around my seventh year
of forked lightning,
i remember a storm,
an opening of cumulus
floodgates
                    extending
longer than my forearm.
the drowning levels rose,
bloomed,
                 and our pond out back spilled over,
     like so much noble grey from china pots,
        by the long barn, below naranjo peak,
                  with its namesake
a luminary of psychedelic
psychiatry and the gestalt,
                                               i played myself
to exhaustion in a marsh of gods and survival
the meadow pulsed;
no grass in zephyr-dance,
or ambient movement,
but for the desperate
flopping of fish,
silver on silver,
ruthless flood
displacement,
refugees in hostile land.
each moment i stayed staring
i lost another fish, i knew,
and the rain was thinning
and i was six, and a gallon
bucket was just the right size,
and for that afternoon, i grew
scales, and gills, fins,
                                     i couldn't
let them die, or keep suffering,
i scooped them up, bucket filled
up to my small arms' capacity,
and returned them to the pond,
making sure the transition
was comfortable for them.
i only remember now that
the others began eating
their dead once they could
swim and dart past one
another.
               i sloshed and splashed
all day to save my kindred fish
from a dry slaughter, en masse,
only to find them flowing out
once more when the rain picked up
from its reprieve

the censorship meme
alive inside me as a child:
some books were worth the mention of--
war and **** were not.

untimely at a pennsylvanian writers' club
where fear lodged quiet smile-halves
in talking clouds and farmyard metaphor,
to weekly bray the corner of an antique movie-house

newcomers weren't to share their work
we three were welcomed as an audience at best
we passed the others' writers' chapter-copies on
on which i scribbled notes of praise
on notes of theme-entwining anti-argument
and **** zests of vast significance:
notes of floral yearning, meadowed love--
iron skies and ahistoric dreams--
off and on archaic themes
of which we weren't to share

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.

It is the tipping point
the harvest well begun
its end in sight
an early morning
retreated to past
five on the clock

mist lay on
the meadowed fields
observed the pond
held tight to the trees

walking the empty road
camera in hand
to catch the chill earliness
in the far fields then back
through the uncared-for orchard
past the forked-fingered ash
still quite still -
the night air collapsing
as the sun rose

Darjeeling
in the white bone-china cup
a kiss of milk
comforting this delicate tea

and light everywhere
between three windows
our table her gifts
from the shoreline
shadowed hard-edged
whilst the back-lit screen
blinks and waits for words

my story blended from fact
pestled into fiction
itself a background
to a further fiction
from a past in ancient time
where each image described
takes aim at the resonant heart
of every exquisite moment


Eight Sketches in a Notebook

I

into a western sky
the sun finds cloudspace
to enter and set
well above the sea’s horizon
and for a while its rays
glimmer upward onto shards
holding remnants of the day’s
unreflected light


II

not a hut of straw and rushes
on a far mountain fastness
this a walled stockade all but moated
gardened inside its bounds
a miniature railway said to surround
a six-cornered house facing seaward
and towards a lagoon on whose banks
little terns nest from April to June
a mirror of light upon which
the solitary soul might dwell


III

rock guardian
standing
mid-beach

its debris
spilled
to water’s edge

still as still as
no wind or wave
pools dark depths

further out
the sea shimmers
ablaze with reflections


IV

hiding an anxiety of hair
a headscarf blue
and spotted white
reveals an ear
and below a sturdy neck
on round shoulders
her bare arms fall to quiet hands
next to thighs trousered  
knee-length to gentle calves
falling further onto bare feet
stood standing on course sand
at the sea’s murmuring edge


V

here the rock opens
its lips to a kiss of light
but deep inside remains
a dark sheltering secret
blackness impenetrable
wide enough for a storm’s
intrusion of water and wind
but beyond such darkness
possibly nothing
- a closed door
of rock?


VI

from my canvas chair
on the flags outside
the white French doors
this drawing – from where
the garden gate once was
a gap between
the honey-suckled hedge
and the long low cottage
above an ash tree waving
its fingered branches
in the afternoon breeze
fresh over the hill
from the sea’s shore
hardly a mile away


VII

the land points seaward
to an island light
a mile off-shore

on a shingled beach
sliced by the sea’s knife
cattle wandered yesterday

in the mist-driven rain we
sleeked wet as dogs approached
on the headland’s path


VIII

littered the land lies
with interruptions
interventions of the built

past beside present
ends amongst beginnings

complex histories
to delve deeper into
on this northern shore

When the sigh of a breeze
in meadowed land
mimics the velvet-soft whisper
of the owl wing in flight
the evening spreads her indigo cloak
as does the night in her majesty -
for God's tender command of daily silence
soothes each weary heart
at the end of each garish day

Who am I, which version of me will i now be
she lurks at a counter, sips wine, a lipstick stain
leaves me meadowed in deep lust. Drowning in gaze and my fear thereafter must, rise from my most fragile thoughts
let that fear not become me.

Which version of me,  oh why cant I choose
Either, she loves me
or hates me
what have I got to lose

Which version of me , My most ponderous thoughts pondered
Thus a shadow appeared ,to her side
of whom I wondered

Which version of me, an empty stool now lurks
Left a glass, lipstick stain
A heart , that now hurts.

Somewhere now
In the deeper canyons
Of night, hidden in a
Garden of stars, crawls
Out from a deeper woods,
A ghost of a ghost, hunched
On hind limbs and ready
For the pounce.
      All night.
And you, you are
The deer that wanders
Through the aspen doors
Of a meadowed mist,
Beside the dizzying stream.
And what, what will you
Do then, when those trees
Begin to shift, when the stars
Begin to move?

Said to be said.

Grime slapped into verses.
Grabbed by infinity.
A lonely grasp.
Swollen faced security.
To self destruction.
Meadowed in suicide seating.
Think of her often.
To leave and ride eternity.



Garrett Johnson.

Morning walks are pleasant walks
on open endless plain;
the dew is glistening, clinging
from flowers in the rain.

The quietness is hallowed
free from noise and stress;
it calms the walker's mind
and lets the mind undress.

What is left -  is beauty
of Nature's winsome view;
reflections of a palette
of what you never knew.

Colors from a scrapbook
of mountains, sky and sun;
artistry of Nature's hand
now here, but not yet done.

Morning walks are my delight
on the narrow, meadowed lane;
meditation... of a sort
from flowers in the rain.