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
Eastern Europe, January, 1800, Terzata #31
The coming of the naked year
Is announced by desiccated corn,
Its leaves quivering with fear.
These fields will never be shorn,
New seeds never sown —
Nothing slouches to be born.
We have given all we own
To the bankers and the lords
And secured only blood by loan.
Our shacks are hollow gourds,
No water to drink, only beer.
There’s no strength in hordes.
Bawds lift their skirts and leer.
My body is richly scarred
As if caught in an avalanche.
It’s crisscrossed and barred —
Lines of sewn flesh branch,
Nose and brow bear hyphens,
Once pink areas, burned, blanch.
Time ravages us with its sins,
Which have nothing to do with will,
But the vulnerability of skins.
Not one baby’s molecule is still
In us after fifty years, discarded
Without changing us, until
We are perfect again, unmarred.
Music in Time, Terzata #33
Music in time: evanescent,
Humming ghosts of tempo,
Neither past nor present,
Equally fast and slow,
Epitomes of entropy.
Violins sing, horns blow
A memory of melody,
A broken string on a bow,
One chord of a threnody.
Staffs roll row on row
In their staccato descent,
A momentless flow
Of tones, incandescent.
Another Odyssey, Terzata #34
The man, like a trackless train,
Makes his own determined grooves
With the churning of his brain.
Mud up to his axles, he moves
On his earthbound odyssey.
(Not one goddess approves.)
He’ll see the grassy sea
As he sinks into the sand.
“Now,” he cries, “for Persephone!”
A neap tide drowns the land,
While he, chugging into the main,
Discovers himself unmanned,
Rudderless, sane, and insane.
Afraid of heights, I climbed a tower
Made of steel and wooden stairs.
At the top I watched clouds cower
From the sun. I whistled ancient airs
As I teetered on a platform
And vultures flew by in pairs.
I existed in the eye of a storm
With no lightning, wind, or rain
Blasting my human form.
I refused to celebrate the pain
That grew inside me on the hour.
I saw myself look down again —
Fall like a meteor shower.
I woke to the voice of the Caller
Saying “Call me. It is late.”
Like a Saturday night brawler
I responded with physical hate,
But it was too close, too soon.
(My challenges do not abate.)
I recall the sound, an ear-worm tune,
Like a long undiscovered cancer,
The dire gift of an angel or goon.
It’s too late to become a dancer.
I’m just a word-addled scrawler
With one question and no answer:
Do flying sparrows grow smaller?
His own minion in that nation,
He eats like a king, thinks like a stool.
All of his words are defecation.
His actions insipidly cruel,
He pounds his fist on the able,
Whips his army like a mule.
Hacksaw and hammer and Babel
Bang on the running heads
Of corpses on the embalming table.
He dreams of flowing Red,
Of flags and blood, this revelation:
The elimination of the dead
And his exalted exaltation.
Syzygy and Chiasmus, Terzata #38
Two words we couldn’t do without:
Syzygy, when three celestials
Align on their gravitational route,
Momentarily over a billion miles,
Occluding light, eclipsing night,
Like the gnomon on a sun dial.
Chiasmus, the reversal or bight
Of like words in two parallel
Clauses, such as, heaven is bright,
But all is eclipsed in hell.
Oh, the words we spit, spat, spout —
Though we live under their spell,
They can’t cast what life is about.
Forgetting is memory erosion,
As though sand is being drawn
From a beach by high ocean
Waves. It returns like fall dawn,
Each day a bit dimmer,
But never completely gone.
I am not a strong swimmer
And fear the undertow
More than the shark’s shimmer
Coming at me from below.
I think him an old emotion
I still, but vaguely, know —
Toothless, a dying pet’s devotion.
The peregrine’s flight, obscure
From speed the eye can’t clearly see,
Takes life in the air, fast and pure.
The wings of the bumble bee
Carry its rotund yellow and black
With aimless invisibility.
Fish beneath frozen ice lack
Form and color and disappear
When seen and don’t come back.
Words are noise and letters blear —
Their insensatenesses inure
Us to understanding. What’s clear
Is unseen, or if seen, a blur.
I left the slip in a small boat
With no oar or rudder to steer
On the knight’s castle moat.
The sail drooped, empty and sere.
I was drawn on, always slower —
A current from a series of weirs
Dropping me lower and lower.
I was passed by a fast ship.
Its captain made faces: grins, glowers.
I shot down another weir’s lip.
It took all I had to stay afloat.
Near sunset, I glided into the slip
Where I began this anecdote.
There were a thousand crows
Asleep in their rookery
Before the winter sun rose.
I rise with them, insomniac weary,
And pour into the hollow
Of my brain the blustery
Anticipations to follow,
What I must and cannot do,
And what time will allow.
One crow caws. I answer “You!
Think you!” as though he knows
The universe might offer a clue.
As he staggers away, it snows.
The owl fell from its nest
And cringed among roots
Yards away, fanning its breast.
We couldn’t hear the hoots
Of his mother. He made no sound,
Afraid of raptor brutes.
He was lucky he’d been found.
I took off my shirt.
We wrapped him round and round,
Carried him to his tree, unhurt,
And let him loose. He didn’t rest —
Rising on claws, he girt
The trunk with wings up to his nest.
I have searched the homely grail
At work, on the summit of Pike’s Peak,
And in the bills and ads in the mail.
I can only guess at what I seek,
Except that it is lovely and wild.
(Oh, if only I could steal a peek.)
I’ve searched since I was a child,
Less curious than hungry, grasping,
Nothing inside me calm or mild.
The wanting is the asp’s sting,
A surrender to the jailor’s flail.
I cling to the preying roc’s wing,
Without knowing how to fail.
Cold air slipped in the window
Left open overnight.
It’s 100 below zero
And all is either black or white.
Ice leans against our home
As if meaning to fight.
The wind chants a lifeless Om.
“This is our new Ice Age
Under a sun silver as chrome,”
Says the nodding sage.
There’s no bitterness or woe
I could scratch on this page —
The ink has ceased to flow.
It’s possible to destroy even hell
And turn evil to dust
With the dropping of shell after shell.
What remains is one man’s lust
Mating with his own cold will,
Giving birth to blood and rust.
Each bullet or bomb’s a pill
That plugs a hole in his brain,
Which is cold and still,
As is Ukraine,
Where a young child fell
And didn’t get up again —
Her killer dares her now to tell.
The oak limb in the yard, bending,
Close to breaking,
Required careful tending.
Upon my waking,
The tree was on the ground.
I hadn’t felt the earth shaking
Or heard its falling sound.
In a few days it was gone,
Its thick stump ground.
I planted another one,
A sapling depending
On me like father to son . . .
Already ascending.
Nest, Terzata #48
The owl fell from its nest
And cringed among roots
Yards away, fanning its breast.
We couldn’t hear the hoots
Of his mother. He made no sound,
Afraid of raptor brutes.
He was lucky he’d been found.
I took off my shirt.
We wrapped him round and round,
Carried him to his tree, unhurt,
And let him loose. He didn’t rest —
Rising on claws, he girt
The trunk with wings up to his nest.
The Enlightened, Terzata #49
He woke and ate his freeze
With little sips of fog.
He’d forgotten how to sneeze
Having slept under a log.
He wandered lonely as a cloud
Like a surveyor his Magog,
As the ants stood and bowed.
He smiled with teeth of sun
And blinded the empty crowd.
He’d count to zero and one
The memories he could squeeze
With brains of no and none,
Gulping himself to the lees.
Green, Terzata #50
This is all I have to say of green —
Not the perfumes or the taste,
Nor all its nuances I have seen.
Green, not red, is the color of haste,
As with all of life,
Little completely faced,
Yet the opposite of strife,
Which is hope (no, not blue),
The blunting of the knife.
Nothing, nothing is quite true.
We act before a green screen.
I speak and act only for you,
My love, scene after scene.
Note: The numbering style changes
at #31 to indicate the composition
dates of these poems. The first 30
were written in 2006; the last
20 were written in the first half of
2022.
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