stiffly beside her on the limb,
stretching their wings, inflating their chests,
holding their red scabrous heads erect.
Their nostrils dilate with desire.
The ritual goes on for hours.
These bald scavengers pay court politely—
like overdressed princes in an old romance—
circling, stretching, yearning,
waiting for her to choose.
The stink and splendor of fertility
arouses the world. The rotting log
flowers with green moss. The fallen chestnut
splits and drives its root into the soil.
The golden air pours down its pollen.
Desire brings all things back to earth,
charging them to circle, stretch, and preen—
the buzzard or the princess, the scorpion, the rose—
each damp and fecund bud yearning to burst,
to burn, to blossom, to begin.
PROGRESS REPORT
It’s time to admit I’m irresponsible.
I lack ambition. I get nothing done.
I spend the morning walking up the fire road.
I know every tree along the ridge.
Reaching the end, I turn around. There’s no point
to my pilgrimage except the coming and the going.
Then I sit and listen to the woodpecker
tapping away. He works too hard.
Tonight I will go out to watch the moon rise.
If only I could move that slowly.
I have no plans. No one visits me.
No need to change my clothes.
What a blessing just to sit still—
a luxury only the lazy can afford.
Let the dusk settle on my desk.
No one needs to hear from me today.
III. REMEMBRANCE
To the memory of my first son
Michael Jasper Gioia
Briefest of joys, our life together.
PRAYER
Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves.
Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur
of autumn’s opulence, blade of lightning
harvesting the sky.
Keeper of the small gate, choreographer
of entrances and exits, midnight
whisper traveling the wires.
Seducer, healer, deity or thief,
I will see you soon enough—
in the shadow of the rainfall,
in the brief violet darkening a sunset—
but until then I pray watch over him
as a mountain guards its covert ore
and the harsh falcon its flightless young.
NIGHT WATCH
For my uncle, Theodore Ortiz, U.S.M.M.
I think of you standing on the sloping deck
as the freighter pulls away from the coast of China,
the last lights of Asia disappearing in the fog,
and the engine’s drone dissolving in the old
monotony of waves slapping up against the hull.
Leaning on the rails, looking eastward to America
across the empty weeks of ocean,
how carefully you must have planned your life,
so much of it already wasted on the sea,
the vast country of your homelessness.
Macao. Vladivostok. Singapore.
Dante read by shiplamp on the bridge.
The names of fellow sailors lost in war.
These memories will die with you,
but tonight they rise up burning in your mind
interweaving like gulls crying in the wake,
like currents on a chart, like gulfweed
swirling in a star-soaked sea, and interchangeable
as all the words for night—la notte, noche, Nacht, nuit,
each sound half-foreign, half-familiar, like America.
For now you know that mainland best from dreams.
Your dead mother turning toward you slowly,
always on the edge of words, yet always
silent as the suffering Madonna of a shrine.
Or your father pounding his fist against the wall.
There are so many ways to waste a life.
Why choose between these icons of unhappiness,
when there is the undisguised illusion of the sea,
the comfort of old books and solitude to fill
the long night watch, the endless argument of waves?
Breathe in that dark and tangible air, for in a few weeks
you will be dead, burned beyond recognition,
left as a headstone in the unfamiliar earth
with no one to ask, neither wife nor children,
why your thin ashes have been buried here
and not scattered on the shifting gray Pacific.
VETERANS’ CEMETERY
The ceremonies of the day have ceased,
Abandoned to the ragged crow’s parade.
The flags unravel in the caterpillar’s feast.
The wreaths collapse onto the stones they shade.
How quietly doves gather by the gate
Like souls who have no heaven and no hell.
The patient grass reclaims its lost estate
Where one stone angel stands as sentinel.
The voices whispering in the burning leaves,
Faint and inhuman, what can they desire
When every season feeds upon the past,
And summer’s green ignites the autumn’s fire?
The afternoon’s a single thread of light
Sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow,
As one by one the branches fade from sight,
And time curls up like paper turning yellow.
THE SONG
How shall I hold my soul that it
does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it over you to other things?
If it would only sink below
into the dark like some lost thing
or slumber in some quiet place
which did not echo your soft heart’s beat.
But all that ever touched us — you and me—
touched us together
like a bow
that from two strings could draw one voice.
On what instrument were we strung?
And to what player did we sing
our interrupted song?
(After the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)
THE GODS OF WINTER
Storm on storm, snow on drifting snowfall,
shifting its shape, flurrying in moonlight,
bright and ubiquitous,
profligate March squanders its wealth.
The world is annihilated and remade
with only us as witnesses.
Briefest of joys, our life together,
this brittle flower twisting toward the light
even as it dies, no more permanent
for being perfect. Time will melt away
triumphant winter, and even your touch
prove the unpossessable jewel of ice.
And vanish like this unseasonable storm
drifting there beyond the windows where even
the cluttered rooftops now lie soft and luminous
like a storybook view of paradise.
Why not believe these suave messengers
of starlight? Morning will make
their brightness blinding, and the noon insist
that only legend saves the beautiful. But if
the light confides how one still winter must
arrive without us, then our eternity
is only this white storm, the whisper
of your breath, the deities of this quiet night.