LIKE SNOWFLAKES DESCENDING by Salvatore Buttaci (manga ereader txt) 📕

belly of the whale,
the paper-thin edge of the universe,
the dark bottomless pit.

From a coward’s mouth horrid screams
assault the quiet twinkling of the stars
nesting in this nighttime sky.

Who are we in this dark drama?
What whipping words lashed from
a foolish tongue cannot be rescinded?

In a multiple-choice question
of guilt, what dare we confess to clear us
of unproved accusations?

How can we disperse scoundrel clouds
from their intimidating poses
and re-ignite the stars?

This is the demarcation line,
the intervals on both sides of confidence,
along which clowns like us totter.

It would be so easy now
to throw off transparent disguises
yet we go on hiding.

In what seems a simple code of on-off
Blinking, the stars tell us something
But we pretend we hate the night.


World Peace

she pretends in the crib of her small hands
sleeps a weary world, a globe of blue and green
at rest in her open palms.

she imagines the world a train derailed
in a lazy clover field, free of ties and tracks
trekking towards destinations.

the world she says is sleeping in these hands,
it is dreaming itself peaceful like an infant
cradled in his mother’s womb.

she makes believe the world is safe,
it can be touched without fear of
sharp edges-- just a smooth ball:
a synergy of ocean and earth.


Riding Through Warsaw

You wonder about lonely windows
framed late at night
on the front of tenement houses
planted deep in Warsaw.

Riding by on the late-hour bus,
you see the light
but no one is there. Maybe people
living inside are laughing.

Somebody's daughter says something cute.
Someone's son might
be feeding his dinner to the fat
dog under the table,

but dark windows are the loneliest.
Eyes locked down tight,
you wonder Will they ever come back?
Do spirits walk empty rooms?

Pale beams of moon and stars
brace themselves
against the height
of these tired old buildings. How blessed
you are to be going home again!


Secrets

all my friends are dead
my secrets died with them
buried to a safe, quiet depth
but some nights
they all escape my dream mouth
dead friends and
the secrets I confided
the taste of dirt and ashes
grievous like gravel
choking in my throat
the confessional veil lifted
by incriminating words
that say how many fools I am
those secrets
tightly treasured in darkness
clenched in seeming absolution
even those secrets
in the least expected

in the least expected
sleep hours
come loosened
from the tongue
secrets like vermin
crawling free
from the surrendering hands
of old friends


For Vallejo

On some downtown cobblestone nightmare street
In Chile I hide in doorways that smell of cheap wine,
watch la policia rush by in search of me,
Listen to my heart boom towards implosion,
And wonder how in God’s name will I find
César Vallejo before the end of his next poem,
before they come to close down his life.
These are my nightmares, the horrors of dream,
That ride me in rios of blood, nearly blind
To exit isles, to logic, to alarm clocks
screaming me free of these concrete feet.
Vallejo, where are you hiding? César,
If you can hear me thinking, trembling,
Do not call out but let the litany
of your poems rattle off mute lips
Like monks at matins, repentant lovers,
The condemned. I have come a long distance
To track you down in the past of your time,
Hide you in the crook of my shirted arm,
And let Dios grow wings for us, sail us
To the future, a safe house in Brooklyn,
A room with a bath, a place you can write,
But when the police are all gone, your voice,
A coda of silence, your body still as your pen.
César, your brother Miguel, tus amigos
en revolución, the woman you loved––
All of you creak open the door through which
I run, stone feet on stone ground, to freedom.


Homeless Hannah

The park bench for a nighttime bed
or the alleyways along city sidewalks
where she catches a few winks under an old
blanket she has kept all these years,
Homeless Hannah trudges through her days.

Children poke fun but she's blessedly deaf
and nearly blind. Hardly a tooth left now
in her old woman's mouth; still, she
plods along, dragging varicosed legs
heavy as the doric columns of town hall.

In her pocket, food crumbs rummaged
out of garbage cans behind McDonald‘s.
In her pocket her prize possession:
a photo of the house she once owned,
creased so often it was hardly visible,

a kind of phantom photo that
could have been Hannah in her youth
or her children lined up like stakes
in a picket fence or the face
of the man she once loved when life was good.

She holds the photo in her arthritic hand.
Nothing else can make her granite face smile
or squeeze tears from the depths of her being.
Once she lived beneath its roof. Laughter rang there,
the walls took in secrets that keep her dreaming.


Last Winter

do you remember last winter?
heads tilted back,
eyes squinting half-closed,
our mouths wide open,
the two of us caught snowflakes
on smoking tongues
melting them with the heat
of our December laughter.

do you remember?
we trudged like arctic explorers
down the length of a ghosted
Main Street lined with blobs of cars
parked obliquely
beneath the white wraps
of a treacherous winter.

last winter: do you remember
the way the grey words we spoke
hung dancing in the air:
yours in soft breath steps
mine tripping in clumsy,
desperate exhalations
as if the words I spoke
feared the wind would silence them.

do you remember it at all?
we envied the snow people
sculpted on white lawns,
their black eyes seeing what
past their carrot noses
the laughing two of us perhaps
rising and falling again and again
on a soft lathered bed of snow.

what do you remember now in retrospect
that winter of our content-- what comes
to mind if anything at all?
the world is dead around us, you said,
as if we were exempt from nature,
but in the end winter's white took down
the colors one by one and killed us all.
When I awoke in spring you were gone.

now a year gone by the snow is back again
and I walk with slower feet this empty street
this white road that goads me to remember
laughter, smoky trails of spoken broken
promises, two adults romping in a white
childhood revisited, two lovers snow-mad,
delirious, terminally in love.
how unreal winter seems now!

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Publication Date: 12-06-2009

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