SELECTED POETRY

by
Anthony Liccione

ETERNITY

Remember how, Michael
when we were seventeen
in the kitchen peeling green
pears, the sun mirroring off the knife -
slicing its reflection amid our tender
eyes, sedately, as we talked
of eternity, the thought of being
and the fatal syntax of it. The
blind whiteness stare of a pure state.
We hugged each other in realization
that it was a forever process,
that eternity is in the now.
When we let go, our friendship
went on also, where most young hearts
go, with ambitions to get in the way.

I ran into you, fifteen years later.
Downtown, by the War Memorial
you were walking in the eye
of the street screaming at the world
from a crazy distant, as I drove closer
you were giving anyone, everyone
your middle finger.
When I approached, not knowing you
and then I did, the instant you told
me to go fuck off, with a fist tight
in a ball of rage and your finger
pointing up toward God, telling me
where to go. I said your name, and
it�s me. Your face loosened, dropped
and you shook my hand oddly.
I never asked of why your rage.

I asked of your travels, where
you been and your goings -
we ended up in a bar with
two drinks down talking
of your failing marriage
and how she has been seeing
another woman. And how a
divorce would just wreck
your little Michael, being six.
I apologized for not being there.

I dropped you off back to the street,
asked if you wished to stay the night
seeing the rain was heavily falling,
but you turned down the offer
exited and waved a fallible goodbye.
You returned to shouting at cars
and a raised finger in headlights
approaching you cautiously.
Lightning struck the sky silently
as a hummingbird strikes a flower.

I saw your face on the news
ten years after in another state,
a father of two they described you,
who butchered his wife with a hammer
while she laid asleep in bed, with a
pillow you covered her face and
hammered, hammered with a foul
stench of whiskey on your breath.
They found her covered in feathers
and blood.
At the trial your lawyer pleaded insanity
and you won the case insane, the judge
ordered you forever institutionalised -
they put you in a room pure of white
no windows, no metal objects, or hangings
of any kind, no shadows that may linger.
They gave you walks when needed
and then locked you back in eternity.

And I recalled our infinite thoughts,
moving from flesh to faultlessness
in the flash of a moment,
how everything could change
in the flash of a moment.

---

A LEAP OF FAITH

Not only doesn't he listen well,
but he will leap out of the twelve story building
window, and take the plunge of being airborne;

plummeting with a now knowledge of gravity,
turning about degrees in the air-
making music as a windbag along the way
with his spine facing the land.

All the while it is an eccentric fall
of six-point-seven seconds to ground,
according to my stopwatch -

the cheerio of his mouth in agape
and how the upward hair changes
from gold to flashing burgundy

as he meets the thriving sky.
Perhaps, it's the way the sun strikes,
throwing its icy red rays like if
velocity, thrill and a paintbrush

decided to come together to cause a scene -
when he suddenly turns over, less timid to time
like a skydiver knowing where at what depth
to rip the cord of his parachute.

This commotion came about when I tried
to clip his claws with nowhere to escape
he took the brightest part of the room

(as light at the end of a tunnel)
accidentally through an open window,
taking the spider plant with him on the way down.

Unaware of my bellowing above -
with the thought he passed over his numbers
and came steadfast to this ninth life,

I rushed down the flight of stairs in fright
to find him settled licking his paws of dawn dew.
He mastered this dive seven times over

that same year, enjoying his pastime urges
to jump and jump again out the apartment window,
with no worries of broken bones below.

The effort of reprise comes to me,
how he overtook one fear in fear
and found a new hobby for bird watching.

And the many windows I've passed up in life,
where chance could have changed fate -
backed with a sense of defeat,

on returning to those shadowed windows
with a resurrected courage to leap,
I found them sealed shut with the few
shattered, staring out into belated darkness.

And that could-of if I would-of surfaces
and wrenches me like a thorn in the side.

I resolved this jump a beautiful thing,
a splendor on both sides of the bough
when I go down below with my video
camera to capture pieces of my hopes,
when he lands on the pads of his feet -
where the evident of film only can tell
and staunchly strides away.

---

OF YOU, THE WIND SET ME FREE

When I let you go into the wind,
it was like a breath held too long
elapsed in time of collapsed lungs.
It was like turning over a new leaf
and shining the dust from off the sun -
finding and refining a dream that
tarnished over time.

And the weight, that weight you hear
so many people talk of, but don't understand
or realize that same load is on your shoulders,
until you let it go. It drops like a gas tank
on the back of a scuba diver:
a temporary life support.

Looking back into the black atmosphere
I saw your face in the whirl of the matter
the darkness I tried to help you through,
a change I thought little me could conquer-
but I was wrong, I was wrong, when I was
slapped with sensibility and sight.

You were the storm angry and lost
the same haunt of thunder that echoes
and echoes continuously in your life -
you looked down on me through the clouds
of your conscious, eyes white as the moon,
in pity your gaze went faint to the blur of wind
and in that split second, I seem to have seen
your eyes opened as well.

The rain fell like bullets pelting my conscious,
the possession of your ghost sluicing to the ground-
my body clean from the pool of you at my feet.

---

LUNCH WITH MR. COLLINS

It�s always no time to read and rush,
rush, rush after I�ve washed my hands
and prayer- just a notch to eat my boloney
and rye, defeating the sense of purpose
to why I bought his read-while-I-lunch
book in the first place.

He always sits in my locker
with ink still fresh on untouched
pages, peering at me though dust,
desiring to teach me different
hemispheres of thought and notion:
of how the moon reflects a bitten cracker
and Beethoven orchestrates a barking dog.
The what, I heard he found under
Emily Dickinson�s nakedness.

But rather, it�s fold of a newspaper missing
sections and the greasy-screen television
nomadic with the operas and dramas of Oprah,
it�s the giggle of gossip of who slept with who
in the receiving department, and that same down-
ward clank of a can of Coke on a couple of quarters,
where the last breath of wings bleating zeros
from a sinking horsefly in the sink.

It�s the shift manager across who keeps shifting his
eyes from the time clock to me to his sandwich and
wrist of hands almost perfectly aligned to the minute,
all the while

a pierced-face girl�s cigarette is half past twelve
to her lips,
and fifteen minutes spent to no intention.

---

THE PEARL

I had heard how she spoke of it,
clams, but never once did she
speak of it in front of me. I think
it would have brought her soul
to tears, had I mentioned how
we never have clams for anything�
whether its baby clams, clam
chowder, red lobster retreat,
she would eat any other shellfish,
but never the movement of a mouth.

My father, however gave no appeal
he would devour them at any chance -
by chance because it would have been
coincidence to his own desire.

One dozen, two dozen, three
would go into the hot steam,
sometimes raw - it wouldn�t matter,
he would try to pry the mouth open
like it were a fight for survival,
a win or lose conquer of clam verses man.

Once detached, he would dress them
either in butter, Tabasco or lemon juice,
blood if he cut his tongue on the lip
of the clam, eager to swallow the foot.
The mouth that didn�t open at his
command would get crushed at the blat
of his bottom fist on the fish -
they shattered in pieces of tissue
and shell in his rage.

I remember as a youth, on their fifth
anniversary how his one hand
clamped over her precious hand,
burying it whole -
then bringing out a pearl necklace
and fastening it around her littleneck
layered lavishly white like small moons,
stringed in a full universal circle.

There on, I believed time could
change love -
it simply took some time and wine
a fight and a quick jer k -
for the strung up pearls to loosen,
they fell to the floor like teeth
violently knocked out.
As us children, scattered in fear.

And when she opted to leave him
secretly, in secret he hired
someone to take her life.
Her life was a piece of sand
careening where the ocean calms
singly she went trammeled in a clam-
where she silken her layers of nacre.

When I approached to see her lastly
she was beautiful, even in death -
her body enveloped in a pearl dress
where her sleep reached blissful peace.
My father stood as a dark shadow against
the fading light, hands of thin bone, shaky
disguising himself in tears of innocence.

Soon the mouth of her coffin will close
and bivalve in the unspoken unity of purpose -
as her spirit unravels like a cloud in the wind.

---

WHERE FATHER HAD DROWNED

To all the many wishes
I cast to the sea, all the forgotten yarns
of history, unravelled
lay spread on the bottom seabed.

Sandglass footprints of who
he was sunk along the shore,
billions of stars etch the pebbles
that went footloose.

The fishermen yachts ten yards away
cast their hooks and catch nothing
but colds and lost dreams in brine webs.

My father fit in with his troubles
as he cast his fishwife to the abysmal chill -
his soul strung in the curls of water
and tangled in hairs of seaweed.

Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum in a brown
paper bag was a favorite, when down and
done he�d cast the bagged bottle to the
black blanket sea as an SOS seeking tutelage.
His messages floated to shipwreck.

Desperate years trodden along the pier,
he chose a beautiful scenic view to wash
away the chronic depression of his life -
I wished my father a lifeboat,
and clear water to subdue in.
I tossed in my cents apologizing
for being a born burden to you
and the woman you couldn�t control,

when the coins twirled at random, aimlessly
spinning a silver glitter to the bottom
before getting lost to the murk,
unretrievable.

---

THE CASTAWAY CARNIVAL

This is where regrets spin like a carousel
and the one headlight horse gallops frenzy,
where a video camera blinks on red prowl
and security guards flirting with loose girls.

Crowds of kids, mom and pop cord dogs
juggling faces, daughters of laughter twirling
as the cotton candy kettle wraps a warm nest
in pink sugar clouds, not far from the dust bowl.

And the mustached man with a top hat and pointer,
his quick and potent eyes cropping the carrot
to onlookers: Step right up and gaze inside,
the unwanted and abnormal, born deformed -
feast your eyes on the amazing pregnant snake-lady...
half human-half reptile, step aboard if you dare
and see the two monkeys that share a mouth,
witness the talking two-headed woman...
one that lies and the other that tells the truth.

In the midst of colliding cars, rails wrecked -
balloons bursting upon the prick of darts,
canoes airborne and hydroplaning downward
roller coasters that hold your breath at the pitch,

a woman sits face-wretched wrapping and
taping her angel face in glad plastic bags -
a crutch in her head she limps on thoughts
when she thinks her future falling face flat.

The lens focuses on auto and clear in density
to her face in the ghost of fog and moon,
just nine hours ago she unlocked her womb
to give birth to a worm meant to be buried
a soul deliquesced by God of breath to nostril.

As the four kittens and a rock in a tied bag
how they were dropped off the Genesee Bridge
into the cold river; she gave the dumpster
her blue load, that gave no more cries.

In a walk away the camera captures identity -
a gravely face of disappearing genes,
the chalk outline of whose blood, prints
and teeth that fashioned the skeletal castaway.

When the videotape comes to its full stop
and rewinds itself, the security guard unalarmed
turns in his timecard rushing to go out on a date
to the phone number he retrieved earlier -
scatterbrained to put in new tape, he rerecords
with the same tape; the camera tapes rather
a calm night through its lens, forgetful to reason.
As footprints on the shore etched to someone
when the tide breaks the waves come in -

with the truth erased,
all that's left is the world.

� Anthony Liccione
Reproduced with permission

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