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30 Terzata

Terzata is a term of my own invention, a conflation of "terza" as in"terza rima" and "sonata." Other than the varying number of feet per line, the difference from terza rima is that each Terzata ends with a quatrain whose second and fourth rhyme is the same as the poem's beginning rhyme, and is composed of 13 lines (terza rima can be of any length).


    Terzata I


Two words gather weight—

the deadness of a dumbbell.

Three words mate


that don’t produce a living cell.

So, speak, wife, without words,

secrets only eyes can tell.


Your tears the Lourdes

of credulous youth

restored, and, blue sky to birds,


your body is the proof

of flight—it’s not too late.

Up, up through the old aloof!

A kiss is a kiss’s fate.




    Terzata II


A white-faced clown,

butt hanging from smeared lips,

leans back, puts his beer glass down.


His imp of mental backflips—

the first two drinks—sleeps

sodden sleep.  His woman sips


coffee with milk.  The barkeep’s

rag flaps ashes and napkins

to the floor his first-born sweeps.


That boy, eyes coals, begins 

a song—his alto smoky.  The clown

conducts a dozen violins.

His wife yells keep it down.




   Terzata III


The child behind the bathroom door—

face smeared with rouge:

I scrub until her skin is sore.


In my dark closet refuge,

stained with a brother’s oils,

I learned the secret sin grows huge.


What perfect crime soils

the soul the heart can’t confess

before it bursts and boils?


Silence:  Instead.  Perhaps.  Unless.

Bury the thought beneath the floor.

Walk on it daily.  Let her guess.

Say, “Nothing.”  It’s easy to ignore.




   Terzata IV


The hair grows thin?

No, the skull grows wide

to hold the past in.


Flesh gets hard as hide.

Eyes water what they read.

Did I once think the women sighed?


The body is a weed

to pluck: prepare the ground

for flowers, a vegetable seed


you have not yet found.

In the blown garden,

beneath the frozen mound,

things there, too, harden.





    Terzata V


Mooning about the bread and fish,

glass pitcher of milk on a tray,

the starved spirit can only wish


the dotted lines that betray

its outline in the dining room

would turn solid or fade away.


This moment is this moment’s tomb,

says this moment.  Can you hear

the boundaries of silence boom?


Take my hand.  That’s us, my dear,

the damned limit.  What we wish

to have, and have, doesn’t appear

to be either food or dish.




      Terzata VI


More than once, you’ve complained

that every word I write

is joy dry or tear-stained.


Is everything I say a slight,

and not slightly true of us?

I don’t mean that I am right.


Pumping his bellows, Hephaestus

forged his two mechanical

women.  He thought less


of Aphrodite than of the practical

advantages of walking to regain.

When he leaned upon those metal

shoulders, they relieved his pain.



    Terzata VII


What is sadder than the street?

Gray strip of tar and stone

slapped by the car’s flat feet.


The road is almost all bone,

a creature of the elements,

no sinews, no erogenous zone.


Its (yes, self-righteous) sense

that it exists for others’ use

requires no strict recompense.


But, in the cold, its obtuse

flatness turns shimmying sheet

to burlesque the tread’s abuse,

dancing where road and tire meet.




    Terzata VIII


At times it is necessary to go,

to test resolution by simply

moving toward a place you know.


Along the way, you pass a tree,

glimpsed like a foreign road sign,

interpreted with some difficulty,


grasped like an arrow on a line

between a there and there connected

by something else you can’t define.


Your destination is the recollected 

journey—the glimpsed tree, the flow

of the effort to arrive redirected

by the tree—not where you meant to go.




    Terzata IX

    (after Rilke)

  

Awe of God.  Angel terror.  The almost

deadly birds of the soul.  Fear

first confronts the heart's ghost

 

staring into the prepotent mirror.

The flesh-and-bone-deformed soul

eludes the quick eye, the pricked ear.

 

What did we expect: dilating hole

in our forehead, a tiny face—

grunting, found-out starnose mole?

 

Only then, in panic, do we embrace:

eyes closed, silent, still almost

alone, we feel our warmth trace

the form of the heart and God--one ghost.

 



      Terzata X


Sparrow mistakes

the rustle of leaves

for an answer to peeps it makes.


Bluejay believes,

raiding the sparrow’s nest,

in nothing that the sparrow grieves.


Cardinal puffs its breast

in the radiance of Fall,

to demonstrate whose red is best.


Waxwing flies into a wall

of mirror—mistakes

a part (not of the sky) for all—

a victim of the ubiquitous fake.




        Terzata XI


A darkened window, an emotion

reveals wavering shadows

made by neither tree nor sun.


And always, I think, who knows

if they see what they see out there?

Once, dreaming relations froze


and pinned the shadows where

no light would ever see

them, no one seeming to care,


I reached through the hooded tree

and plunged my hand into the sun—

globules lambent in a shadowy

web of bones—to strangle that emotion.




     Terzata XII


By waves of translation,

a number of water particles

undergo propagation—


a trough pushes, a crest pulls

them to the high splay of beach.

Yet, a ghostly bit trickles


back against the surge of each

swell, back and through

each successive wave’s breach.


What drives it back into 

the source of its translation,

having since been closer to

the beach—what destination?




       Terzata XIII


So what dear Theo didn’t read

his brother’s letters to the end.

Hadn’t he his own life to lead,


his peace of mind to defend?

Those letters—he’d ignore

or quench his heart to comprehend.


Why did that overhasty traveler

choose to flee when it 

pleases us to wait?  The painter,


his painting: the tortured spirit

beneath the sheets Theo loved to read—

we can’t hear it,

but we drink what the sheets bleed.




      Terzata XIV


Sun-suffused capillaries glow

in my shut eyelids.

I can see the blood flow.


A slight shift of the head rids

me of that vision of my god.

The sun, thought the old druids,


was a fiery monster who clawed

the open air; Stonehenge

would train him to applaud.


Now, your eyes singe

the air between us, out-glow

miracles; proof for my religion—

terrible, but there to know.




       Terzata XV


One woman wears her breast

upon her cheek, which makes

a gaping hole in her chest.


Put there, my heart bakes

until it’s done enough to eat.

After, she tips me up, slakes


her thirst, hums to the beat

of her gulps—wipes her lips

with the sleeve of her bed sheet.


Winking demurely, she slips

into the bathroom; comes out undressed.

Beneath the bed, the cat flips

a mouse and gnaws its chest.




       Terzata XVI


A humming ghost makes a music

of then—now: a pedal note

steadies below—above, sick,


trembling sixteenths float.

I’ve yet to learn to hum two

notes at once.  Kissing, I devote


my two lips to you.

Your tears balm my bitten tongue.

Their songs ignored, ghosts boo


audiences to scare the young,

who take the sound, in their panic,

for the songs they’ve not yet sung.

Ghosts know fear, too, is music.



            Terzata XVII


The trees aren’t ghosts, green

sheathed, whispering recitatives

from some tragic Greek scene.


Not the one beneath my eaves.

He’s oak of a humbler sort.

Having shrugged his leaves


like a worn-out overcoat,

eyes dark sockets atwitch

in the cold, he makes no retort


to the groaning old bitch

standing close in evergreen

sleeves.  A gnarled switch

dangles a last leaf of spleen.




           Terzata XVIII


Across distances telemetry

measures and sends to stations

cringing with curiosity,


a boat of would-be Phaetons

flies, dragging tattered sail,

seeking legendary ray guns


said to spew the holiness of the Grail.

I sit here, root them on, pray

God won’t let them fail,


while inside my head, day-

dreams, poor memory, curiosity

of faith: synapses fray:

shattered star:  no telemetry.




        Terzata XIX

   (The Miryachit)


Gulping before the green moray—

all throat and jaw in its orange tank—

I slowly writhe and sway.


I don’t recall how I fell and sank

to this barrier reef of holes,

only that I have myself to thank.


I am all neck; my head lolls

upon my tail; I remember feet;

my myopathic left eye rolls


toward the door and the street.

What shall I do to me today?

I am all eel, therefore discreet;

I do nothing, so I cannot say.




       Terzata XX


My cat kneads my thigh,

rubs his cheek against the chair,

stretching repeatedly for my


hand, which answers with air.

He prowls beneath my seat—stiff

with wanting—circling where


I must see him if

I look down from my eye.

I bend over, whiff


sour meat, sandbox lye,

massage his rigid thighs.

I weaned him from biting by

gripping his jaw, ignoring cries.




       Terzata XXI

          (A Riddle)


I’m in here    my

body    water passes through

me    I remain dry


I spend    I accrue

on balance    I grow

in here    there’s no you


you I do not know

rain on my neck seeps

into my collar    so


your body sleeps

where lid blankets eye

when my eye weeps

yours is dry.




       Terzata XXII


A man looked out at his back yard,

wanting to make good use of time:

I need to tackle something hard,


he thought, something to make mine.

He bought a dozen doors of glass,

and built a house, and hung a sign


that said:  you shall not pass.

Then he bought some seeds, a pot

and dirt, and began to grow grass.


Each night he stood inside and thought

watering grass is not too hard.

Soon the roots began to rot—

in the greenhouse, out in the yard.





     Terzata XXIII


I walk the SoHo street afraid:

November dusk bustle and din

a kind of living stew made


(by a cook long since forgotten)

of moaning women, guns and bricks.

The people here have forgotten


their fear, their step is brisk,

their eye is a skittering beam.

We trot in self-generating mists.


All that the unremembered (unseen

rooms of cold beds still unmade)

have left us is their dreamed-

of street, this unwatched parade.




           Terzata XXIV

 

Bare spots on canvas convey

light angled off reflective

surfaces.  A silence says

 

nothing, but is suggestive.

Between stanzas a blank line

is an essential corrective

 

to the words' attempt to define.

Fill the bowl, or the hollow;

heed the signified, or the sign?

 

When we kiss, we follow

each other by ways

not even thought can go,

and leap the walls of the maze.

 



        Terzata XXV


You say I cannot know 

a thing, such as a book,

as others do?  Though


I give it a second look?

You think what men thought

years ago, which shook


the world, can be bought

and sold, yet not known?

That the poem wrought


from silence is our own,

but not ours to bestow?

Take this one, on loan.

Return it when you go.




        Terzata XXVI


I feel better after snow—

the gray world gone white,

the lawn a spruce torso.


Then I am a roaming kite,

hovering above the mouse

who dies without a fight.


I swallow, mite and louse,

leave not one red drop

on that immaculate blouse.


My wings unsheathed, I hop

into spangled air.  Let no

one think I plan to stop.

I feel better after snow.




           Terzata XXVII


The brilliance of the boy applied

by lacquer meant to protect

this relic of childish pride:


the sheen of his suit reflects

a light bulb and my blue face;

his restorer’s hand so perfect


I can’t spot the brush’s trace.

I wonder what should be done

about the boy’s cracked face,


that smile of a rich man’s son

shattered as the paint dried?

Drip into the cracks, one by one,

better paint than the artist tried? 




         Terzata XXVIII

 

Can you still not see to see?

The running, heart-shot hind

(oh, do not go yet, Avery!)

 

crashes through the hunter's blind.

No trophy: on a paper

brain box in a card-board bind.

 

As easily read a vapor

exhaled through a wrought-iron

grate (sour sweet savor

 

of extinguished meat) to learn

how to be not to be.

Neither is this Chris Guerin.

Stay with him a while, Avery.

 

 

 

          Terzata XXIX



You've got part of it right:

that we traveled far is true,

wandering the desert at night,

 

but only at night, lead by two

stars (not one)--the dim one

fiery, and the bright one blue.

 

At dawn they dove into the sun.

Indeed, the child was godly,

like the others.  These chosen

 

ones are beautiful, you see.

They hanged him in plain sight.

Such men come and go.  Only

the one still shines at night.




           Terzata XXX


I can’t know: is snow empty

new jars shattering on impact,

spilling cold glass on the city,


or full, plump, soft sacks,

dutifully conforming flakes

piling up (what?) in stacks?


Perhaps the air should take

credit: flakes can’t flutter

in a vacuum.  The windbreak


sends snow to field or gutter.

The night sky is an empty

skull, the wind its mutter:

entity   entity   entity   entity



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