Category: Poetry

I haven’t shaved in a week,
and I haven’t showered for half that time,
but that’s OK,
because salt water is good for the skin,
and all I’ve worn in the last two days
is a pair of boxer briefs
sufficing as swim trunks, and God
I’ve got dried sand
in my eyebrows
and sunburns where Lisa’s fingers
couldn’t reach in time
before I’m off
swimming in the surf,
bringing back dead jellyfish and seashells
to drop at her feet
so she’ll tend to my cuts
and bruises with clicks of her tongue
before I’m off again,
promising not to get sand in the bed tonight
and to be back before dinner, and if I’m late
it’s the currents, and if am early
it’s because I am hungry, either way
she’ll be there
in dark sunglasses
hips folded like a book
on her beach towel, wondering
who is this grubby boy
playing in the surf
and how much ransom
will she need
to get her man back.

 

 

copyright 2005 Rocco de Giacomo

As appeared in magma poetry, 39, Winter 2007/2008,
and the collection Leaning into the Mountain (Fooliar Press, Toronto)

 
for Winnipeg

 

Every morning, it’s the same thing: east
of where she wants to be.
She picks herself up from the road,
shakes the rust from her eyes, the old
tires and patio chairs from her hair,
and makes her way west again. She starts
off strong enough, like a rock pine

cutting through a stampede.
But by midday, her throat
is as parched as a storm canal
blazing with crickets; and the evening
shade, in the bones of all the rocking chairs,
aches within. Just the thought
of that first breeze through her
long prairie grass, brings on the shivers
of late afternoon. By nightfall,

curtains are flowing
from her bedroom windows, lighting
bathes her wooden balconies in white
and the rain and floodwaters
begin to gather in the potholes
along Maryland Street: little cups
offered to her lips
in consolation.

 

copyright 2006 Rocco de Giacomo

 
As appeared in Prism International, Vol. 45 No.1, 2006
and the collection Catching Dawn’s Breath (LyricalMyrical Press, Toronto)

The leg of a table,
the spine of a book,
the eye of a needle:

One of these
should be sufficient
to scrape a petroglyph
into a patch of skin
or etch a wound
into the landscape;
eloquence and cruelty
with a tooth pulled
from a cliché,
incidental but deep
enough that centuries
from now someone
will happen upon it
and say, here,
we touched bone.

 
 
 

copyright 2004 Rocco de Giacomo

As appeared in Quills, Vol. 11 No. 11, 2005,
and the chapbook collection Leaning into the Mountain,
Fooliar Press, 2006.

You want to eat at a place
with a busy turnover, where the cook
wears a shirt and the wait staff
isn’t mopping out the sewer drains.
You’ve been looking for so long now
but on this dusty, shadeless motorway
there is an almost admirable
defiance; restaurants clinging
to the road’s edge like last year’s
Christmas decorations, their greeters
smiling through the 40-degree heat.

At last, you choose one with subtitles
and push open the 80-pound glass door
into an environment so chilled
it borders the erotic. The hairs
under the sweat-soaked parts
of your clothes grow rigid as you sit
in the dark and sip tepid water
from a glass you’ve ordered with no ice.
The photos in the sticky menu
are pixelated impressions, and the English
underneath is either Roget’s dreams perverted,
or his most perverted dreams realized:
Danger! Perilous Hotplate!!
Scorched Duck.
Orange Gropefruit.
No rabbit because of sore reason.

A single adventurous taste-bud cries out
for dog, but you settle for chicken
in the soup you’ve picked. When the waiter signals
that this is a spicy dish, you assure him
with your most sincere gestures
that you know exactly what you are doing.
And when the steaming pot is placed before you
you wonder, briefly, why they
would add cranberries to chicken soup.
The waiter backs away slowly
as you clumsily add bean sprouts
and the stir the pot; the dye, you think
from those scarlet little berries
turning the broth a fiery red.

copyright 2007 Rocco de Giacomo

As appeared in Catching Dawn’s Breath (LyricalMyrical Press, Toronto)