Laugher, freedom, play without the scaffolding of the I – Poems by Carmelo Militano’s Forthcoming Collection

From Part I: Eros’ Season

 

August in Italy

In the distance, small

coquettish olive leaves dance with wind and sun

Whisper ‘ drink to me with thine eyes and I will not look for wine…’

Before ancient trees one at a time enter the valley

 

On the balcony

Potted broad-leaved cacti

Fitted with small needles like a cat’s tongue

Red fichi d’India fruit plump as ornaments

 

Unexpected hot breeze swells curtains to nine months

You turn your tear-drop shaped breasts away from the window

Immodest sun on your shoulders.

 

 

 

Part Two: Substances inseparable and lost

 

Silence of the stars

 

Silence between stars bewildering

Messages to our pale blemished moon unanswered

Yet he remains our one true moody friend

Reveals to us evening music

Shadows on thick temple columns

Lips sealed beneath Athena’s sacred bush

Moon whispers don’t stop.

 

 

 

Part Three: Midnight

 

Midnight a nomad

 

Midnight a nomad drives past, past

Bleak deserted desert mall parking lots

Fronted by large low squat box stores form following function

Edging restaurants, mirages of pleasures, their names

Recall some homey or foreign place before Covid 19

Neither mind nor spirit can locate

Tug in a banal way at the heart

Alert as a fictional detective in an ugly prairie city

Empty bed unsolved.

 

 

Part Five: Blue Guidebook

 

Rome’s Starlings

 

Lisbon’s railway station cafeteria white vaulting arches

Resemble pre-historic bones

There three ticket agents smoke

On their lunch break each wearing a blue-grey uniform,

Official cap, black tie undone against  a white shirt,

Smoke and exchange stories, chuckle like card-players

At their good fortune

Ignore the same beggar who approached them twice

At another table a woman with stern concentration reads Pessoa

Enjoys coffee and a pastry

My introduction to cigarettes, poverty, poetry, coffee and pastry.

 

-2-

 

Starlings in the evening sky expand and contract like a lung

Twist transform into an hourglass,

Effortless as if controlled by a mad  Etch-a- set

Spin unsolvable mathematical parabolas

Below are stoic Plane trees along the Tiber

Elegant grey light softens edges of an ancient soft city

Ruins, churches, statues, thousands of stone steps,

Grey paved streets, yellow and red crumbling walls

And now the sudden arrival of starlings

Passing free through blue-sky light

‘The blue hour,’ Italians say.

 

 

-3-

 

Laugher, freedom, play without the scaffolding of the I

Stand on a bridge

 

to explore the relationship

between theft

and poetry

between the solitudes of winter in Canada

 

and empty sidewalk café tables at midnight in Mexico City

 

between an empty road

 

and a poet’s journey

 

 

 

 

Lunar Eclipse, South Winnipeg

 

Again, moon appears in one of my poems

May lunar eclipse almost complete

Curved church cupola end is what remains

White pale romantic heroine full of unspeakable longing

She is rare, beautiful, intelligent, free-spirited

Flouts social conventions and expectations

Sprite in the night sky yet pragmatic

Revealed under the cover of night

Bright monster worshipped by dark lovers

Romantic deviants, evening sky and stars.

 

 

Carmelo Militano is an Italo/Canadian writer and poet. Winner of the F G Bressani award for poetry.  Provisional Eros is his 7th book. Go to his website: https://www.carmelomilitano.com/