Poetry
published by Retort Magazine, on April 12th, 2013Kids were picking up hundred dollar bills
Kids were picking up hundred dollar bills
strewn across the casino floor.
A couple hid behind torn bodies
an army of dogheads, a broken door.
I woke to the memory real and surreal.
Let a man take a wife for two reasons –
cockatrice or grace. They ran expelled
heavy limbed on an animal trail.
Bug eyed, chagrined, lumpen
wrapped in the skin of freshly killed boar
they couldn’t escape the dialect
almost never
dreaming elation.
A lean and melancholy David
slack-jawed
with malicious flavour.
No city embraced opera.
They hung body parts from the Bargello
carrion feasting in daylight, yet
the sainted faces in Caravaggio’s glow
or drifts of prayer on scraps of paper
swarming like white bees;
photos of the dead or lost
placed at the altar
of Santa Rita.
I would have jumped
but for the sulfurous yellow of the Arno.
The hero in his bloody sock
pallid, peering
bearing prickles, thistles.
Millennia of separation
worried in my bones.
I followed the river like rumble
up the mountain past the hermit’s cave.
Winter vespers at 16.30
by the Rule of Benedict
daily the monks still sang.
