Another January poem

 

A comfortable, daily rain

undramatically dormant

cold season of drizzle

in an evocation of derailed

trains, missed appointments

and cement sandtraps.

I miss the oleanders, the eucalyptus

of the California coast, the cliffs

of a sea not worth swimming

in a city not worth destroying;

there just might be one or two

here of the just worth saving.

1/28/2013

Florence

The Man from Mandrax

The Man from Mandrax

Mandrax seed in a dead man’s coat, I stalk the floodplain until recently held to be a Venetian phenomenon. Crackling seals re-perform my crime for random passerby in drastic madams’ elastic tokens. Gone. Another flat-ended puddle of flax: liminal, pointing eastward. Signed, sealed, delivered. I’m disguised as a junkie of old—they stare at me outside of the soup kitchen. It rains still and, huddled in niches, the snails emerge towards their hallowed wine and tobacco hollows. One toke, one toke—only a motion away.

At a hiccup’s pace, not necessarily stoned, butt-ended avalanche of water, or waiting, of wine and sandbags. Dramamine helps one to lean with the city’s rocking gait. An oasis palmed in plaid, deflated, then drowned, newly navigable as carburetors cough up blood and conk out. In that, another deed indeed gets done.

The sun may never shine again, undone as Newflorence’s Renzi's-pavement’s laced with mercury, a mirror to the falling water, upward in a twin so thin against hidden stones and sea-ment, no seed to take over mortar, no earth beneath our feet, only moons, a mutually attracted collaborator to the weight, an image in the sky of the night we exiled electronically orange, crucifying all good intentions for the season ‘tis for regretting the folly of poverty with all them gifts.

But quit? It don’t seem likely—not in a text anyway, a mandate for decent proceeding onto the next hanged man giving birth to worlds of poisonous offspring in stolen coats who never look back but only forward to vengeful revolutions.

11/28-9/2012

Florence and Bologna

"Velvet wet precaution..."

Velvet wet precaution, a savior

salivating over dampened greens and golds

and soggy grey, grounded olives past

passengers far, far away in hopeful

sleep.

            Those ravines dividing Tuscan sun

From Latian solarity, the revelation

that there is no particular one, no center,

despite Peter’s rock and/or Orpheus’ egg.

The circular line of expiational time

expands, mocking clocks, drenching benches

and presiding over all—‘though there are no—

second chances. The gist of arable fields,

fallow shoals soaking up the thunder

of another era, a Roman sojourn

                                                 surrenders

to the thought that becomes this velvet

wet precaution: that you might get caught

in the rain.

                        8/29/2012

                        Florence-Rome