This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) by Maureen N. McLane Page A

strollers
    jewelried & jacketed
    though here and there
    a louche jogger
    lowers the tone
    almost to my level
    & a young mother
    & a posse of teens
    newly gelato’d pass by
    Serena Hearts Lucas
    names on stone

TO ONE IN PARMA
    The privilege
    of even being
    provincial,
    to know the small
    humiliating city,
    the ever unfinished
    cathedral,
    that over there
    is the real where:
    we had none of it.
    No one heard
    of anything.
    The glit and shine
    and scut of it shimmered
    on TV the satin crotch
    of the metropolis
    a 13" square
    of already thinned
    fantasy.
    No wonder
    the saints
    were martyring themselves
    repeatedly, furiously
    in imagination.
    This was something
    to die for
    a life outlined
    in acid-bit etchings
    obsolete as the names
    of trees we were never given
    to know in the neighborhood.

LEVANTO
    salt lips & a buoyed band
    binds the sea in loose chains
    to swim in. the beach’s
    thinned out, the clouds puffing
    in, the last ferry’s
    debarked a last load.
    starting out now
    seems impossible
    but. the rock walls
    break the breakers
    in. nothing
    cannot be disciplined
    or freed. scant pines
    stagger the apennines
    semaphoring
    what. quartz-
    striped granite
    tells a time
    that outlives us.
    I am older
    than the sea
    in me.

IV

TERRAN LIFE
    â€” an excursion beginning with a line of William Wordsworth
    When we had given our bodies to the wind
    we found bones in the earth and not in the sky.
    We found arrowheads in the earth and not in the sky though they’d flown through the air before grounding.
    The era of common sense is over
    & finished too the flourishing of horoscopes.
    Hey traveler what chart to sign your way? what iPhone app?
    All the birthdays have immolated themselves in a far pyre
    and no one knows where
    they were born.
    Earth gods always come after sky gods.
    If you could choose
    a secret power would it be flight?—
    a wish more often expressed
    than the desire for invisibility.
    â€œA mythology reflects its region”
    and a poet sang the sea the lemon trees and pines
    the Ligurian breeze salting his lines
    and a lightly placed step on a Greek mountain is the goat song of tragedy.
    Jehovah rarely shows his face for we would die of it
    die as surely as those who looked to the sky in the bombing raid
    the underground tunnels a sudden refuge
    Out of ash I come                      Out of the earth
    Back to ash I go                          He fashioned them
    male and female I tell you
    they wore the most beautiful evanescent clothes
    in paradise so much subtler than the trawling nakedness of heaving giants
    hurling other giants to heaven & some to hell
    on the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
    Thus far clones are of earth, alone.
    When you say earth you mean land but more than land         You mean the oceans covering “the earth” as if earth were the substrate of everything and not also the crust.
    I found the ground sound, unfaulted, uncracked, even where the continents have split and will again split the archaic seamstress unable to suture the plates of the earth forever.
    â€œTerran life”: what the biologists typically study but “weird life” is also a zone of research. “It is easy to conceive of chemical reactions that might support life involving noncarbon compounds”—
    viz. The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 6.
    Earth now supports life but could not now initiate it.
    Crawl, sway, sashay: you’re still doing it on an earth
you take for granted instead of going crazy
yr head blown off by an apple no I meant an IED no
    I meant an apple.
    Newtonian physics’ defunct but that doesn’t mean an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree composed of atoms whose dark matter you don’t know how to measure, supermodel. Me neither.
    Gravity thy name