From my new book, Poems of Ancient Rome and Greece, available in paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as eBook on Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books:  https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Ancient-Greece-Christopher-Saitta/dp/B0DS6933HB?ref=astauthor_dp  

My mother the sea,
She woke my sandy eyes,
Just to tell me she had to leave,
Draw past the markets where the fish are sun-dried,
Snarled by the coral-rough hands of divers deep.

My mother the sea,
She left her running tab
Of the grocer’s choicest greens,
Thumbed the velamentous rinds and spiny scarola,
Her xylem and phloem are the slow moving cruciferousness of a breeze.

My mother the sea,
Charwoman of tides,
Who dips and delves upon her knees,
Who scrubs her brothel-coves with chamber lye,
Cyprian mistress of the salt-stained sheets.

I have looked for you, mother,
A scugnizzo amid the striped awnings of the marketplace
~ like sails to the sky ~
Where the fishmongers hawk their pride
Of conch, cavallo, and black sea bream.

I have looked for you, mother,
Walked sun-forged along the boardwalk,
Amid the neon-mascara of signs,
Hand-in-hand with only the ladyfingers of salt and vinegar fries,
Toward the crisp syllabub of pebbles and sand.

A beach is window-warmth spread free, cosmopolitan,
The longeur of eyes crushed in the glass-dust of cities
And in the sputtering of the frosted spume of tides,
Held broken seashells in my hands like broken needles,
Heard the pump-click of the ventilator through your mask of sand.

My mother the sea,
A naked convalescent,
Whose ever-turnings have taken
A turn for the worse.
Who will know her by her death, who but me?

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.

Love is a thousand women who fail to amount to one,
Peasant seductress with bared shoulders of red dun-colored roads and candle smoke,
Who pours down her wet, ungoverned hair, like a fast-fading storm to dry over Aurelian walls,
In that dark sneer of sultriness over the sentry-like stillness of ramparts and stone,
A wasp in water whose sibilance comes from what the sting makes,
Like the upgathered phalanx of spears in the sand,
Or the sisters of fate who have coiled their hair as sunset snakes,
Her fingertips ***** into me like much-traveled and ancient rain.

Morning was sudden-made as an onwardness of hills,
Meant for donning crusade in chainmail glistenings,
The sun visored in misty slats of cold steel,
To glimmer fusty through the godded grove,
A holy sepulchre, earthly-dim to its rafters of oak,
Where the forest-fall of sunlight shed its rosework,
And a red-breasted bird, its song-flight of dappled gleam,
And in the meadow, where colorful whorled the tale of Saladin,
Wayside flowers shook beneath the destriers' cloth caparisons,
A sunny fullness of vales for the crusaders' forest-heartened lungs,
And when this furthering of sights was sunken from,
Still an onwardness of hills to Jaffa like steppingstones.

Sings a small boy whose hair is tousled by the wind,
As too the folds of his mother’s peplos and the robes of clouds,
When Greece gathers in silence like the stillness for a deposed crown,
And all Athens around, the song of eiresione for firstfruits of Autumn,
Singing boys with the olive branches of colored wool and garlanded gourds,
A fall-bird to wander the Ionic sky, foretelling of new sunrise.
How that joyful ancient voice still haunts the songbird of sunset.

I never learned to weep
But ground my eyes down
On the griststone of a mill
Turned sadness into powder
Then choked on my own weaponized sorrow.

In our love for the wind and all that passes,
Each smote of self, a wisp of loss and absence,
Like the snow pendulous slips over last grasses,
In the glow of the lamppost and unholding fences:
So too the thousand-grains of breath
Blow through our bodies’ incandescence,
And in the starlit-smoke from the dragon's mouth
On wings of filth swirl the bone-edge of death.

She kisses like the reading of an ancient poem
With lips clouded by their own sighs,
So too with all her mock moons, paraselenae,
Obnubilations over her luminous mind,
Her last desperate pulchritude of night,
Chaste labors of assembling unspoiled dew:
Just crumbs of breath at the Greek feast of wind,
New sun pouring in to the clay flowers of our lungs.

A knife cuts clean the jugular of Greece,
Sun-shattered Autumn spurts in breezes,
Her face falls like crumpled sails of the trireme
~This is the sound of sinking clouds, mammatus~
The slow tottering head sinks into itself,
The arm of once-command lies lengthwise
Next to the sea, as waves erase all her form,
And the drear and maddened moon in its cage of stars.

Even when
All is said and done,
And I have become
A guardian angel
Over my past self,
Even then,
I have failed.

Autumn is a Greek sea,
A summation of wet leaves,
Gathered wicks of sunset,
A hypocaust of warm water,
That lies beneath our feet,
Incense from the Sea of Crete,
Risen to the airy suggestive.

Autumn is a word in the mind, fallen leaf-like to the mouth,
How like the orange rind, our ancient past is shriveled under pillars.

So Herodotus muttered marble dust into his beard,
And foretold the white clay of the mule road,
And the whiskers of Greece grew long with legend.

There is in sadness a sense of Fall, of spacious leprosy where crippled thought like the outmoded nymph dies behind each tree, and childlike peeks out to let at least childhood disbelieve in its unhappy end.
     There is in sadness, a branch that holds the once-upons, the happily-evers, and the destined-to-bes, a sweet find for all in grief.  Each stem lends momentum to their pluckings.
          There is in sadness, a young man who cherishes dead leaves.  He lately held waxen happiness and knew this as his permanence.

A sigh is a barebacked rider, soundless along a sandy coast,
A candle tipped with starlight, wheeling in a cosmos of smoke,  
A firefly floating on the ruins of the wind like a winged gyroscope,
A skull in the stomach whose teeth are my own and breathes
With Babel’s thousand tongues telling fragrant untruths.

So falls Greece, so falls Rome,
And in their bone-lipped tombs
Forever those still listening for love.

Winter is the cold sleeping space
Between the blanket and the sky,
Between the legs falling asleep in warmth,
And the leaves turned to frost in twilight.

If I could love, I would take the best of marble and dove,
And craft her eyes like inlaid tombs in stone skyward flight.
Just so, the Egyptian khamsin wind, by way of Rhodes,
Alights with evenness on the trullo stone of Alberobello.
Just so, the weighing of the heart lies between marble and dove.

Love, unruliest hope, when fierce Diana went wild
With savage discourse, the arrow-stroke of her tongue—
While rage-hounds bay in wooded Gargaphie—aimed at Actaeon.
Or old Baucis her god-giving bone fat of mind,
Stewed the broth of covenant for Zeus to repay in kind.
Then Parthenope, siren-stung in her whirlpool of sea vines,
Her maiden-voice is a breath of sand for Naples to muse upon.
The body of Helen still lies in ages-old smoke over our cities,
We live in the timberframe of her bones of burned ships.
Why can’t her death be an end to all skies?

Light has shone, light as death,
Sunset is gathered in fishing nets,
Like a twine of leafy stems.
~The coldest sea is the blood
Of the murdered and aggrieved~
Scaly Autumn of lost fires and dragon plumes,
Lanterns in the fog, graverobbers of the moon,
Light has shone, suckles at the tomb.

Thrums the bee waggle-dance in a haunt of Indian horsepaths,
Or the shaking leaf one second past the strike of galloping rain
/ Parsimonious lightning, thrifty in its jagged stalks
Against this night of heavy-hearted oaks /
Then the hay-fringed bale of sleep, rolled into a valley of slowed breathing,
Through parting cloud-diabolique, poison-peers the wet toadback of Autumn,
Glowing moon-gristle in the bosky wolf’s beard with its wireframe of teeth.

I failed to love round, but fallen flat,
My head slumps down, over an ancient map,
My eyes roll back, over the mappa mundi verge,
Where waterfalls purl, and the sea serpent-sleep lies curled.

When she folds into me and weeps,
The world of empty things falls into me
Like the wetness of July in antiquated Rome,
Mother of tears, Mater Lachrymarum, in Forum stone,
The rain-addled veneers of Octavia’s portico.

Gather up these black sickened bellies of ruins,
Turn them out to make hunger the den of the skies,
Let the cracked whisper of each monument and temple
Breathe as Caesar, in unending stillness like a bare road.

A road is the sadness of seeing our beginning
But knowing love its far-off end is foretold.

The scrimshaw of the air, the long whales-tooth of sunlight
Etched with seafarer’s care and his great wantonness for the sea,
A kiss as light as the bottlenose dolphin cresting from the water,
Then night undressed and falling down like sliding beads of watery stars
From the wet coriaceous porpoise skin and a tail of silver fire.

Snow is but listening silence,
Sent from our dark past,
Inaudible ghosts made visible
In the butterfly net of cold.

Sunset whispers to itself
~No time outlives time~
The meltemi winds crackle the wild millet,
Graze-feed upon the stalks of Greek plains,
The pelican scoops up the honeyed Aegean,
Waves of sunlit anise and almond in refrain,
Vestigial as the sweet persimmon from Egypt,
The hammered warmth from the flat anvil of Africa,
Sunset whispers to itself
~No time outlives time~

They said passing by me that they would put out their eyes,
The clouds did as they died across the battlefield,
As the gauzy horses stanched the wept blood,
As the thorns, gnats, and briers, wound into
A dove’s nest of bayonets and knives,
The clouds died in insurrection,
And the night breathed freely and the stars cleared the mud.

Love is not a maturation of voices to the more sublime,
But sotto voce, an undertow of groping intonations,
The sod of soil hearts cast across the reaping sea.

The horse breathes in the city, the world of unrelenting pistons
And steam from the jingling harness, and the jangling windows
That reflect the bolting sparrows like fire arrows in the coming night,
Viennese darkness is like the smell of the chocolatier mixed with snow,
Sealed in a sachertorte with the alley-crack of the riding whip on coach,
Viennese sunshine is like the baker’s soul, rising on flashing coppers and tins.

Love not the empress curve of your cheek,
The many-storied, empty ziggurat of belief,
The man-handled, baked brick built so high,
Your grotty thighs are pasted with all your lovers,
Your lacquered heart is glazed by luminous grief,
Head-bearer of broken vases as your crown,
Filled with dry dust from liquid stars.

Snow brings to earth the ash footsteps of Titans,
Winter in its giant vacancy of bygone strides,
The overthrown birth of frost mother and sky,
~The snow proselytizes all our warm tomorrows~
But the totality of loss lies like a starved lion,
Paws crossed, staring at the cold changeling-world,
As a young white-tailed Springbok ages into distance.

These clouds of Italy are grown on vines,
Infidels of skies, fruit bearers of wine-veined
Marble, fertile in spite of its own lifeless tableau,
Here thrives the succulent garden of the alone,
Where turns aside the burnt nape of the plowman,
Voyager of the cool midnight seas of the mind,
Up to this arable vine of sighs from outworn gods,
And hears his heart once more give up its throne.

Maybe the darkest things are the truest things,
Death, the redoubtable lover of all, the atom bomb
Burns beneath cherry blossoms of closed eyelids,
A magnolia grove of forever fasting lips of the dead,
Pompeii and Hiroshima, twin lovers of rupture,
Graves of the wind now, keepers of nothing and all.

Do you have eyes, old man, as airy as the sky?  
Do the trees grow through your eyes, old man?  
Do the starry leaves of your mind grow old with you?

Love, if it were told how little truth you hold,
How diadems and stars are less than twinkling souls,
How anyone can fill your mercurial fancy in the fold,
How you lie before God and you lie with man,
Love, books are less old than your falsehoods,
Or the rood and the rose.

The shanties of the shore are the tide’s wives in clay,  
The uxorious sea fawns at the blushed lips of the beach,
A serenade from the sung-exhalations of all living things,
Though eternity is the stillness of silence repeating.

All is gone, all my kingdoms, all my sons,
All of valor, all of disenchanted love, but for eyes
That see the world of nothing, slow in its demise.

The ancient way across this world lies like sunset over black pearls,
The treetops are marble-made that the riffler of wind deforms,
To know all mother tongues from the quarry of rough stones,
To speak everything at once, Bride of Unbecoming,
The moldering walls of lips, the kiss of vacant streets
And the quiet, wet solitude bespoken by back roads,
The whispered origami of the Forum, paper gods in folds,
Smothered in the false pillows of their own repose,
The wolf’s beard dipped in the fresh pant of dewfall,
While lovers have placed on the stones of the Appian Way
Their perfect hearts like votive candles, cupping the flames,
Looking down the swift arrow of loneliness, Sagittarius its same
Heaven-glow and besprinkled guidepost of a starlit Sacred Way.
Mother of Rome, your powdered face has been made ashen by those
Unreturned home, your far-off travels lead only to the graves of sons.
The ancient way across this world lies like sunset over black pearls.

Every Autumn, the sky a little more to stone belongs,
The immovable strata of deciduous columnar clouds,
Every leaf that falls, Rome a little more to earth’s heart recalls.

The finger upon whose weight
Depends the pluck of the string,
Does pull back the folds of a drape
Of sunwashed loneliness in afternoon.
Windows drift through you, without home,
Without glass, or any warmth from looking through.
Life in its squared sequence does amass, ecumenical,
Until death its finger does pass in its final pluck
As the touch of the thundering universe.

There the floating scholar of green lines read,
There the shading peasant of sun-fields plowed,
There the fleeing empress of coral red gowns,
There the graying knight of frost-broken vows.
A tree is a haunted ruin of bare limbs and rooms.

But thought scurries around like a five-lined skink
With its tail shimmering blue as oil floating on water.

She kept bed-side by me all along,
Her prayer like a flower behind my ear,
Asleep, I think I hear the petals fall.

Death is to become sunshine,
To break open the self to the world,
In sunwheat gold and peasant hearth,
(The sun is the only empire of peasants)
Every grain of annihilation is still a seed,
And the sunlight carries the sleepless dead,
Their melted voices are warm upon our ears,
The sounds rooted in, but when we do not hear,
No more than the dead worshiping the dead.

Methuselah, old profligate wastrel of evergreen time,
In giant generational strides, close the striking distance,
Take my face in its failed vision and drink out the eyes,
One fang at my cheekbone, the tendril of silver music
Shown through, pull out its roots and the topsoil of skin,
Blow from your cadaverous lips to the beadhole of ear,
And whisper about the hours of my hummingbird life.
Here you sing alone with weak-winded isotopes of your half-lives.

The soul has as its sextant the ribs opened wide,
The heart its compass in fluid circuitous diatribe,
When each to zone the geometry of Greek sky  
With its powdery fabulism of centaurs and jars
From Aesop’s wine of words, the untimeliness
Of sundials to Charybdis’s bloom of giant watery eyes.

To know oceans by the dry riverbed of my pulse,
To scale only as high as the sparrow’s tomb of my heart.