We were born.
~~~ ** ~~~ ** ~~~ ** ~~~ ** ~~~ **~~~
DAD
Sometimes, under large
oranges discs
when
her distant face makes endless, sad ooooo’s,
the moon sings in pools of harmonica nights,
sad notes
wound around sinuous pickets of silence
light beams,
stragglers, fallen here when you left,
the lights of the inner valley realize
they can do nothing about it,
shrug in their brilliant
simmering
and then I, for a
moment,
allow
myself you … a cool glass
of what I nearly had
in this motionless place
earthy darkness, a honey-sweet moon
glides its silver, strumming
along rememberance
and that soft brush of life
hums a nearly perfect pitch
almost harmonious
heavy
with nights berries and
tentative, blue music
unheard
but felt,
a
tantalizing wisp
a
quick firefly spark of
another life, now gone
into
this breathing darkness
only faint tones,
a
distant window
slams
shut on someone’s
jealously guarded dream
whose
tiny pieces could waft
long feathered tails, wrap around
a subconscious clothesline and
flap slowy, softly
like sheets drying hazy cotton
of the past and
I listen
can hear their moths
treading this illusion of light and
reality
and somewhere in there is
that place where I can find you,
a telephone man who
played harmonica
and
was nearly my dad
and if you failed
to love me,
what
was love anyways?
little
more than a barren twig that shuddered
in your winter or mine ….
Or maybe it was even the
slowly spelled words
of a large, orange moon when
suddenly I know
that you will certainly appear,
smiling that guilty, careless radiance,
white doves that forgive
the wind
yes, gone, but only
because
you’ve
been stringing
phone
lines into empty space
(all these years! Just for me!)
and on a special receiver
concocted with the fire of stars,
we will begin
(together!)
to hear
the luminous voice of the moon
finally able to tell us
just what he’s been trying to spell
all these years.
~~```~~~~```~~~~```~~~~```
I see pennies, pennies on the ground all around.
And I see people, homeless people hugging the sacred ground,
Holy as the water makes sound, holy as the green ground.
I see deep in the hungered eyes, as the water draws miracles
In a cup, the flies are cold as winter as summer sups.
And hunger quakes the bowels
like terror shredding terror’s claws.
You
gave me meat when two men walked in front of their nose,
when two men walk a hard, hard road, the least of them my brother.
You were a stranger in a kingdom
of friends, and the Lord of the mansion
Took
me in, naked and he clothed me with what I will be,
Sick and the King visited me, his hands are flowers day and
night,
You captured your prison in Self, and
the rest of the World
Dug up your roots and
burned your bridges with your cross –
And
You came unto me.
The young face the young and blame the old men in their house,
They see pennies on the ground, pennies all around,
And their knees never humble – know no King.
John Amato
Isaiah 55:11
*****
My
House
I was locked in
a wave of time,
a wild finger
beckoned,
and I knew to
whom it called
all around me,
its dazed eye towards Jupiter,
the house turns slowly on
its thickened stem of events,
plans of well seasoned
pollen
which, nonetheless, will scatter
into
the canyon wind,
probably at night
while
I sleep
this furrowed place contemplates
its eventual demise,
angels walk right out of
chiseled stone statues,
the crystal shatters
spilling adjectives among
the asters,
and seeds of yesterday's light
which always defy explanation
why
you were always gone,
but the thought withers among
nouns, socks, and a phone ringing,
perennial sounds while
light beats its sweet way
into wings upward
scattered among
the faucet's steady drip
meandering to the canal,
to the river,
to the sea
to the green depths
of some
November or December,
when you won't return,
when days will gently fold
around the hour
where we
will end