Stones
so blue in the night
listening to the steps we take
— they have no wisdom for us
no one puts an ear to them
shining after rain
they outstare every star
for they know stillness
is another way of moving
through the narrow throat of time
and yes, they call for cathedrals
to take them up
and bathe their faces
with all that falling light
Bastille Market
Though the rough bunch of carrots
misshapen as boys in hoodies and trackies
with green blazes wild as African headdresses
are as expensive as tourist cheeses
or cinnamon pain aux figues et noix
still the man in a stained t shirt who sells them
and the woman beside him whose morning hair
is wrapped up in a worn veil
have come in from their farm
along a dark morning road
in a van jostling their potatoes and carrots
dragged sweet and full of what the soil
has given them all the way to my hand
held out as the man nods and wrings the neck
of the long green leafy show of his carrots.
The Red Truck
At low-enough-to-sit-on rubbled walls
of once-homes bombed seventy-five years ago
in a world war come to Palermo’s skies
as fighting planes — now gracing entrances
to shopping malls lodged into highway knots
out in cloud-soaked suburbs of traffic
(where three men sell fish from a cart in the rain by the road)
— we lie down beside Giovanni Falcone’s missing
childhood home to hold a book against the sun
or lean a shadow over phone screen.
Sunlight silent over us like some supreme teacher.
Palermo’s Mafia needed four hundred kilograms of dynamite
to speak for it — its local earthquake a side chapel to Etna –
a lava mouth opening to corridors of web-grey catacombs.
Beside us a red truck with one torn and flapping tyre
reverses over flower pots, its driver trembling, shrugging.
Across the way: a church without a roof, buildings given
over to those who can write and draw on their torn walls.
What You Want Me to Understand:
that you’d never known what it was
you were painting
that you love him still
that he’d died too soon
that there’s nothing to be done
but endure this love
that dogs are machines of devotion
that once he was gone you loved him again
that he was good — though maybe not
as good as a dog can be good
that the question now is what to do
(what am I to do with myself?)
that building a boat is something to do
that sailing at a moon rising from the sea
takes courage to keep to your course
that dogs understand you these days
that you imagine the faint near-sounds of him
at the silent tasks of the dead
keeping his voice alive inside your words
what you want me to understand is:
this teetering place we have above waves
at a long-handled tiller, above us those sails
nudging our blood-bucketing vessel towards shore
I left you at the end of your stony garden path
at your gate that falls open
to a road strung down a mountain
past goats, pine trees and clouds on its way to the bay