Category: Poetry

I remember
an open field
and my mother
she touches my shoulder
and points
she says -look up
you can tell if its a hawk
by the curls in its wings

I am being carried
with slow drifting sight
from the curl end
of her voice
into the sun

and
after 10 years
of travelling
the height of dreams
along the span of day and night
I recede from the backseat window
finding my self
curled
in the final
feather end
of her voice
holding me again
in open fields

 

As appeared in Descant, Vol 30, No 4, Winter 1999

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.