David Giannini

Late October

Cracking sky startles cattle, hips shifting up
and down in thunder.
                              Broken barn
windows rattling as rain
streaks motes once settlers on glass.

Dust with dust, were they once

‘the bones of a child buried in a man,
buried in the nature of the world?’

They were once, as they are, of gyri & sulci
the brain’s ridges & valleys,

how we interpret 

the nature of any scene locked with what views it: 
humped tops of livestock are also the tips
of hills feeding into each other—

                                    cross into the distant pitch

and you will find an old farmhouse,

                                      dust on the stairs
as the strange boy
      descends without
           leaving footprints.

 

David Giannini’s most recently published collections of poetry include: Viral Packet  (New Feral Press, 2020;) Mayhap (selected brief poems,2020;) The Future Only Rattles When You Pick ITt Up; and In A Moment We May Be Strangely Blended (Dos Madres Press, 2018-2019;)  Faces Somewhere Wild (Dos Madres Press, 2017;) Span Of Thread (Cervena Barva Press, 2015;); AZ Two (Adastra Press,) a “Featured Book” in the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival; Inverse Mirror, a collaboration with artist, Judith Koppel (Feral Press/Prehensile Pencil, 2012;) WhenWe Savor What Is Simply There (Feral Press/Prehensile Pencil, 2013;) and Rim/Wave (two full-length poetry collections in one book from Quale Press, 2012.) Antonio & Clara, Giannini’s 1992 poem issued as a book from Adastra Press was reissued in a different format from Feral Press in 2012.                                                                   

His work appears in national and international literary magazines and anthologies.  Awards include:  Massachusetts Artists Fellowship awards; The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry; an award for prosepoetry from the University of Florida; a 2009 Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review, and a 2020 James Hearst Poetry Finalist Award; He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; and taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as  well as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others; and he worked as a psychiatric case manager for 31 years.  His Installation, The International House Dust Collection, was exhibited most recently at the Yager Museum in Oneonta, New York.   He has been a committee and board member of The Becket Arts Center where a dramatic reading of his extended narrative prosepoem, RIM, was produced in 2005. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded, the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He started and hosts Writers Read, an ongoing series of monthly readings by poets and fiction writers presenting at The Lee Library in Lee, MA. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam, and their two cats, Mina and Maya.