Dreams form in chlorophyll shades – Poems by Pasquale Verdicchio

Where is the place where you are?

What does a young boy see
Through one eye
On the margins of the world.
Keeping watch
From a distance
Makes it feel like abandonment.
His absence follows me
Sits with me
Eats with me
Rests with me after a long day.
What could I say
What might contradict
My absence to let him know
That I am there with him
When he sleeps
When he walks
When he weeps.

Fireflies

I point to fireflies hovering
Across the window pane

You tell me they are stars
Floated down from the sky

“There is the moon”
You say and point to where it is
Fully now in place

Reflected just off shore.

Of this city

The humans of this city
hold together its fraying edges

sorely ruined skin
of decades and centuries

help me out
I’m in a bad place

I disappeared
while my mother died

my children passed on
before I could know them

the ruined humans
of this city form

a bond with trembling hands
clutching at threads

of presence.

Lung

Lung is the ritual
Cleansing as it branches
Into puzzled obstruction.

There are meteors crossing the sky
Waves lapping closer with tides
Trees hedging their approach
Deer at early morning sea salt
Leave traces of wandering
Hoof prints materialize then drift
Wood settles before our eyes.

Lung is a tree searching
Air hummingbirds hover
Stalks of growth new
With recent rain.

Scent

The day after
My mother closed her eyes
One last time
Imagining another morning
Never to come
I sit in the inscrutable air
Of passage
My back to the room
Vision averted
And catch the scent of her
Eau de cologne
Hint of orange blossom
Then hint of candle smoke
Homage to those
Who have gone before us.
My back to the room
I sense her presence
Out of our lives
Into memory
And am reminded
Of the Italian expression
Si è spenta
Like a candle
Light rising
A ribbon of smoke

Fragments from the section Traveling Poems: Savary Island, British Columbia

[..]

Blue landscape sweeps
toward no horizon.
Overcast summer sunset.

Southwestern wind and seas
of white-capped blue breakers.
Night a conversation of climate.

Weather moves within and without;
rainstorm, lightning sun.
No progression, no preparedness.

A discrete portion of rainbow
hardly showing
after a hardly rainy sky.

[…]

Scattered rib cage and vertebrae,
skull with fur.
Beach deer dream of pastures.

Hoof tracks on the beach,
a post-meridian deer visit.
We follow and lose it in the sea.

At night candle light
diminishes room to room.
Dreams form in chlorophyll shades.

Again the sand bar
an open space
where wind travels fast.

Full moon and meteors
in mid-august.
Coincidence of lights.

Pasquale Verdicchio is a Canadian poet, critic and translator who has made important contributions to the whole discourse on ethnic minority writing and culture.

Born in Naples, Italy, in 1954, he moved with his family to Canada and grew up in Vancouver, B.C. His first degree is from the University of Victoria, his M.A. from the University of Alberta and his Ph.D. from the University of California. He has been teaching in California for a number of years in the areas of Italian, film and creative writing.

Among Verdicchio’s many books his works of poetry are significant for their originality with language and structure. They include among others: his latest Only You (2021), This Nothing Place (2008), The House is Past (2000), Approaches to Absence (1994), Nomadic Trajectory (1990) Ipsissima Verba (1986), Moving Landscape (1985). His most important critical work is Devils in Paradise: Writing on Post-Emigrant Culture (1997), Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through the Italian Diaspora (1997), The Southern Question (1995) and translation of Gramsci. He has also translated many Italian writers into English.