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.
"Desuetude" means falling into disuse.
"Pome" here conveys the fruit and a small apple-shaped object.