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Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 5 july 2013

America

In your own words
You can take the road not chosen
And arrive at the idea of order at Key West,
Or gather at the river
Where the branch will not break.  
 
What lips my lips have kissed
Are words for the wind.
This is just to say, America,
I carry you in my heart
Like a dream deferred.


number of comments: 2 | rating: 3 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 18 may 2012

Kiwanis Music Finals


The practice area is like an orchard of sound
Where you pick notes as they ripen
And those that fall seed the ground.
 
You can harvest grapes from this vine
That grows along the staff of time
Following the sun into drums of wine.
 
The pianos seem near and far
Like conversations behind doors
Or rain on the roof of your car.
 
The practice area is a paradise
Where even angels clash
And beauty is soundly imprecise.  
 
Please listen to the children play,
Their music is so unaffected
You’ll hear the origins of rhapsody.


number of comments: 1 | rating: 4 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 26 december 2011

The Painter After a Stroke

Half the loft in darkness,
Half the flowers watered,
Daylight shines halfway across the floor
Like a line he drew
With a yellow marker.
 
Half his mail unopened,
Half his cat visible,
One speaker crackles in and out,
A spark of recognition
Comes and goes.
 
He smiles like a canvas
With a middle margin,
And pointing to a window
Beside his easel
Perfect halves meet.


number of comments: 1 | rating: 6 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 18 december 2014

In a Gallery of Birds

The mind is brushed by sparrow wings.
                                 Hart Crane
 
All shadows of a kind                       cross the atlas of the mind.
Alone or with fledglings                  in realistic settings 
The ghosts of those birds                           migrated into words. 
The longer we stayed                         the sound of a glade.
Windows doubled as skies                  for eternity in their eyes.
Even for a feather                                   it is a heavy tether.
In each nest                                            eggs  at rest.
Such stillness grows                               like flight in repose
Mounted there                                          in flying air.
What is seeming                                       if nature is dreaming?
What is death                                           to a hummingbird’s breath?
In an eagle’s gaze                                soar endless days.
A glass case sings                                     it breaks with wings.
All field marks fade                              light goes into shade.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 0 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014

The Counterweight

If you weigh the stars in the balance
Glaciers are nurseries of the stars.   
They are weighbridges to the borealis,
Ice roads into isolated communities.
They’re hydroelectric power plants, 
Evolutionary clocks, mammoth museums,
Icebox mountains of organic matter.
Meltwaters surge from the summits
Enlivening salmon in summer streams,
Nourishing the valley with snowmelt.
Glaciers are a kind of counterweight
To their own absence tipping the scale.
Once gone, what could replace glaciers
That we’d not burn in water/drown in fire.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 0 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 9 december 2014

Journey of Life

You want balance, but this abandoned bicycle
In Amsterdam borders on paralysis.
It is Chaplin pretending to be the Fuhrer.
It is whoever survives, whoever escapes… 
It is a flower cart that flowers in the same spot.
It is modern art, the unraveling of modes,
Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” reconstituted,  
A bicycle trellis in European horticulture,  
An instrument for the music of rarest days.
Someone left this bicycle and didn’t return.
Someone locked this bicycle here and died,
Or moved, or moved away and died,
Or became a novelist, like Michel Houellebecq.
It’s a sacrificial lamb, a contract with loopholes,
A love letter from the bicycle crazes. 
The wheels of the sky ripen among vines.
The pedals are powered by the sun,
And with wind, deep-rooted to the spot,
The lock is slowly unlocking, like space.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 0 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 20 december 2014

Firebird Sunset

That’s the Phoenix! That’s the myth!
That’s what the storybooks   
Have been trying to tell me. The firebird
Nests in the searing winds of time.
It migrates to the forests of the sun.
It lives in the drop of fire behind the eyes
And perches on the volcano in the ribs.
You’ll know the firebird by its ashes,
By how the sunset beats its wings
And flames out like a cosmic fire.   
Better to start living, to start loving, 
Better to be consumed with joy
Than live another day without rebirth,
Without music that catches fire
Or words that cast a burning shadow.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 0 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 24 april 2015

Strip Search

for Victor Hernández Cruz  
 
Strip search because I was full of the drug love,
Strip search because my name is an eye-rhyme with Allah,
Strip search because of Mafia stereotypes,
Strip search because I was carpooling to Mexican Village,
Strip search because I carried a book of poetry,
Strip search because I was traveling to New Orleans,
Strip search because I loved a woman with two names,
Strip search because a black woman offered me a ride,
Strip search for desiring Belle Isle after midnight,
Strip search because I am not a savior but a Salvatore,
Strip search for bleeding from hands and feet,
Strip search for driving naked and saving time,
Strip search for visiting the graves of my ancestors,
Strip search for the orange blossoms on my bride,
Strip search for the smoke of ablution and peace,
Strip search for defiance at the borders of freedom.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 1 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 17 april 2015

Natural History

We are bone, love, we are earth,
Our breathing slows and we are stone.
 
We are flesh, love, we are spirit,
Our eyes close and we are mineral.
 
We are burial places, love, we are fire,
When we kiss the ice ages recede.
 
We are half lives, love, missing links,
When we touch the earth grows fecund.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 0 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 11 april 2015

The Study of Languages

My love is like the crescent moons of Arab calligraphy,
Like a language that sand erases.

She is also like the little word houses of China
Shining on their bamboo stilts
As the green rice flashes to the east.

Spanish is for the blood rose of her mouth,
French for the azure of her gaze,
Russian for her madness and passion.

Latin is for the mirror of her beauty.
Ancient Greek is our Olympus,
Our long climb to a mythical sublime.

If I spoke Aramaic I could tell you
Of the myrrh and frankincense of her flesh.

Sanskrit is for the mystic knowledge of her eyes,
Hieroglyphs are for the silence
With which she guides me to her living tomb.

She is like the inscription on a stone,
More obscure as it is revealed.


number of comments: 0 | rating: 1 | detail


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Other poems: Strip Search, Pathetic Fallacy, Natural History, The Study of Languages, Animal Horns, Anthology, Unforeseen Events, Empire Coins, Mother Son Song, Terrace Garden, Lampedusa House, Firebird Sunset, In a Gallery of Birds, The Counterweight, Journey of Life, Conversations with Men with Brain Injuries, Music Mountain, Chronicles of Man, What Angels Know, Clouds Over London, Stonehenge Revisited, Six Rooms, Kintsukuroi, A Time of Hard Rain, Incantation Bowl, America, Petroleum Coke Piles on the Detroit River, State of Grace Hospital, My America, On a Photograph of an Abandoned Southern Home, The Becoming, Cryptozoology, Crow Feather Totem, Ellis Island, Kiwanis Music Finals, Young Love in Ancient Place, The Blue Hour, Two Moon Matching Set, Sea Dreams, The Painter After a Stroke, In the Beauty of a Lower Heaven,
 

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