GENESIS

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 GENESIS
poems by Emanuel di Pasquale

"foreword by X. J. Kennedy
4919-

BOA Editions, Ltd. * Brockport, New York * 1989

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals
in which some of these poems or earlier versions of them first appeared:
The Christian Science Monitor, Counter/Measures, Crazy Horse, The
Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Nation, The New York Times, Open
Places, Poem, Poetry NOW, The Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry
Review and in the following anthologies: An Introduction to Poetry
(X. J. Kennedy, ed., Boston: Little Brown & Co., Inc.) and Poems One
Line and Longer (William Cole, ed., New York: Crown Publishers,
Ine:);.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to X. J. Kennedy.

—E. d. P.

Copyright © 1989 by Emanuel di Pasquale. All rights reserved. Manu-

factured in the United States of America. Except in the case of brief
quotations in reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission
from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to: BOA Editions,
Ltd., 92 Park Avenue, Brockport, New York 14420

ISBN: 0-918526-65-6 Cloth

0-918526-66-3 Paper LC #:88-71553

Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit corporation under

section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Service Code, are
made possible in part with the assistance of grants from the Literature
Program of the New York State Council on the Arts and the Literature
Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as contribu-
tions from private foundations, corporations and individuals.

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 CONTENTS

Foreword / by X. J. Kennedy / 9

A Find at The Asphalt Mine / 15

Sicilian Childhood: A Half Sleep / 16
My Two Fathers / 18
My Mother’s Nightmares / 19
Fat Louie / 20
Mad Mario / 21
Sicilian Pre-Dawn / 22
Sicily / 23
Genesis / 24
Melody and Roots / 25
Al, The Carpenter / 27
Uncle John / 28
Flight / 29
Burial / 30
My Uncle Emanuel / 31
Another Way / 32
Dawn / 33
A Sensual, for Ezra Pound / 34
Waiting for Idea To Become Act / 35
A Poem of Longing, Or, Per Mari,
Ancora Un Altro Poema D’Amore /| 36
The Outer Banks / 37

II

Return to Sicily / 41
 Ill

Letter from The Greek Islands / 55

Thoughts / 56
Gifts / 57
Old Man Timochenko / 58
The Clown / 59
Turkey Duck / 60
Winter at Headquarters Road / 61
Walking on Thin Ice / 62
Last Snow / 63
Spring at Headquarters Road / 64
In Spring / 65
Rain / 66
Reality / 67
The Song Within / 68
For My Mother / 70
On The Birth of My Son / 71
For Laura, My Daughter / 72
A Parting / 73
A Kelson of Creation / 74
After Seventeen Years / 75
Always Finish with a Poem / 76
 FOREWORD

Meeting the poetry of Emanuel di Pasquale for the first time,

the reader is in for an arresting experience. These poems do not
answer to any usual expectations. Neither clearly in the tradition of
metrical verse, with its rigid and walloping stanzas, and yet too rich
in musical devices to seem quite one with the other tradition of open
formality, the poems in Genesis ask to be accepted for what they
are. And what they are is rare.
For one thing, we seldom meet a poet who speaks to us so
simply and directly. Not one to proceed by methods of symbolism,
Surrealism, nor intelligent nonsense (like Wallace Stevens and
John Ashbery), di Pasquale forthrightly tells us of whatever he is
most intensely and immediately aware:
I look for you as I circle the lake,
red-faced, grotesque, old turkey duck.
Canadian geese stand like long-rooted trees
while you, lonely and lowly,
squat behind them
like a midget bush. .. .

But to me, dear friend,

you're beautiful . . .
I sing you a prayer, shy grubber,
and make your loneliness mine.
As those lines indicate, here is a poet of passion. “I want,”
declares the last line of “The Outer Banks” —“Oh, yes. I want.”
Reading di Pasquale’s work, we are overwhelmed with feeling,
sorrowful or angry or exalted. The poems are those of a man at
home in the physical world:
Like ripening grapes,
her breasts, her small breasts,
lean lightly into the air.
10

Or see a poem with an abstract title, “Waiting For Idea To

e
Become Act,” which proves surprisingly concrete and definit—:
I wait for my head to crack
and spill will into my limbs,
for thought to take root
in my hips and hands.
One sign of true poetry, an ability to create great metaphors, is
often evident. An instance that sticks in mind is “The Clown,”
with its hard-to-forget ending: “Death fell on him/like a long
face.” Most of all, di Pasquale’s work reminds me of Ezra Pound’s
idea that in poetry, only emotion endures. If he was right, and I
suspect he was, then here are poems that should last.
Di Pasquale’s accomplishment will be all the more startling
to the reader who knows his history. Born in Sicily to a mother
widowed when he was very young (“Even my father forgot to
live”), he came to America at the age of fifteen, and first learned
English in this country. Today an English professor at a commu-
nity college, he has not merely learned the language of his new
country, he has enriched it and expanded it. In the small poem,
“Rain,” for instance, a haiku-brief masterpiece often reprinted in
anthologies, he writes with an acute ear, reproducing in new con-
stellations of words a music discovered in reality.
Emanuel di Pasquale and I first came into contact in the
early 1960’s when, as poetry editor of the Paris Review, I found
myself stirred by his appealing poems. Because the magazine had
become an overstocked annual, I was unable to take any. Angry
and despairing at being encouraged but not accepted, di Pasquale
wrote me a letter from the heart. How could he write such good
poems, he wanted to know, and not get them printed? This sensi-
ble outburst led to a correspondence and a friendship that have
never been interrupted. Although over the years his work has
appeared in some of our best magazines— Sewanee Review, The
Nation, Crazy Horse and many more—it has had to wait till now °
for a first collection. Ironically, while this book, Genesis, has
taken such a while to find a bold and discerning publisher,
di Pasquale has won small but definite celebrity as a poet for
 11

children, mainly through the many popular anthologies of Myra

Cohn Livingston. But here at last is a strong, tightly chosen array
of his finest lyrics for adults.
I know of no first book of recent poetry that America has
been owed for a longer time. Miraculously, its contents remain as
fresh as the day they first issued from their maker’s brow. It’s a
book worth waiting for. I greet it with joy and thankfulness.

—X. J. Kennedy
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 15

A FIND AT THE ASPHALT MINE

Searching for birds’ tongues,

my father found me, a baby
tucked underneath a stone
(my mother said),
and lifted me
in the twilight
of a working day,
carried me with hands
that could bend cement
and touch bodies out of death,
raised that heavy
choking stone,
let me breathe
and carried me
in his splendid
workman’s hands.
SICILIAN CHILDHOOD: A HALF SLEEP

By the watershard shore,

in the provincial city,
the Franciscan Church
squatted on baroque joints.
Beneath the main prayer hall’s
empty-handed statues,
the floor dried open into
a dungeon where death stumped
like horses that have whinnied
in a night of winds.
There, hate sustained.
There, my brother went pious.

The prickly pear trees follow me

like bent old women.

By the watershard shore,

in the provincial city,
her body ravished
by the heat in young men’s eyes,
my sister nailed me to her breasts;
her warmth butted me across dance floors.
In deserted huts,
in World War II bomb shelters,
in the front rows of movie houses,
where actresses grinned,
helpless, willing,
the hurried groped and grabbed.

The prickly pear trees follow me

like bent old women.
 1M

By the watershard shore,

in the provincial city,
while white blood pasted my thighs,
I waited for age to hurdle me
to where the women with no bras
crossed legs; I waited
while sex became ancient in me;
I circled the whorehouses,
peeking at the wrinkles and the rouge,
while crosseyed taverneers
stuffed my sweet holes
and stunk my joys.

The prickly pear trees follow me

like bent old women.
18

MY TWO FATHERS

They say that

when I was a small child
I had two fathers—
one hung from a
huge portrait on the wall at home
and one was stuck to a tombstone.

They say that

in half-play
I'd boast my luck
at having two
where others had only one—
though I had none.

At home, his eyes looked down on me

and he would never speak.
And once, in my small anger,
I hurled a carrot at him
and made a cobweb of his face.

But the small picture on the tombstone

always spoke to me
and asked for flowers, flowers—
andI... Istole
chrysanthemums and roses.
 19

MY MOTHER’S NIGHTMARES

Horses gallop on her body.

Black shades flay her.

Hissing snakes
coil inside her mattress,
breeding cankers and blindness.

Lizards, flying
like hands of rough lovers,
sound the depth of her blood.

In the night, drunken friends

of her dead husband
break down her doors.

Red-hatted monks leer.

20

FAT LOUIE

Nightly, he squatted by the tavern doors

and played a silver tuba. All cheeks and lips,
he blew and blew till all us children
gathered and sang out his name.
Then he rose, a block of sweat
that beat out our breath,
and laughed us into streets,
slithering like drunken snakes.

One clear dawn,

for a couple lonely bucks,
he was rolled behind the bushes and stones,
his forehead richer by a rock.
His cheeks, which once ballooned
like blushing pig bladders,
hung like running water in a freeze.
Bits of his specs curled,
like worms, into his nose.

Blind mules brayed

and wingless black birds cawed
as he was buried
near a lime-scented pine,
another beast
officially made holy by death.
But no music filters
from his grave,
and no starry hand
yet stirs his bones.
 21

MAD MARIO

A heap of lice, half mad,

you were found dead
in the mouth of Mother Church—
the bronze Florentine door
that sketches the dragon’s fall
beneath Saint George’s spear.
Like a lonely beast
begging breadcrusts
from the scorched Sicilian village
where at my birth my father
let go his bones,
you built yourself a hut
beneath the pillar
of an ancient bridge of stones—
till, in your old age,
a fire freed you into fields
and dark cathedral caves.
Long before, in the same America
that now buys my sweetest breads,
you had burned your loins
by bedding your mother
and knifing a father
crazed with fear and jealousy.
Mario! Pazzo! Damned by staying awake
throughout your most mad dreams.
22

SICILIAN PRE-DAWN

When I was eleven,

people were always dying.
Even my father forgot to live.
I was alone.
My brother, the marrow in his bones
heavy as lead,
worked as a night baker
and fed us.
All day long he lay—
a wax shell
sleeping with eyes always open,
hissing strange women’s names.

When I was twelve,

stones down the street
changed into slaughtered horses
and barred the way to the short cut
that hours before had hurried my brother
to the bakery. At four in the morning,
alone in those Sicilian pre-dawns,
I ran the longer way,
brushed by grey churches and cold stars—
my hair straight as a pig’s bristles,
my skin tight as the belly of a drowned cat—
trying to whistle,
wailing my mother’s name.
 23

SICILY

What I remember most

is the scent of jasmine,

crisp and moist

as my dreams of women—

how after the night’s dew

had beaded stem and petals,
suffused core and cup
with unseen rain,

Id steal
into the jasmine garden
and spill its scent
about my limbs,

and suck at pistils—

vermillion nipples
spread flat
beneath my tongue.
24

GENESIS

When I was young, I played with bastards,

sons whose mothers were sluts,
children on whose births
the priest with dry loin gluts.
Our prophets were pimps and epic drunkards.
No faint-lipped teachers ever felt our flanks.

My friends and I were donkey screwers,

snatchers of poor-boxes and cactus leaves.
Yes, we were deeply thieves.
We roamed where our hunger rooted
and no food was sacred.

Our lean eyes smartly raked

by winds that kept us eternally running
into valleys and, at quick turns, climbing
up high olive hills, we moved through nightmares
that only Satan and Mothers know how to make.
 25

MELODY AND ROOTS

With the will of witchcraft,

I see my father again
and feel his body, living heat,
as I dive butt-first
into the summer-light
Sicilian river, deep
into one of its deepest holes;
and he lifts me like a sparrow
and dunks me, laughing:
his moustache two
red-tipped wings,
the veins on the back of his hands
blue lightning in the grey sky.
Over and under, my father
jumps and dives and I follow,
breathless with the first chill
of top leaves on the feather trees
that trace the river to the sea.

With his slippery knife,

my father cracks the melon
that like a large green egg,
half sunken in shallows,
has kept cool in the chirping waters.
Shifting a few small rocks,
he lifts the shy crabs—
our freshly roasted dinner,
while muddy-eyed frogs
keep their coarse distance.
We kneel and slurp up
the cool spring water.
26

Then, with the spilling shades,

we walk up to town—
by great horse troughs
and pathways slim as goats,
by broken-fingered saints
and tomb-dumb statues,
by palm trees that sketch out
blue church gardens
and cafés where old men squint
at stingy cards,
by salt-black women
rocking on door frames,
and children, flocks of hurt
birds, cowering by curbs,
up thousands of steps,
up the hill, up,
passing houses that lean
like old grey mules,
my father and I walk—
I on his left,
he close to the walls,
the fall of stones and bricks
safe in the strength of his shoulders.
 27

AL, THE CARPENTER

With the wisdom of flowers bent

by sun and rain, he spent
his days the owner’s ways.

From him there were no raving arms,

no braving, wet-lipped speeches.

His eyes, that knew how to creep,

died quickly, in efficient sleep.
28

UNCLE JOHN

Uncle John, how they have done you in,

old flesh. They’ve chained your dead hands
with rosaries and placed bronze and silver
crucifixes crawling like lizards
on the solid copper casket.

Old John, seismic boozer,

the wineries will miss you.
You, too, left your myth.
“T’m done for,” you said,
before your heart officially froze.
“The horny bitch has been
shadowing me for three days.”

To think that so much hate

can reap so many flowers, John.
 29

FLIGHT

Enough is more than most

and mostly he had had enough
of clarinet and harmonica lessons,
of his bible-bum father,
his wretching mother’s
grand canyon mouth.

His porcelain heart cracking,

he crawled to the nearest analyst
looking for the brilliant bush.

He leased a ten month home

in Paumanok bay
where he swam summer and spring
and kept a one-winged swan.
30

BURIAL
(For My Father-in-Law)

The bier lies like a flowered altar

ready for the ceremony of earth.
Murmurs are scooped by the full skies,
small children squeal from bush to tombstone—
loud silence lies alone
in the dead man’s bones.
The diggers hurry
their only form,
fold garlands and chairs,
and slip the bier below.
And as the mourners retreat,
the two daughters advance.
Numbed by the vacancy
of flesh, they kneel
and hold each other
in the bright blood
of their father.
 31

MY UNCLE EMANUEL

Battered by cheap booze, his knees loose

in perpetual pre-genuflection,
my uncle toured the lame streets
like a skeleton (the jingling of his bones
muffled by his liquid flesh),
Crazed with forgetful dreams,
he found himself in nearby towns,
rolling with strange dames
(guest of frightful hosts),
ready to stay lost.
But my aunt always hunted him down
and prayed the saints for his new birth.
Yet, monthly it seemed, the van came.
Doorkeeper to his hell, his wife
let the male nurses in,
who felled him with their madman shirt:
they bound him in his sleep,
his kidneys floating past his thighs.
Mostly, he wouldn’t be in his head
till the madhouse shrieked at him
and his thirst howled from a dry bed.
32

ANOTHER WAY

Off the cross you go, my brother.

Gently, gently, take those thorns
off your head. Let your wounds heal
with fresh cool water
from a deep, deep quarry I know.
Settle down with one of the Marys
and grow, in love, on a small farm
with great water wells.
She'll place her head
under the warm cave of your armpit
in those nights of thunder
and you will help her sleep peacefully.
Let your eyes be clear
as the birth of your firstborn—
a skittish girl with chestnut hair,
a beauty with lips that swell like grapes.
Let your legs have a dancer’s bounce,
the athlete’s certainty,
a cougar’s quick footfall.
Eat the barely bloodless chicken, beef—
the lean meats
and drink the dry red wine.
Let your hands keep the heat of ferns.
Let them heal the limbs of those
who yearn for movement,
for the wave of the snake.
 33

DAWN

This morning I woke up and heard

branches rustle in my head—
a grey seed cracked open into roots,
roots lifted into trunk
and flowed into branches, buds.
I heard winds wet
the veined backs of leaves
with moist whispers,
and watched a redbird dip
and rise around me
like an uncertain plane.
Below me, a small spring spilled open
and damp clay shone like a clump of sun.
This morning I saw winds slip into buds.
34

A SENSUAL, FOR EZRA POUND

A girl is feeding
grapes to three leopards.
The leopards are black.
The grapes are also black.
Blue black.
And the girl is naked.
Like ripening grapes,
her breasts, her small breasts,
lean lightly into the air.
 35

WAITING FOR IDEA TO BECOME ACT

I wait for a simple message

straight as children’s eyes.
And my chest shivers in the wait.
My heart is a hawk
in treeless twilight.
My limbs beat like lizards’ tails.
I wait for my head to crack
and spill will into my limbs,
for thought to take root
in my hips and hands.
A POEM OF LONGING, OR PER MARI,
ANCORA UN ALTRO POEMA D’AMORE

Last night, my bedroom

grew into a blue beast:

The forest across the street

hovered over my balcony,
scraped away dust and rust
and filled the bird feeder
with small buds.
Thin-leaved umbrella plants
and small ferns thickened
into juicy African snakes.
The tall bookcase
stemmed
into a palm tree
and
the rug rose to the ceiling
and shed feathers
of fattest blue.

And you, where were you?

This morning, three blue-winged seagulls,

having flown out of last night’s stars,
circle over my head.

And you, why aren’t you in my bed?

 37

THE OUTER BANKS

I want to go to the Outer Banks

and live like fish and seagull.
I want to learn to breathe
and know the ocean’s winds.
I want to take my girl with me
(her thighs slim and trembling)
and row into the thousand inlets.
I want. Oh, yes. I want.
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RETURN TO SICILY

(Written in July and August, 1978, during and immediately after

a visit to my native city of Ragusa, where I lived for the first
fifteen years of my life before emigrating to the United States.)

ib

Never as in past facts or dreams,

my brother moves. The palm tree
under whose rich-leaved shade he smiles
has dates grown useless
from having stayed green too long.

2,

Dammed, beautifully dammed in cement and steel,

the ancient river is drying,
the old waterholes where in my childhood
I swam naked as the crabs I roasted
with dry bamboo sticks
have gone low—the old waterholes choked
with asphalt and weeds. Only the waterbugs
don’t seem to notice as they crawl their
butterfly stroke. One lone lizard scatters up a tree,
a frog stirs mud. Unafraid, my son searches for it,
lifts the bark off a tree, but the lizard’s gone.
We see no frog, only the stirred mud.
The river I knew is but a dragging rivulet,
its waters sucked thin by cement factories,
boiled to cool their machines.

3,

I found my son a pomegranate bud

and slipped a bit of branch into it
42

and made him a fine pipe. And I

found my daughter a pomegranate bud
and slipped a bit of branch into it
and made her a fine pipe. And
my wife puffed on the toy pipe
and laughed.

4,

I woke to a cool light filled with breezes

and the swallow’s song. And my mother,
thinking it would all disturb me
and my children and my love,
tried to close the window shut.
But I would not allow it.
Let the swallow sing
and let the cool light
touch us with breezes!

5.

Etruscan graveyards dug out whole

rest in the dimly lit museum.
One empty tombstone lies half open.
The figurine of some unknown Socrates,
its upper lip curled, smiles wickedly
from behind glass.
Like a prison guard, the coughing attendant
follows me and my son step by step.
He eyes us and stares at windows
to trace our movements.
We wonder in whispers at sharp stone hunting weapons,
killing tongues, skinning bits of rock.
 43

6.

In the full moon tonight,

the werewolf tumbles and tumbles
and leaps and leaps
and lands on his feet on a Sicilian mountain.
And as he lands (his moustache dripping wine),
he dances a little jig, looks into the eyes
of a girl who finds it hard
not to twitch in the thighs,
takes her by her sweating hands,
hops up on the hayloft
and comes back an hour later,
bright-eyed and hungry—
he and his girl eat olives soaked in oil,
soft cheese, and drink red wine.
The wind whips up for the werewolf
and shakes the trees
and stirs the werewolf’s tail and ears.
After a look into the eyes of his girl,
he cartwheels off the mountain,
takes wing and flies to the winking moon.

fi

Pulled a baby crab off a seaweed-rich rock

and let it run on my children’s hands.
And saw God. Saw God in millions
of bright lights dancing in the sea and air.
Heard Him in the wail of street vendors
selling parsley and basil. Heard Him
in the squeal of children outrun by a foaming wave.
Felt Him in the mid-July twilight,
in the blue-tipped feather
44

of the southern horizon,

In the smooth circling of the swallow,
in the quick beat of pigeons
landing in the cracks of clay roofs.
And I saw Him in the small picnic under a full moon:
the boiled potato, roasted onion, lung, liver—
in the wine and children and roses
and the jasmine bud and flower:
white and spread out as a gown
that dawn winds lift.

8.

“You, you were found by your father between a cracked rock,”

my mother told my brother. And then to me, “You, and you
your father found beneath a stone.”
“But no,” my brother said, “Emanuel was found inside a cabbage.”
And my mother, making certain never to look at me once,
“Unlike any natural child, Emanuel’s first word was Father,
and not, as it should have been, Mother. And your father,
sick as a river whose mountain spring has dried,
would cry, ‘This child is come to kill me,
this child is the Anti-Christ
come to take my place.’ ”

They say the sea’s been wild for three days now
and soon should calm. I hope it won't.
Let the waves, like the white teeth of horses,
nibble at buds on low tree branches.
Let living shells clasp rock so hard
 45

that only knives can force them loose.

Let swimmers flee, all except my children
my wife and me—let us ride the wild neighing.

10.

My fifty year old brother made love twice yesterday

(“I had to know,” he winked.) He can still eat two full plates
of spaghetti a day (“easily, ” he yells). And, with the right
friends, once a year, can consume seven pounds of fried
sausages at one slow shot, with red wine, pastries,
and the black coffee.

11.

A friend remembers how always, as darkness

began to stick out its white eye,
like an anxious Huck Finn I'd run for home.
And while my mother sat on the front door step
gossiping about bad women
who marked the town with their red smiles and crotches
and men who followed their scent
like dogs searching for trees,
I'd cover my head with heavy blankets
and hide from a barefoot Holy Virgin
Mother of Christ or some Red-Eyed monk
who floated over my bed.
Yet this same friend remembers how,
under the sun’s fiery tails,
I’'d curse God and Saints,
hurl lotus fruit at my enemies’ faces,
and, to feed hungry friends, I'd
steal pennies from the church’s poor box.
46

12.

It will not lose itself, this Sicily.

Above the violent fist of forced brotherhood,
the songs of farm and sea emerge certain and steady.
The dawn communion of horse, cart and man
on their way to the monthly fair,
the soft buttocks of almond-eyed women,
the months rich as ripe pomegranates,
the rooster in the man,
the strength of one woman, one man—
the family, the union of small forces.

13.

This night, my daughter, whose innards

have been churned by the change of air
or dampness of sea, has fallen asleep
holding half a lime and a note of apology and love
for my having lost my temper.
Meanwhile, my son is quietly resting
with cool damp cloths his mother
has placed on his sunburned back.

14,

Noon hour. The only sounds are those of bottles

of water stacked inside small refrigerators.
Even the beeps of cars die down
and motorscooters still their purrs.
TV antennas fall asleep standing up.
Pigeons lay off monuments,
and coffee machines end their hissing.
Band-aid bikinis get rinsed.
 47

The old men disappear from the square

and the balconies of political clubs—
the old men who, morning and late night,
sit on benches and chairs
and gesture like massacred snakes
for a sugar-drowned coffee,
the old men in white shirts and black pants,
jackets and flat cap (woolen and worn
in any weather), the old men who measure
time by memories of fascist pride,
the old men whose only living fight
is claiming terrain from pigeons
and the long tables of candy vendors.

15.

The waves wash over the rippled sand

with a cooling hand, feel the beach rocks fully,
take their time and roll back to sea.
Some fifty yards out, a fishing boat stretches,
almost still. Its captain leans over the lamp,
readies it for the night.

The calming hand of the sea

rubs the sea-creatures to sleep.

Crowded with walkers and vendors,

the boardwalk is a nuisance to the sea.
The old forest of bamboo is gone—the forest
where twenty years ago lovers
would fall on their backs and knees;
now cement and asphalt display rides,
electric voices . . . neon lights rip the eyes,
cover the night. The weeds long for silences.
Lovers sweat inside small parked cars.
48

My love’s head hurts. She lies across the bed,

her head resting on the inside of my left thigh.
I stroke her hair. She falls asleep.
Outside, the noises grow.

16.

Mr. Style! Who studied a bit and speaks Formal Italian

with a Northern sound. Who loves to be close to me,
the professor. Who for the last twenty years has been too busy
seducing married fake blondes to see any of his childhood friends.
Who is too mighty as a small time boss
at the Great Local Cement Plant
to say more than a quick hello
to friends who work and sweat there.
Who has driven to see me
and has asked me to send my poems.
Whose only great fear is having to wet
his thinning hair when he goes boating.

Ai

At night, some women simply close—

sunflower seeds one finds open and swirling
only while the sun is out.
And there are women
stirring in their watermelon seeds
who, seeming closed day and night,
can easily open
and in their red darkness
find sweetest juices, fruit.
 49

18.

The hot sand that burns in summer

keeps the feet from sweating in winter.
It hides lovers that flash through it
into tree-made huts—the branches both walls and sky.
Below, the sea plays the sly fool.
Only its colorings give away its depth:
blue-black for deep,
light-brown for shallow—
sandbank even at high sea.
Only the seagull is its master.

19.

But always the inevitable Piero, owner of the local hotel,

charging extra for the few necessary dinner drinks—
an orange soda, water— wanting to grow green gills
on his porcupine neck, believing every man’s wallet his own,
swearing on his mother’s honesty,
creating imaginary legal documents. But backing off,
obsequious at the mention of a friend of a friend.

20.

The waitress sucks her upper lip,

grows bone on a jaw already hard as red granite,
leaves the dirty napkin on the dinner table for three days,
keeps the chipped plate and glass in circulation.
And, at the tip, smiles an obligatory smile.

21.

Love-making, the birth of a child. . .

Only these few things are as sweet
50

as stolen red grapes (big as the fallen sun)

washed in spring water
and eaten while children laugh
and women clean as highest clouds
stain their lips
and while a childhood friend
gets drunk with me and remembers
days old as night:
a good hunting dog,
swimming holes,
caverns cool and moist.

22.

Below Ibla Mountain, the cemetery sits,

a small city of the perfectly behaved.
Bushes and grass and pine trees grow disorderly.
In some dark corner, my father’s bones lie half-melted in lime.
I walk with my children;
free-limbed goats, both hop on stone walls.

My mother points below, “There, I want

to be buried there—in that sunlit corner.”

(Two lions guard the cemetery’s gates.

One sleeps and one’s wide-eyed.
When, as children, we rode the lions to exhaustion,
I'd shirk the sleeping lion.
Always, always I rode the wide-eyed beast.)

23.

At twilight, hundreds of swallows sprinted and sang

into sleep— made a jungle racket at the church square,
dove over our heads like dancing black hands,
 51

and, imperceptibly,
one by one,
slipped into their nests.

24.

Last night, my wife swam

on highest water,
on deepest ocean.
And a great fish
rose from the black depths.
She nearly panicked
at the thought of shark,
but smiled at smooth dolphin
and embraced it
as it surfaced
between her legs.

25.

Marble columns are chipped by nails

driven in by some careless altar boy.
Young women slip and fall
on the cracked, black asphalt floor.
While the afternoon light
bursts through the cupola’s mirrors,
morons wander the streets
and wash their shirts in the fountain
by the baptismal wall.
(All the gold fish are dead.)
Saint John the Baptist, stiff-necked and still,
smiles and points a finger at the Heavens.
He knows his Feast is coming and lira bills
will soon tickle his dry flanks.
52

26.

Dawn. The Little Jesus’ Church bells let loose. First Mass.
Bent and lean as rabbits roughing it on rock fields,
two old women clear their dry throats,
spit at my mother’s doorstep and hurry down to church.
Dawn. Swallows stretch out the cloudless skies.
A water memory splashes in my head,
I climb the river of dry stones
to the end of town—past yawning tavern doors
and an old man dragging green bamboo sticks.
Dawn. Like a large hand, a stone fountain
cups a mountain spring.
I slurp the cool silver water
like a small horse.
Fig and pomegranate buds swell.
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 55

LETTER FROM THE GREEK ISLANDS

We eat old goat cheese, bread, drying chickens,

drink milk, wine and the hard well water,
and conserve the few herbs and spices the hillocks offer.
When the hunting season blows it damp horn,
we kill a few rabbits, and elusive pheasant.

The souls forget themselves in movie houses

and card games, in dreams of those friends
who left empty café chairs and sailed
continents away to the busy tombs of industries.

The Aegean is spent.

It withholds fish.
Its back creaks like the bridges of boats
that have been drydocked for centuries.
56

THOUGHTS

My mind is hefty
with the thought of friends
who
to deny the possibility of dawn
shut their eyes
who
as the sun began to bite
spun into black caverns
 57

GIFTS

I remember the smiles of small children,

rich with open eyes.

I remember my wife’s body after love,

soft and bright as the blue glow above green trees.

And I remember a feather a friend gave me one summer—

a small, white-black feather a bird had shed by his barn.
He picked it up, smiled and simply said, “Here.”
OLD MAN TIMOCHENKO

Winds scratch his hands

and his sharp bones
deeply assert
their lineaments.
He stand like a
trembling leaf
on the branch
of an oak,
and will not fall.

Careful,
by the road’s edge,
silent as a sunray,
he waves
as I drive by.
Like birds’ wings,
loose as they coast
in the high air,
his eyes
soften and expand.

He moves in slow waves,

an ancient snake
knowing the end can wait.
 59

THE CLOWN

Looking like wormwood,

the clown lay
on the splinters
of an alabaster bird
and from his youth
sang for death:
“The moon, chopped head,
rolls with crooked eyes,
faking a look of love.
The stars beat like fists of fire.
Deep in furnace light,
I am at the farthest dawn,
alone, a roaming thing
in a burning desert.
The palest ghosts wink at me
and, with the points of rusty scissors,
prick the insides of my thighs.
Dry land fences off the seas.
Sand multiplies.
And desert lizards,
their scaly tongues flicking,
are on the loose; their eyes
freeze one or two final birds,
while the hidden webs of spiders
pin the last butterflies.”
Death fell on him
like a long face.
60

TURKEY DUCK

I look for you as I circle the lake,

red-faced, grotesque, old turkey duck.
Canadian geese stand like long-rooted trees
while you, lonely and lowly,
squat behind them
like a midget bush.

I remember a few days ago

the boy —curly haired, blonde
handsome youngster— cursing at you:
“Get away, you're ugly, ugly,” he yelled,
and would not throw you bread.
And I recall how you stood back
and stared at the brown earth.

But to me, dear friend,

you're beautiful—
my children bring you bread.
I wonder where your friends are,
your family, bumpy-headed,
turkey-faced and handsome-red.
I sing you a prayer, shy grubber,
and make your loneliness mine.
We both breathe cool autumn winds
and share the full moon chill
and leftover bread.
 61

WINTER AT HEADQUARTERS ROAD

Months back he knew

this winter would last forever,
the way he began to pile up chunks of wood.
Thin-skinned, the bones leaping out of his face,
how neatly he aligned the fire-food
below the bare apple tree
and around the water well,
charting arches on a roofless temple.

Now snowdrifts pile upon snowdrifts,

winds whirlpool winds,
and seagull-colored birches
shake back and forth
like despairing women
wailing in silence.
Deep into February, as I
drive to a friend’s high farm,
I see the old man
still shaping the wood
atop a flat tree stump
before his house—
his other witnesses two great grey swans,
and his wife who, from time to time,
picks the few splinters the sharp axe loses.
WALKING ON THIN ICE

I heard the crackling

underfoot,
felt the wet ice
reach through my shoes;
and like a dumb drunkard,
whose head is tight
from too much booze,
quickly found myself
soaked full—
at last, sharply awake;
at last, loose in a freeze.
 63

LAST SNOW

Water-thick and plenty,

this last March snow
melts even as it settles
on a sleeping tree
and turns it into almond blossom.
(Blood-red cardinals take crazy chances
and sing from dripping branches.)
It melts too fast
this last snow,
spreadeagled, soft,
and I yearn for more.
A few fat inches would do.
Then let the sun walk quickly through.
SPRING AT HEADQUARTERS ROAD

Here energy takes wing and

whitens the air, brilliant
as the beat of butterflies.
Flat bellied squirrels
bounce on comma feet
across the road
and still my car.
Pheasants stake out a playground,
a land line that is theirs.
I, the intruder.
A dog hooves down a hill
to smell my car, O Cat-
alina blue and bright,
O killer straight.
Fawns’ eyes fill me.
Small birds trudge at the last instant,
shaken by a well-tuned carburator,
and horses neigh near a creek
that flows white flamed,
clear and fluid as a calf’s look.
 65

IN SPRING

In Spring in Washington Square Park

the fat red houses squat around the square
and always there are the clouds at sunset
sliding southwest like plump porpoises
crazed with heat
66

RAIN

Like a drummer’s brush,

the rain hushes the surface of tin porches.
 67

REALITY

Now that we see no mystery beyond the hill

we'll dance on the dunes
and get covered with leaves
with starfish thorns
and the sighs of baby seahorses
now that we call the sun the sun
68

THE SONG WITHIN

Trapped by subtle dreams,

we need to awake and feel
for the faint light
that leads to the song
of the simple nightingale
and the crackling rasp
of the hoodlum frog.

The wind plays the forest

like a harp,
and a child sings
with open throat.
We need not shut
the soft-eyed wonder
of the child —
as, lost in the forest,
he makes music
from the reed,
and we need not silence
the forest that hums
like winds over
open ocean waves.

We need to unfurl like flags to the wind,

or birds that on windy days fly
breast first into the high currents
only to give and be blown across fields
like willing leaves.
 69

Humpback whales
that every new year
sing new songs,
we, too, have endless themes
within us, flames of arias,
for the sky is but a greater ocean,
and the earth howls
in a swirl.

The great northern lights

advance and retreat—
condors and hawks.
Music echoes in our bones
and blood rushes like a waterfall
through our flesh.
70

FOR MY MOTHER

Mother, I love you as I love radishes—

the bitterness,
the bite in the tongue,
the dirt, the earth—
and the egg, the juice: the root itself.
 cal

ON THE BIRTH OF MY SON

Snow has stopped gliding

down the arms of air.
Night is whiter
than the almond flower.
The burdened branches nod
like half-broken stallions.
Below the pavement,
great mountain ranges brood.
72

FOR LAURA, MY DAUGHTER

Lighter than June winds,

she teaches birds to fly
and sunrays how to skate
on the bark of a birch.

Proud pheasants pirouette for her.

Lakes and streams drink from her eyes.

The skies rush about her.

To touch her hair, air jostles air.
 73

A PARTING

Like splendid house plants, Indian

rubber trees that have outreached
the ceiling and lean to the full light
of yard and balcony, our children begin
to somersault into the sudden
and wide hands of winds and streams,
into the small secrets of
their own dear friends.
They dance to the beat of farthest stars—
while we linger by silent porches
in cool weather and, open-throated,
watch for the alien ship
to greet us with its organ
music, its deep trombones.
74

A KELSON OF CREATION

The moon spreads

her hips wide,
offering the same womb
that once churned
the blind seas
and loosed life,
the same fluttering tongue
that stirred loins
when in his garden, naked,
Blake and his woman
rolled into one,
while angels flicked on
the great northern lights.
 75

AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS

Vincent van Gogh, as flowers

and blue hills spilled over
with the stuff of suns,
died in his brother’s arms
by force of will.
And I, as our children rush
about us like waterfalls,
live in your arms
by force of feel.
ALWAYS FINISH WITH A POEM

Always finish with a poem

in praise of children;
mention their eyes,
open and giving; the sun
and moon and beetle stare,
the hungry wolf,
and ocean with currents without end—
the sure look that,
fully realizing objects
one by one,
doesn’t rush or blur.
Mention their limbs
that easily somersault.
Praise their dreams
of birds’ songs
in restless dawns
and rain slipping
down tree trunks
in those twilights cradled
in a father’s gathering arms
or the warm nest of a mother.
Praise the children
for their ready tears.
And praise the children
for their belly laughs,
their unstopped throats.
 EMANUEL DI PASQUALE

Emanuel di Pasquale was born in Sicily in 1943. He came to

America in 1957. His poems have appeared in The Sewanee
Review, The Nation, Poem, Poetry NOW, Southern Poetry
Review, The New York TIMES, The New York Quarterly, and
many other periodicals, as well as in anthologies. Lately, he has
been publishing poems for children in CRICKET and various
anthologies published by Holiday House. In 1965 he earned a B.A.
in English from Adelphi University and in 1966 he earned an M.A.
in English from New York University. With his wife, Mari, a
medical doctor, and their two children, he makes his home in
Edison, New Jersey, where he is assistant professor of English at
Middlesex County College.
ay |
BOA EDITIONS, LTD.
NEW POETS OF AMERICA SERIES
Vol 1: Cedarhome
Poems by Barton Sutter
Foreword by W. D. Snodgrass
Vol. 2: Beast Is A Wolf with Brown Fire
Poems by Barry Wallenstein
Foreword by M. L. Rosenthal
Vol. 3: Along the Dark Shore
Poems by Edward Byrne
Foreword by John Ashbery
Vol. 4: Anchor Dragging
Poems by Anthony Piccione
Foreword by Archibald MacLeish
Vol. 5: Eggs in the Lake
Poems by Daniela Gioseffi
Foreword by John Logan
Vol. 6: Moving the House
Poems by Ingrid Wendt
Foreward by William Stafford
Vol. 7: Whomp and Moonshiver
Poems by Thomas Whitbread
Foreword by Richard Wilbur
Vol. 8: Where We Live
Poems by Peter Makuck
Foreword by Louis Simpson
Vol. 9: Rose
Poems by Li-Young Lee
Foreword by Gerald Stern
Vol. 10: Genesis
Poems by Emanuel di Pasquale
Foreword by X. J. Kennedy
Se .

Te
ee, atid
sit

—
 Emanuel di Pasquale

“Neither clearly in the tradition of metrical verse. . .and yet too rich in musical devices
to seem quite one with the other tradition of open formality, the poems in Genesis ask to
be accepted for what they are. . .rare... I know of no first book of recent poetry that
America has been owed for a longer time. . . Its a book worth waiting for. I greet it with
joy and thankfulness.’

— X.

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