David Giannini

Thinking of Lewis Warsh

                          for Katt

As your inner loom weaves it creates the witnessing eye.
The openness of mown fields means none but smallest critters
claw in their mazes—patience connects to Eternity.

Except today, this pastured bull is a hard-boiled detective
held in check by an electric fence. Imported from England,
he knows how to whinge. The enemy’s out of range.

I want to see Lewis again, walking with no bull, bearing witness
as he used to, dear man, now dead down in some urban maze
among whatever is among all there. We steeped in our loss of him.

His last book of poetry, Elixir, remains the first feast after.
And who could forget, out of his stone-set corpus,
‘There are fences around churches to keep the agony from steeping.’

 

Gratitude

Be careful, friend, your skills are approaching

a dead heat between your cast down eye-
lashes of despair and the occasions
of poetry. Chance opportunity can turn
into opera unity, pageantry-and-song,

or say Mongolian horseback falconry
with quivers and shafts on the remembered plain
or stage inside you. Allow all! Allow all heart
against slaughter in Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, the world.

Who doesn’t find poetry never truly overcomes despair.

Thanks, at least, for being there and telling
of the rainbow outside your window. I hope
you manage to pull back the sun’s arrows,
and let them fly to an unknown country

where one may more than meet the sky.

                                   

The Endling

Filthy windows,
                          sunlight dodging dust
best it can, and no one blames the smear we can’t reach.
Dinner on crates,
                             blankets, green splendor in the wraps, talk
opening above shifting chairs:
                                               the scatter through glass
a gray jungle. No one can truly hack the battered
world we can’t trust,
                                  the rust we can’t reverse.
The curse:
‘The devil runs the world was Adam’s discovery.’
In another century,
                                the Pied Pipers
led the children onto trains
                                            away from the Blitz. Men
and women still come and go
                                               none talking of Michelangelo.
Widowers and widows
and bleak windows keep the stage.
                                                       What devil can it be
whose acid hair descends from sky pillows
and the stones exchange colors?
                                           These days                
or all days, ‘When the attentions change / the jungle
leaps in.’
               and the world’s clustered with vicious
screaming, bared teeth, chimp DNA
closest to our own.
                               We are all swinging on long vines.
Double helix. No mirth, no one would choose to be
the endling, holding the final human thought and feeling on Earth.

 

Interview
 Q:  Why have you written so many poems about poetry?
 A:   I didn’t write them; they wrote me. I’m not being flip, that’s the initial process  
or sense, sort of like this interview. I sense images and words sensing me, then we proceed.                     
Q:  I’m not sure what you mean, Automatic Writing?
A:  No. Put it this way: Say I pick up a twig. Pretty soon the Boss arrives, sees me          with the twig, and demands that I make a board out of it.
Q:  How can you do that? That’s not possible.
A:   Imagine.
Q:  And then?
A:  The twig starts growing and becomes flat, lengthening and widening,
looking very rough-sawn, but somewhat handsome in its lines. 
Q:  What then?
A:  Soon the Boss returns and commands me to make many boards, of different sizes, milled and sanded, until I have enough to build a house.
Q:  Yes, and.  . .?                   
A:  I build a house—a good shack or a place of multiple rooms and storeys.
Q:  May I see one?
A:  You’re in one now with me. It’s only partly finished, it still has drafts.  
We can be quiet and just listen.
Q:  To what?
A:  If you have an ear for it, there are many sounds like many nails being  
hammered together into a larger structure, but each nail has a voice, like a bird
brought forward through the words of our ancestors, but freshened. They are  
sometimes loud, other times not so. Pretty soon many bits of the universe  
come to knock, enter, and participate, like you.
Q:  Why do you build so many houses?
A:   I couldn’t live anywhere else.
Q:   Last question. Who is the Boss?
A:   Beats me.

 

David Giannini’s most recent books are Already Long Ago and The Dawn of Nothing Important (each published by Dos Madres Press.) He was twice nominated for The National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He received a 2021 Finalist Award from The North American Poetry Review. His work appears in national and international magazines and anthologies.