All, thanks for the many years of continuous support from Hello Poetry, comments (both praise and constructive criticism), and continuing to share our mutual love of poetry.

I am pleased to announce the release of my new book, Poems of Ancient Rome and Greece (of course, what else), in both paperback and Kindle formats with many of the poems on Hello Poetry revised and several new poems as well.  These copies are available on Amazon so please visit my author page for the paperback and Kindle versions:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Christopher-Saitta/author/B0DRTSZSZH?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Anyway, much thanks, and here is one of the new poems.

To the Sky

Once more, comb your skiey streaks of hair,
Backbrush to sombrous chamber,
While the vanity mirror flares its celestial impulse.

The corner of the room is a privation like monastic air,
Its angularity, the ascetic to your fleshened curves,  
More fitting for a candle fasting itself bare,
Relinquishing shine to that spare resurrection in the panes.

So too your summers have flamed upon the windows,  
And autumn has fizzled in spurts of leaves,
So too the failed days are sublimely worshipping  
To a soul that is the glass between.

Love is this placelessness of sunlight,
Earth, the memento of where we touched once:
  Her haystack-gold of hair, his shy, straw whisper,  
  And the footpath that still dwindles there to sunlight's pebbles.
  So warm is the insubstantial, substance of love.

From these paths, the world wanders old,
Upon its crooked staff of trees, its absent-mind dozed into hollows:
  No more sipping at Christ's wound,
  Like a glass soul filled with wine,
  Or tasting his body's amaranth
  In bee-breads fabled to divide.

Where lovers meet, death comes to adore.
Every kiss should prove monument to the world that wastes in air,
Every love should spurn its centuries to that steeped exile of elsewhere,
And break time like shells upon the shore.


II


Shut the blinds to the duller desuetudes of sun,
Because evening itself is a falling in love,
Because moods are the seasons homespun,
And death's great measure, if it comes,
Will be padded upon hand-woven rugs.

So begins the conceit,
Spring its slippered caprice,
Subdued to the stairs, the down-turnings and creaks,
Until table-spread as the meadowed indulgence of the dining room,
Where mornings have had their honeys,
And the berries and creams were guilty pleasures past noon.  

From the china closet and its glass goblet fruit,
Pluck the pome of a teacup
And pour the brook of brews:  
  Within the china pattern of leaves,
  The forest-dark shades of tea
  Are wheeling with subtle complexion
  Of black-currant and grey and darjeeling,
  As if the world could sway so wholly under the thumb,
  As if the woods were a coercion of vapors sapient
  Over their fire-flared stratums.

In mute, cupboarded moments,
To learn the only sound of the soul,
Is rain along the glassings of bay windows,
Is April too lightfelt to hold, only to lose.

Like a nightjar, startle through the storm whorls and raindrop leaves,
Fluster from the ragged brink of Spring,
To presage the distance in shady inklings.
And so then sail to Summering,
Dry until vaporous wings leave cooled tatters like clouded light:
  To dry the sodden absence of a lover,
  Feel your frayed fingers through his sky-blue sleeves.
  Loop the tassel of hair through the collar,
  As before the looms with an armful of yarns to weave.
  Once more the windfall of hair,
  Like smothered lightnings to the static mass of air,
  In strike-soundings, a confession to the cloth,    
  For man to adorn what woman must bare.

Click the lampshade light, the yellowed Autumn of album leaves,
Thinking back is your lying down to sleep.
Fall is the seduction of the sky,
An innuendo of slight denudings,
To lure the human sun from its fleshened prime,
Into leering lusters and willowy fingers to writhe.

Make your skyward sleep,
Past the kitchen that keeps its silence of floors,
A bare reminder of what the snows are for:
Sleep is the only snowfall of the mind, heavy-worlded and pieced,  
Outlying the hushing deep of pines.    

To the sky, great remnant of Greece,
Which has of human lips their redness,
But of love, still its thought to speak,
Mouthing hollow as the wide-open world.

Death is my own covetous possession,
A hand-me-down with the worn edges
Of a closed, burnished keepsake box.

Death is the memory of a tree-lined walk,
A daguerreotype, a trompe-l'oiel des bois,
Sight itself turned within, but without end,
A forest of unstirring eyelashes, like long uncut grass,

Death is the stillness of pewter leaves,
And sorrow is sadness in love with itself.

When a woman averts her eyes,
I feel the snow has secrets to hide,
Or from the small crook of her arm,
I feel the warmth of buried sunset,
In the charm of a country steeple.

We live in the sunshine of our broken loves,
Where window curtains flow like pouring water from the aqueducts.

Sunlight is the memory of an old world, and we are just
Watchmakers who labor at the trumpets of time
As if to blow from the mouthpiece and unwind
The second hands and derelict hours of our luminous grief.
So too shines the scintilla of frost that covers the ancient wheat,
Snow falls like the listenings of lovers in the dark, and we are just
Cartographers of snowflakes, mapmakers of frozen eyes,
To zone the parallelogram of her strands of hair across the sky.

These and these and these
Were never ours.

The towering candles of the monk’s studious hours
Now guttered to an old head on the pillowing smoke.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin bloated on the lawn
And the rat tails from his eye sockets engorged.

War is the end of all lore,
The bare abdomen of the ****** Mary gutted for her son,
War is a *******’s mouldering arms,
The infidel to love, the mutilator of colors,
War is the broken feast of the heart,
Bones picked clean.

Her memory is like the beauty of the silted Nile,
Of sacred blue lilies and heron
And skimming eyes of the crocodile.

Sing my song of forgetting,
Of lips never wrong, never upsetting,
Sing the wine-infused air along,
From the violin’s grapevine song,
Purely gifted as the altar wine and alms
Of the Santa Maria della Visitazione,
A cadenza from the catgut of stringed waves,
     The vibrato in polyphonic staves across the lagoon,
          Amid the psaltery sway of submerged algae plumes,
               Like the strident tails of the horses of Neptune,
Or the teardrop-surge of the glass chandeliers of Murano,
The same powdered hue of Venetian sky,
As bluebirds fallen into their own drowned tune,  
As absence awash over the sun-scattered tombs of Olympus.

Sing with a felt-tipped tongue,
So my song of forgetting is never undone.