David Giannini

Half-Finished Hell
      
After reading Tomas Tranströmer’s “Half-Finished Heaven”
      
Only their torsos there,
repeatedly iced then on fire, iced then on fire. . .
and of course, it’s impossible to think.

Each soul forgets it’s a river
                                      getting away with itself.

Anguish
felt in the gut, then a murder
of meat-picker crows.

Charred leaves.

Frozen blue and white flowers,
while red ones cling to fanatical hopes.

Nothing comes to weave
or wave those colors over the headful ones
not yet descended.

The surrounding country half-dead
from propping up an asylum
called The Governing Body—

staff
       desiring white coats and flight—

days of frost,
                   nights of flame,

moths without eyes,

moths with only their right wings.

 

Meditation with Rant

All the stars still
                       hanging out
of nothing.

Not everything invites us
into wonder.

Wonder invites everything.

Fireworks last night

and someone this morning
playing a flute in the woods,

          blowing through emptiness
                 until space and music are one.

            Antlers rise
to notes and noise—deer
dodging bullets— people shot
in malls and schools—
                              news
of our failing world
                          everywhere,
political sickness
everywhere,
coming to an average here:

                       three guns for every citizen—millions!

Here among hills, the air is always growing
younger, while the forests age.

Soon will some politicians and trees
be felled by winds of one sort
or another, each
                        falling to the waysides of others.

While the stars,
                      the stars,
the stars
             still!

 

A Sense of Eternity in Winter

The mirror left him

stranded in a dark hall. He stood stiff,
the stump of a broken tree. Maybe
his ripped trunk was too severe for the glass,
or a matter of not reflecting disaster.

Daphne was still turning into a laurel tree.

Many leaves or moments passed
before the man snapped to, fully formed again
and with boots on, headed out into sunlight. . .
arriving at a pond iced-over, he hunched
among reeds, undetected, with little identity
or distinction, and saw something 
like a glazed frame edging the ice, bent
around the world he could see reflected. . . .

It was already long ago

when he looked back toward his house
and discerned his boot prints in snow
turned to ice. They had been standing for days
or years, in front of his house, as if waiting
for the one who would warm them, Helios
or another to come shining over the trees.
Cracks appeared and made little sounds
before his boot prints followed themselves
in no time, into the distances of air. . . .

 

Riffing on Xanadu

A few grassy mounds on an empty plain,
all that remains of Shang-tu—nothing

decreed, Khan so long gone—
abstraction a preface to oblivion.

But where we’ve chosen to live, among trees
and hills, some agency accrues in our destiny,

a beautiful light refines arrival
of December when winter and the snow surround

a few grassy mounds on an empty plain       
and our house feels less commodious, more compressed.

It holds tight, a single long winter stove fire burning
its heart against the cold, against

the implicate forgiveness
of blank slate—empty plain, abstraction preface.

Some agency accrues. . . . Named
after pinecones, our pineal glands adjust

our sense of winter light, wakefulness,
and sleep—nothing decreed, but now someone else

waking inside this poem,
wants out, like a blade from a yawn,

sharp tongue to tell you:  nothing
decreed, Khan so long gone,

duress disappears in its own horizon,
don’t freeze your inner fool

or let discord fester, he says,
happiness will wiggle through your birthday suit,

a few grassy mounds on an empty plain,
your head a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

 

David Giannini’s most recent books include The Dawn of Nothing Important; The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up; and In a Moment We May Be Strangely Blended. He was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He received a 2021 Finalist Award from The North American Poetry Review.