 4, 2009

Reposted from Gold Coast Writers, September 2009

Beyond where june slid down

2010-07-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

July Walks In

puts her hands on her hips and
cocks her head. “I’ve brought
you sun, salt-sweetness from
the sea, a gentle something
to move your blinds a little.”

I look at her and there is a
familiar recognition we share
for a split atomic moment.
“Thank you,” I say not
knowing what else she might
suddenly ask or offer.

“Is the roadrunner mine as
well?” I continue meekly.
But she does not answer.
She’s already left her terse
reply on the other side of my
open window—in quailtwitter
and mockingbird squeech,
in the sunned rumps of
darting rabbits and the flat
meander of the blue channel
beyond where June slid down
the hillside to drown in days
gone by, never again to be seen.

Roadrunner sets his wings on
his hips and clurks, “Well,
what are we waiting for?”
I step out and everything I
know has been resummered.

Joseph Gallo
July 1, 2010

The endless river that circles

2010-06-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

All Tribes Are Mine

I claim them all, if none
will have me. All tribes
are mine. I claim them
in my afterbirth, my red
crown screaming, “How
have I come to this?”
before language made
its first imposition.

I claim all tribes by the
endless river that circles
the Earth in ceaseless
blood. I call everything
to kin from frog murmur
to bear cry. In the pale
shuddering of the sun and
the incendiary fan of the
moon, I proclaim breath
ties with all who would
have and not have me.

For I am of you, by you,
for you, in you, and you
cannot disclaim me. All
tribes are mine and I
claim you as such unto
the end of my brief days.

Joseph Gallo
May 27, 2010

Everything we know

2010-06-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

The Tender Acre

So we chat about love and relationships and the small
sacrifices one makes for another and we agree that we
each already have the answers to what we say we don’t
yet know and that what really slows us is the willingness
to take action based on what we already know, how fear
or comfort keeps us from banishing the compromises
we hold ourselves hostage to like those pretty roses one
sees tied at the end of grapevine rows that serve not as
decoration but as enticement to whatever ravages blight or
pestilence might visit upon the tender acre that would keep
the heart from swelling into something wondrous and
indiminishable, all this as a man walks out of a sporting
goods store and passes by holding a shiny new rod and
reel excitedly telling it about all the great places he’s going
to take it, the quality time they’ll soon spend together as
they hurriedly round the empty corner and disappear.

We turn to look at one another as everything we think
we know bobs and submerges without a trace of ripple.

Joseph Gallo
June 1, 2010

Tumble between the atoms

2010-05-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Relativity Poem

If you want reality,
then read the directions
on the back of your anti-
depressant bottle.

If you want to tumble
between the atoms of
what you are afraid of,
then read this.

Joseph Gallo
May 29, 2010

Contemplation In C-Minor & Kim Forges A New Life In Santa Fé
by Joseph Gallo.

Restless land, unsettled sky

2010-05-18T17:50:00.000-07:00

Featherhawking

Once again, I am no different than you.
We make time to walk the after rain,
look where the looking takes us. Down
the stealthy draw among the empty patches
between rising dandelion and where rocks
snailed off to since the last storm gave us
what was not its to keep. Small stories
chalked in owl scat, coyote tracks, the
living parameters that mark fluid lines
between restless land and unsettled sky.

Careful then not to mar the mud traverse
of quail, the light verse of their transitory
scripture leading into yet another density
to remain as indecipherable as sacred thicket.
We know these stories, by heart almost,
as if we were born to read them. The names
never change, merely the readers. We almost
miss them: two twists of fine underdown
strewn and stiffening in the striped wind.
And there beyond those, two grand airships.

So we collect them, gather them into our
keeping for the swift stay they surrender
to be ours. We will, in equal time, give
them all back. Mockingbirds round and
rouse our brief connoiter, wring water from
their brooking song, call out to anything
that might listen. Like you, I turn alone
for the house with these tokens in my hand,
cross spring grass as buckskins snap the wet
weedtops to stain in lingered storm there.

Joseph Gallo
May 18, 2010

Bells more prudent than ladders

2010-05-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

Winter Sun

It may have been caught up in some forgotten
branches, left untended as so many parts of my
body, nothing touching to touch it out from where
it hung like a stubborn leaf or a treed kitten too
far climbed for its own good. Firemen may be
summoned, but it will not help. Bells may prove
more prudent than ladders for what is far kept
will only be rung down by the pull of a monkless
moon. This happens every year whether winter
arrives or not, snowless, deadstilled under drifts
that make bleak ziggurats in the night.

These are the hours that seek sun in no allied
corner of the world. We need stories read by
willing lovers on days like these. I will read a
cold tale to the sun that might coax her down,
siren her to crash among the rocks of my bones
where keels of lost cauldrons kick against the
swells of this unseasoned hunger. For all the
good it might do, I will send vapor to hide her
deeper in the dead trees until she says enough.

Joseph Gallo
January 9, 2009

Things that arrive

2010-04-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

Owlless Under Spring

Owlless under spring, the stars telling all,
nothing held back in the blackness. My
father visits again, in his usual way five
years after we buried him in Rose Hills.

He doesn’t say much, as usual, but I
listen anyway as he commandeers the
voices of nightbirds, mimics communication
through every single misunderstood one.

“I’m sorry,” he might be saying. Or, “Please
forgive me,” insisting again. I thought he might
have asked if I remember him at all, or why I’ve
yet to visit there where he lies beside his mother.

These are the things that arrive owlless under
spring, the reticulated cosmos whirring violently
above belying its placid demeanor of beauty, of
succoring interest, of care or passing concern.

So I find my place there, pick out a starset spot
to lift my feet and lean into a thirst I never knew
I had. There, perhaps, or there within the stinger
of my starsign so the poisons may thrive in the light.

Joseph Gallo
April 18, 2010

Where the woman sleeps

2010-04-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

Aperio II

Veins of lupin carry the field,
stream in lavender veils through
a drying heart to bear it gold.

Rock calves and suspends midair, the
island borne by a trick of light out on
the channel where the woman sleeps.

Wintergrass sips what spring rain
pours now in sun, the cheep of quail
scattering seed beneath tasseled forage.

Two oaks, nearly still, herd grazing
wind along a trace of branch where
the red hawk sat her watch for an hour.

Another spring, is all. Another spring.
We do well to keep company with red
sisters who would call us out to sit.

Joseph Gallo
April 6, 2010

What we think, what we choose

2010-03-31T18:20:00.000-07:00

Graces Fall

We begin so high, the slow climb to summits
we were born to rediscover and attain. Once
arrived, we sample the air, test vapors for their
vintage, savor subtle differences between rarified
blues, note the absence of angels this far up.

We struggle to survive until we come to
understand this was never meant to be a struggle.
We learn to sit, to be still in such atmospheres,
to move with purpose rather than persistence,
refract what elements would seek to suit us.

This is all meant for the body, for spaces
between atoms where the ages thrive to
bring us to some place we might call home.
What we think, what we choose to believe,
has so very little to do with any of it.

This is the worn path of prophets and
sailors, footprints left in sand and foam
that lead the way toward a destination that
is but a traverse through commencement.
This is where what we call grace falls.

Joseph Gallo
March 24, 2010

Held in the bosom of a city

2010-03-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

She Always Wanted To Go To Paris
For Kim

She always wanted to go to Paris. She wanted a pair
of boots not available anywhere else in the world;
buttered croissants warm beside a cup of delirious
coffee strong enough to flatten the Arc de Triomphe.

She wanted the light on her arms fragrant with mist from
the Mediterranean, a dark Moroccan man’s hand sliding
along the brace of her nape as if tracing the north coast
of a map of his homeland where her desire spends winter.

She always wanted to go to Paris. Stay for months and fly
to Texas to see her father, for him to live forever and still
be alive when she flew back to France and, when airborne,
settle into a dream that her mother would be at Roissy waiting.

She wanted to misspeak a thousand irregular verbs incorrectly,
watch a waiter imperceptibly wince at her better-than-average
attempt to decimate their cherished tongue, order the wrong
thing and act as if it were exactly what she wanted.

She always wanted to go to Paris. To be mugged by a street
thug who clapped her in the back completely unprovoked
while his girlfriend watched and surrendered her right to be
counted among women who should never have to suffer so.

She wanted art flooding her senses, the audacity of it, the
singularity of pricelessness overwhelming her callow sense
of beauty deepening her encompassing of what it is to be
held in the bosom of a city of such incomparable light.

She always wanted to go to Paris. She wanted to sit alongside
the river and watch reflections race the slow summer sun,
spy lovers lazing along the loping banks whispering French
words in French ears with French mouths hungry for conquest.

She wanted this and little else. To be seen among its citizenry,
mistaken for Parisian by boorish Americans who would never
know her uncle was the same cavalier swashbuckler as theirs,
a prattling young cuss who seldom gets the ways and words right.

Joseph Gallo
March 5, 2010

Something else given

2010-03-09T14:09:00.001-08:00

Quail Under Brush

To paint them would diminish.
Their color, unpalettable.
My hand, unworthy; the light
irredeemable as sleep.

To live in perpetual alarm would
nail canvas to wood, wood to
shadow, shadow to sky and all
that would bear harm from it.

Dirtmound serves a perfect
promontory. The tasseled
sentinel holds wary; any
suddenness cause for claxon.

They sight me in colors swathed
by the spectrum of their rich
vision. Heat and aura paint
me with threatless precision.

Signature not owl, not bobcat,
not hawk; vertical, observing,
nothing imminent, but something,
something else given to mistrust.

Joseph Gallo
March 1, 2010

Beyond this beginning

2010-03-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

So go down the road. Be death, be stardust, enter the
duality known to the generations who are vanished,
who left behind this double image, but only half
the message, just the instructions for how to begin.
~ Eleanor Lerman (from her poem Muons Are Passing Through You)

Instructions For How To Begin

It all looks so simple. Every day begins not too unlike
the millions before it: a rousing, a stirring, a changing
from nocturne to reveille as owl gives over to rooster.

How this will all unfold, no one can say. It is the first
lesson we set aside before bearing wing, paw, fin,
foot to its taken purpose. Everything does it this way.

The journey promises one thing: it will reach an end.
It will not spur you to go this way or that.
One signpost is as good or useless as the last.

Should you find me struggling with my shoes,
do not hold this knowledge against me. The snail
treks a world far larger than we can hope to imagine.

Half-erased, I set this for your eyes to reassemble
in any manner you might deem fitting. Beyond
this beginning there is, remember, yet another.

Joseph Gallo
March 1, 2010

A ghost of last breath

2010-02-25T12:45:00.000-08:00

The Last Woman I Fall In Love With

may be named Jeremy. He will work
in the hospital they brought me to and
be a paragon of caring and procedural
execution. He will tend to me beyond
the end of my luxurious discomfiture.

Or her name might be Connie. She’ll
be ordinary among ordinary, yet I
will find her unsurpassingly beautiful.
I will have unnoticed her on a thousand
streets and a thousand subway seats.

Only now will I recognize her as my
tending angel. I will want to sit with
her over coffee and talk in detail about
the new curtains she hung in her living
room that match the blue seat cushions.

She will know the purpose of every
tube, be adept in filtered needles and
dispensing of pain medication. She will
take me back to the bliss of my youth
a hundred times and never know.

I will fall in love with her in the last
hour, marry and have three kids. We
will have a wooded house in Ohio,
a cabin in the San Juans, and a yurt
somewhere far up in the Blue Ridge.

The last woman I fall in love with
will see me through to the other side.
She’ll set the coins to settle up with
the ferryman, unplug the machines,
notate her clipboard, and call for the doctor.

When they return, it will be the most
embarrassing moment of my life. They
will check some signs, say some words,
note a time in the chart, and douse the light.
My love will lie hidden in a ghost of last breath.

Joseph Gallo
February 25, 2010

For my father on the day of his birth and who passed away in May 2005. And for all of us who have lost and will lose fathers.

That you do so

2010-02-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

Orionaria
For Donald Konopka

If one day I should die
See that Orion stands fierce in the sky
A belt of light, a sword of stars
A cloak of negrid cultivars.

If one day I should pass
Toast to me a demitasse
Raise it high to an upturned moon
See that you do so very soon.

If one day I should cease
See my war is brought to peace
Eat the fruit left in my bowl
That it may seed your pilgrim soul.

Joseph Gallo
February 16, 2010

In memoriam on the day of his passing. Deepest sympathies to the Konopka family. Artography above from an original astrographic image of Orion by Géza Kurczveil, ©2010.

The loving states

2010-02-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

Lözarn Valentine

The lovers walk, their every footfall
an exercise in cinching the bond,
invisible points where tendrils
stretch and strain along the body
in tender pressure variables that
move them apart, but not too apart,
and clumsily crash them together.

This couple are in Kapellplatz, she
in white, he in black, neither aware
I am watching a world away, spying
them gait their paired singularity,
noting how the muscles compensate
for cobbled terrain and the old stone
fountain before them, marvel at how
they negotiate the obstacle without
compromising the union, the loving
states that tell me they are lovers.

Joseph Gallo
February 14, 2010