Salvatore Ala, 20 december 2014
That’s the Phoenix! That’s the myth!
That’s what the storybooks
Have been trying to tell me. The firebird
Nests in the searing winds of time.
It migrates to the forests of the sun.
It lives in the drop of fire behind the eyes
And perches on the volcano in the ribs.
You’ll know the firebird by its ashes,
By how the sunset beats its wings
And flames out like a cosmic fire.
Better to start living, to start loving,
Better to be consumed with joy
Than live another day without rebirth,
Without music that catches fire
Or words that cast a burning shadow.
Salvatore Ala, 18 december 2014
The mind is brushed by sparrow wings.
Hart Crane
All shadows of a kind cross the atlas of the mind.
Alone or with fledglings in realistic settings
The ghosts of those birds migrated into words.
The longer we stayed the sound of a glade.
Windows doubled as skies for eternity in their eyes.
Even for a feather it is a heavy tether.
In each nest eggs at rest.
Such stillness grows like flight in repose
Mounted there in flying air.
What is seeming if nature is dreaming?
What is death to a hummingbird’s breath?
In an eagle’s gaze soar endless days.
A glass case sings it breaks with wings.
All field marks fade light goes into shade.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
If you weigh the stars in the balance
Glaciers are nurseries of the stars.
They are weighbridges to the borealis,
Ice roads into isolated communities.
They’re hydroelectric power plants,
Evolutionary clocks, mammoth museums,
Icebox mountains of organic matter.
Meltwaters surge from the summits
Enlivening salmon in summer streams,
Nourishing the valley with snowmelt.
Glaciers are a kind of counterweight
To their own absence tipping the scale.
Once gone, what could replace glaciers
That we’d not burn in water/drown in fire.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
You want balance, but this abandoned bicycle
In Amsterdam borders on paralysis.
It is Chaplin pretending to be the Fuhrer.
It is whoever survives, whoever escapes…
It is a flower cart that flowers in the same spot.
It is modern art, the unraveling of modes,
Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” reconstituted,
A bicycle trellis in European horticulture,
An instrument for the music of rarest days.
Someone left this bicycle and didn’t return.
Someone locked this bicycle here and died,
Or moved, or moved away and died,
Or became a novelist, like Michel Houellebecq.
It’s a sacrificial lamb, a contract with loopholes,
A love letter from the bicycle crazes.
The wheels of the sky ripen among vines.
The pedals are powered by the sun,
And with wind, deep-rooted to the spot,
The lock is slowly unlocking, like space.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
You who reason and speak
Speak for us who have no names and no names.
You who come and go
Walk among wheelchairs in random space.
You who are alone
Open these doors to see who is alone and alone.
You who are lost
Find yourself among the lost who are lost.
You who are jealous
Look at what men owning nothing own.
You who hate
Imagine hatred when temperament is all tenderness.
You who are in pain
Ponder this painless abstraction.
You who have God
Consider a God of global amnesia.
You who are searching
Exit the mind and it is still mind and you are saved.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
for Alan Blind Owl Wilson
I’m going up to music mountain
Where all my friends have gone,
Where the air is pine-scented
And you’re high all the time.
They say the mountain is tuneful,
You can hear the fire of the sun,
And at night the humming stars
And beyond them, God’s blues harp.
Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014
After the first beheading, hope was severed like a limb.
After the second, love produced a fountain of blood.
After the third, faith changed faces with fear.
After the fifth, knowledge bled to the last drop.
After eight beheadings, God recoiled.
After fifteen, there was no more happiness.
After twenty, it all seemed propaganda.
After thirty-four, more headless people took office.
After fifty-five, a collective body was sworn in.
After ninety-nine, children played with human heads.
After two hundred, there were no more days of peace.
After four hundred, it was hell on earth.
After six hundred, the executioners were put to death.
After a thousand beheadings, they dare not stop.
After fifteen hundred, fate and freedom were indivisible.
After twenty-five hundred, the heads kept singing.
After five thousand, a dialogue began.
After seven, the heads became oracles.
After ten thousand, there were more priests than people.
After fifteen, the books were sealed.
After twenty thousand, it was a total human eclipse...
Salvatore Ala, 6 february 2014
A handicapped child is born to test us,
He’ll see if we are worthy of his attention.
The sick hold out their medicine for us to take—
It is good for the soul, they say.
The homeless guide us home unaware.
The hungry feed us with their eyes.
The suffering save us with their heavy tears.
When we are tired of being frivolous
We sometimes look differently at people and at things,
And they look at us and say
Even you are greater than you know.
Salvatore Ala, 20 september 2013
... neither God nor No-God
Louis MacNeice
Not clouds but burkas naked on clotheslines,
Hawksmoor gloom with Horus eye,
Warzone Luftwaffe left-over thunder,
Lions’ heads on building tops,
Quorum of the heavens… London fog
And a neighborhood in London fog,
The ghost of Hitchcock at the window
Of his house gave the shadow of a doubt.
Nothing was real, not buildings or streets.
Only a waking sleep from cab to cab
And a destination from which you depart.
Not clouds but statues wet in flesh
And veil, as in “The Winter’s Tale,”
Or the dead likeness of a changing guard.
North of the city an explosion; south, a beheading.
Astride the block a shadow slumps.
The head of God, a cloud in a basket.
Salvatore Ala, 12 september 2013
The earth is cradled in a grave
The sky is buried in the earth
The stones are hanging from a thread of light
And everyone here has been here before
And everyone has come a long way
And those who love meet those who hate
And those who breathe air breathe stone
And those who are fire are dust
And those who are clay shall be wine
And those who arrive meet those departing
And children find their mothers
And fathers reconcile with sons
And the old meet themselves in the young
And the young discover a road
And round the heavenly clock time is as nothing
And we cluster for warmth
At the brief fire of a thousand years
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