La Dolce Vita (poem)

He arrived here not from Italia, for in 1920
    a man's country was still la famiglia,
And affairs of state were conducted in the green
    vineyards surrounding a man's village,
Where the only officialdom was one's compare
    e commare, and commerce was solely weighed
In the coin of familial interest:  il papa
Would consult his kin, and then rule ex cathedra.

No, he arrived not from Italia but from Benevento,
    a small wine-growing village perched high
On the slopes of the wind-swept and scraggy Dolomites
    where his family had grown olives and bambinos
In equal profusion for centuries, slowly despoiling
    the land which had once nurtured; at age nine
He boarded a boat bound for Ellis Island, the first
Of the many ambassadors his family would send.

He joined his many fellow contadinos
    in the Little Italy of Boston's North End,
And soon was laying tracks for the Boston & Maine;
    he prospered, built himself a neat white home
In the suburbs, took a young immigrant la donna
    to be his wife and created his own famiglia
Of eleven children, the seventh being il primo figlio.
He began to call himself Frank, not Fortunato,

And started pronouncing his surname as an American,
    had running water and electricity, used his phone,
And even learned to drive the second-hand Olds
    he bought from someone who had come from the Capua
Area, too--but when I met him when he was old
    and retired, I would watch him stand out back
Where his garden grew, and I would watch him caress
His plum tomatoes with an almost appalling tenderness.

"Pomodori," he softly chanted, weighing the heft
    of that ancient word against this alien world
For whose tongue he no longer had any use; and lifting
    a rubbed red radish to his sly smiling mouth,
He would  whisper "ravanelli" to himself, soft
    and low, savoring the radish-sharp retort
Of that first bite--and in that child's moment unfurled
All my ageless time, and endless echoes first heard.

Scaling the Ramparts (poem)

 --USAFA, 1970

                                       I

Poised half the way up the Rockies' east front range,

   we three toiled in a crowd of blue

suits, unmilitant militants in a melange

of would-be scholarly soldiers:  we trained our shoes

   to be  mirrors of our stoical face,

schooled our minds in how to bulletproof

our young bodies, measured our swift days in pacing

    punishments on a latticed terrazo,

and gave infinite care to out jackboot lacings.

Early to bed, early we rose to this martial piazza

   and marched, asleep, to a pre-dawn breakfast,

though praying first to a young warrior's gods;

and then off to class where benignant achitects

   of inhuman designs taught us the methods

of human erasure, pure, chaste, and delectable.

Late afternoons, our football became a bullet

   of innocent intent, a guided missile

for the fraternal strife of playing cadets.

Remote, in that high air, what could we tell

to those mountains about a distant shrapnel?

What could we know of the blooded ineffable?

                                     

                                      II

Three young, unthinking reeds--

fragile Swan, sinuous swimmer

in discontent; dumb Wise

who'd mindless aspire without intent;

and Tony Zap, pure mafioso

of his burnt-out, desirous bent--

frozen in the green of their spring year

find vision suddenly sprung upward,

up the ooming, overarching

Rampart Range and find as sudden

hearts beating up that steep

slope, the vertiginous slope climbing

eastward and up towards the pale sun,

and vine-like up they begin to creep.

                                       III

And so pointed our plod up that sliding slide of peak,

placed each foot, feeling grave fetters receding,

noted tough pines thinning, our streterous talk

blown up the balding slope, buoyant in rarified blue

of heaving ascent, and hefted to  communal hearts

onto granite crag, at last, and beheld the midget grace

of a world grown small below.

                                       IV

stone face mountain high--

we blow the reefer-mad spring

out over endless plains     

                                        V

      And then down

screeing. skiing down the slope

  from rock to branch

                  to rock and rock

      and rock, hairless

                  heads streaming back

         and up, pulsating         

brains

                            grinning

   at speed

                        and dopplering trees

only to come to rest

     at the still

                              point

where a contoured green

spawns the rectangular stone terrazo.

                                       VI

Down, down, we came from the crown of the granite tor,

remembering only the distancing green arc of plain

fading at dark--that Monday, we played at that war

once more, stepping through that and each following day

in  their dutiful succession; below, mendicant whores

sold everyday wares and politicos weighed and delayed.

   Each morning, the blue geometer of our faceless crowd

   spoke as one, and resounded over the muffling clouds.

                                       VII

Sundays, sirens wailed

somewhere else--under the sun-drench

of stained glass, we sat

quiet and cool, cowering

in the holy guise

of a religious innocence.

Meditation on Form (poem)

                                            --for Caitlin Thomas

So you would have us boom, then, the word
Inarticulate, and howl the moon--indeed,
Whisper magic, hymn the song most inward
To the cliff-limned voicings of this morning's sea;
But sons of man amid the ceaseless churning
Of these ever-becoming tides, you'd yet have us write
The notes of time's tuneless turning,
Inscribe the stops that play out our light.

But outside, through rain-soiled panes, I see
Her poised, her diver's plumbed touch cleave the wind,
And find tongue stopped as I strain to read
Her outflung form with sun and sea contend.

The light belied, mute black signs encrypt the dawn;
The night denied, frail white hands shape this song.

The Lovers (poem)

Nude, she leads him to her garden green,
Her upturned face, her eyes, sustaining lights
Where fiery fruits are born incarnadine.

What matters that flesh should act the libertine,
Its ephemeral grasp so graspingly infinite?
Nude, she leads him to her garden green.

For our play is but passion's purple, amaranthine,
Is but a green, green dance of mortal delight
Where fiery fruits are born incarnadine.

So let us play our hearts' tamborine
And thrum the limbs' strings far into the night:
Nude, she leads him to her garden green.

For when sybarites sate into epicenes,
Then comes the genesis of some second sight
Where fiery fruits are born incarnadine,

So you will take my hand, and your sybilline
Touch feel out our soul, the hermaphrodite:
Nude she leads him to her garden green
Where fiery fruits are born incarnadine.

Danse Macabre (poem)

We were an unlikely pair:  you, quite declasse
   In your faded and dingy red sweatsuit;
Me, hardly more upright, it being a Friday.
   But owing to some noblesse oblige,
   Perhaps a fawning desire to please
Yourself, it could be--no matter, by streetlight
You asked me in silence to a most private soiree.
   Imagine my shock, feelings of dis-ease,
Imagine my face bathed in a surreal light:
   But insist you did sous la lune.

"Gimme all yo' money," is what you said.
   "What?" I answered most civilly.
"Gimme yo' fuckin' money," now angrily.
    "What??" I can't believe I said.

"This is a motherfuckin' gun,"

   you flashed it at me,
"Gimme all yo' fuckin' money,
    or I'll shoot you dead."
"What!??" (oh god) is what I said.

And so we began our intimate dance,
   Joined at the hands by a chrome-
Plated wish:  we whirled, twirled, and pranced.
   By streetlight we danced a pas de deux,
   Violently graceful beneath that moon,
And awaited one sound to extinguish the night.
Too rudely, perhaps, I broke our embrace
   And ran for the warmth of a well-lit room.
You walked away, chrome in hand, some benighted
   Suitor, tres triste et seul.

Mending Kit (poem)

                                      --Provincetown, 2001

The package, palm fit, its binding skeins
of thread, its prick of needled light,
tools made neat for an alchemist's sigh:
there is nothing more real than nothing.

And here, ocean birds scream to sing
some call, their call, to the whippet wind,
to the rushing tides:  and nature pins
its drooping hem with this diurnal
darning of her slow ebb and return,
the binding thread, the shoreline's rim.

We walk down the dazzled light
where waters lave this stone's slow turning.

In Green Harmony (poem)

                                                   --for Holly, and Pam, by the bay

                                 1

A latticed, green world and and water-lily light
     were but last year's dazzle of pink
limbs, a mere scarlet of passion afloat,
     awash, adrift and terribly undulant
              to these milk-dowsed eyes;

and Claude Monet watched it all, la nymphea,
     goat-tongued poet, and moon child one.


                                 2

Once, by Marin's redolently blue bay,
     a small boy heard the contentious gulls
skate eggshell skies, saw the distant buoys
     of men at work, felt the ineffable, keen pull,
              the wounded words of waves;

and the air could glimmer, then, as the diamond daze
     of fog dissolved into indeterminate day.


                                 3

And what child was it, upon Fuji's sacred loom,
     squatted beneath kitchen table, sensed in limbs,
such fragile limbs, earth and sky tumble, felt doom
     in  the rising sun, and shook to trees nimbly
             dancing?  Memory's dim room:

in amah's tow, riding the nickeling train where
     green waves of rye breathe still, en plein air.


                                 4

Yes, many decades since, when Monet surely knew
     the joy of this prismed light, saw the willow's
weeping green, a bed of flowers, its sinewed,
     power of scarlet and purple, its prolific yellow,
               the sky and its watery blue--

his blinded eyes now hang upon Chicago's walls,
     none the less for that, remembering it all.


                                  5

And you, poised upon the slopes of Big Sur,
     peering west into the next millennium,
what will you see to remember, what remember
     to see? what vision now innocent
              become your roseate blur,

more accurate than true?   In a green harmony,
     the mind sways easy on a widening sea.