Hello, my dear solamente reader,
By way of explanation about this weirdness of posting poetry on a blog that seems to be primarily about office supplies…before I was an office-supply hound or a grant writer-in-training or a published writer of prose (and please check out my work related site, the PenUltimate Ink. Language Support page for details on all services I provide within the area of letters), I was a poet, or, as my sister and I call it, a “pote.” When I was eight, I wrote my first, already hackneyed, verse about the delights of a dewdrop (diamond, of course) on a cherry (ruby, of course) that I saw on my very own cherry tree in my backyard. And I never really stopped. I hope that my work has gotten better; it should have, since I have two degrees in English and writing poetry specifically.
But we all know that poetry doesn’t pay, and it’s unrealistic to think about making a living by being a poet. Even the best poets with lots of books under their belts have side jobs; they write other things, they’re teachers, if they’re lucky, or they’re waiters and working in retail if they’re not. That’s why I became a grant writer and that’s why I also do editing and tutoring and teaching college when I can. However, since I have a blog, I have a place where I can post samples of my writing so that it will get out there. I still submit and go through the humbling experience of rejection after rejection, but now, with this new-fangled thing called the Interweb, or whatever it is, I can force more people to see my “pomes” and perhaps, just perhaps, that might result in a collection being published some day.
Therefore, I will occasionally inflict upon you a pome. However, I won’t do it often, so don’t worry. I want to do it just enough to let you know that I am what I say I am: a practicing pote. With emphasis on “practicing.”
With that, here is my first potry posting. Enjoy!
Cavatina
“…people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness.” — Luciano Berio, composer
I heard a song today and thought
of you and Italy,
I, glassy in the picture,
anonymous soldier and music-box
dancer, mahogany curls to my white muslin waist,
everything below it kept sacred to La Maria Vergine.
Expecting no customers, laying the table
out of habit, I lit
candle stubs in cracked bottles, all the war had left.
Flares frozen in miniature,
beacons, I underestimated
their power in what seemed
just another summer night,
verbena-kissed,
the wind our only lodger
when you bashed your head on the low lintel,
reeled like a drunk,
a Spartan who’d fought for more days
than there are names
all blended together that chiming night,
la quattro giugno 1944.
Lone patron in a room meaningless with struggle,
rough wooden tables and crude frescoes
of Bacchus and angels twining in cream-colored time,
draperies like haunted moss: flagging crimson,
green that dwindles into gray
dust that coats, no matter how much I wiped with lemon oil,
muting a room already dusky
with an old man’s faded idea of elegance.
On this night alone, there is only smiling;
for this night alone, there is only this song
trapped in my little girl’s music box.
I outgrew it then.
Your giant brown hand belonged on my waist,
engulfed my own hand,
led me whirling, darkness ricocheted,
into this laughing waltz,
my white skirt and your olive tie floating the tide of discovery,
your jacket slung like tired armor on the water-stained chair.
Candle’s radiance, unstable
in our wind’s wake,
spinning loose my manacles, locked by Church and country,
abandoned in breathless orbit,
faces collide, scratch of tired stubble to match your eyes
cavernous with suffering that has no voice,
remote as you, as the gales of war
that evoke someone’s chuckle, raspy with oratory;
you have sworn to crush him.
Arms locked, entwined, mine
fragile tendrils of ivy, sinuous round hardened shoulder
and neck, this sepia pillar whose ardor,
once and again the atomic furor aimed toward a spider’s flag,
but for one interlude,
a moment when it only had to be
ardent lassitude that caused my arms to flower…
how they soothed the column in whose hewn embrace
I sang this fairy tale,
immobile, a jasmine shelled by melodious rain
against your stone chest,
sheltered in night-blooming
nostalgia, and bruised
by your very vigor.
The witches’ hour
tapers glimmering,
cotton jasmine in obsolete gloom.
Crickets took up the song eventually,
and night’s veiled raiment
faded as with bluing—
a tear-stained morning,
salmon and silver.
The shadows in the corners crept away.
Poised for valor,
“shipping out,” you said,
in France,
a place called Omaha,
a beach
to dance in the waves
for you, caring naught for sand or salt,
knots encrusted in this Siren’s hair;
we had our song, all I needed
to bring you to me,
dance.
***
Sometimes, when the air smells of bread
and the temptation of wheat is no sin,
I wind the old music box in the dark
room lit by a candle’s crown;
curtsey to a vision
whose rucksacked back I will not watch anymore
casting morn’s twilight
shadow, snaking on the ground
withering by distance.
Arms rise to granite shoulder,
his waist under my hand
… wait a beat…
pirouette back,
back
the last true night I lived.
Cavatina,
a slow, simple song
played only once, no refrain;
a single air of a large movement
or a solitary waltz on a war-sanctioned night,
one prayer, one melody,
encased in a music box,
a night of secrets but no names,
before Antium,
my Coriolanus
when our harmony and our future were unbroken,
a time full of humor and sadness,
of hope and prophecy,
when we were holding hands in the darkness.
