Category: Poetry

It’s a cappuccino and buttered croissant
at 30,000 feet; filet mignon and a dry merlot
among Antarctic ice-bergs; a bowl of ice-cream
in one hand and the fingers of the other
pressing against a blizzard at 40 below. It’s a sweet spot
between comfort and death, the sun
on a soap bubble, the creak
of a swing over a river: the daring
to have your bones scattered like silverware
across ocean floors, a comet’s tale
among ceiling stars, and you
stretching to the tender verge
of a kite drawn into evening, the string
in your back humming in the abyss.

 

 

As appeared in the The 2009 Art Bards collection, The Art Bar Poetry Series, Toronto.

As children, our faces
are often mistaken for suns,
our knees scar the earth
like grass fires; in the secret
hiding places of our hearts
our blood burns, and our
whispers shimmer like noon.

We arrive as adults, noses
dripping with sun-block,
lurching through the heat
to the nearest bar, our hearts
beating so loudly we can
no longer whisper.

 

 

As appeared in Leaning into the Mountain, Fooliar Press, Toronto, 2006.

the strange, clicking sounds
of my laptop.
the three dollars and fifteen cents
in library fines.
the big, black dog
shitting
on my lawn:

I savour it:
the slow drip
of bills
the trickle of Freon
through refrigerator coils

night
was barbed with stillness
its objects
armed with geometry

and now
the relief
of an unsteady table
the loose corner of my robe
slipping from my knee,
the delicate creep
of ants
across my kitchen floor

 

 

As appeared in Lichen, Vol. 7 No. 2, Whitby, ON, 2005.

copyright 2004 Rocco de Giacomo

 
Head east on Broadway.
Make a right at the Safeway.
Keep going until you get to the intersection with a Superlube.
Turn left.
This road turns into Highway 20. Keep right. Get off at the first exit.
Follow onto Goldwheat. Then to River Road.
House number 330. The red one.
On the right. The wide driveway. The vegetable garden.
The rope mattress. The part-time actor explaining
everything. The enormous kitchen stove. The wooden cradle. Winter
hanging over each word like a millstone. Summer beckoning like a faded serigraph
on the wall; the wildflowers on the table stunned with silence. Your hands
remain there, poised over a piano key; this is the wake of someone
you knew; or an office Halloween party: everyone smiling
as if into a flurry, red-eared, endearing ourselves
to our self-effacement: the soft eradication
of one more dream into the details
of waking.
 

 

A version of “Louis Riel” first appeared in Prism International, Vol. 45 No.1,Vancouver, BC, 2006.