Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, Ph.D. |
Poet/Scholar |
by Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, in Confrontation |
Love Upstate
I. Poems, memory, and love are meter, not matter.
Reader, don't for a moment think they are flesh.
II. You see, I'm not in San Francisco, not disorganizing a plate of antipasto in a shady garden restaurant, not facing a kindly gaze, but their shapes draw me like the wind.
III. Here's a stanza tracing a shape, a horseshoe. Long ago, a tall Cavaliere meets a girl - my mother's being is being begun! For good luck, check out the horse/shoe of her Papa's stallion. See its twin prongs throbbing spondees and forked lightning. Iron is absent, and hardly missed.
IV. This stanza cradles a foetal curve - above a beach, a halfmoon rocking the pair who eloped my lifetime ago. . . . Look, the moon-beams varnish a tree while its black leaves turn jazzy and shimmy and shake. Half/moon, not really half-unborn. Well, didn't I lie there in sweet caul? Was I on the dark part or luminescent?
V. I'm not incurious, or inattentive, or indifferent to the thick places. In a poem we drift straight through solidities, even through this Brooklyn house with its limestone façade and long intricate curtains bracing against the wind.
VI. Once, flying to the West Coast in a high lonely plane over a pearly jungle of clouds, I saw in the sunshine a great rain-ring, a round spectrum balancing in the sky, a target for a rapturous arrow.
VII. This part of the poem is the memory of a marigold.
Upstate, New York.
We crouch, denims touching.
Our faces dome it: we smell its yellow lineaments - odor of bookstores, nutmeg, sharp heat!
A heliograph!
A trumpet of topaz flourishing for a Shakespearean king
His hand in love with my hand: we take the marigold, and it umbrellas our morning. We are special, as in a Renoir, and the air is washing meadows.
He knows a blue lake beyond the hill. The land is like cake just for me. Far into my memory a childish chanson winds out of a park band. . . "Vrai, vrai. . .," and a carousel purrs, residence
of wooden horses festooned in gold, ideal, their moulds ascending along red poles, spool-turned, turning, and ascending.
And we, ascended to the hill's lip, touch the empty sky. Below us lies the dry and shining biscuit, the lake unlaked, its light stable and sunken, a half-built causeway gashing it.
I am yet dreaming that chasm blue.
And so we run zigzag down in love into the gray bowl, the green and sensual hills circling it, and we pluck two arid gray gifts, branches, so desiccated as to seem solid dust, in the shape of birds flying, tense,
when one hill strikes a chord,
marvelous concussion, and strange! a paper comb and mixmasters and Moussorgsky at once, and I startle the way a deer does, mute, my neck lengthened, and he cocks his head,
and soon the hill spins out a thick tuning arc of birds, a long low rainbow in shuddering blacks and silvers that hums, and brakes, and we rise to stop the disappearance of the huge smooth song over the other lip of the earth,
but we are left with two dry drowned forms in our passionate hands. |
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