On Utopia Parkway
Cornell’s boxes keep getting
Smaller.
The space inside
Keeps
Getting Larger.
He turns a dusty jar into
A warehouse of light.
A blue comb
A gray marble.
A copper penny,
Pose on the rim of nowhere.
His ruler measures
Eternity in inches.
Greens no explorer ever found
Quiver in boxed shadows.
Discarded galaxies
Sift through a spider web.
The old man peers at his own sun,
Through a window no larger
Than a thumb tack -- clutches A book to his ear, listening
To the endless hive of words.
Mystery is no farther away
Than the robin taking forever
To rise
From the sky hatching
In his cupped
Hands
Greco Coast, Lorca Life
A child's
Moving fist
Traces
Its mother's
Tired veined
Wrist
Along the town’s
Groggy shadow
Bells burnt with cork
Burst,
Burn down
White heights,
Puncturing
Canopies
Of silence
With wish, ash
And winds of whisper.
Spanish houses
Adobe blister
Their way
Through another
Mediterranean
Day.
Castilian shadows
Muscle and crack
Against an Andalusian
Wall.
Wild flowers
Twist and madly
Blue
Hard Feelings
Could be the name of a town
Out in the Mojave,
A place to gas up,
Buy a cold drink and look around;
Telling yourself,
“I sure wouldn’t want to live here.”
But someone
Overhears your thoughts,
And your troubles begin.
Years later, an Eagle Scout ducking behind
A boulder to piss, finds your skull
Emptied of everything.
So when you see the sign,
Keep driving
Even if you do run out of gas.
Even if you have to walk for a while
In the blistering sun,
Someone will stop and give you a ride.
Someone always does.
Leon Spiellieart
The vacant dining room,
The barren beach,
The deserted bedroom,
Those curtains held back by
The wind to reveal
The nowhere of everywhere,
Where did you take the people
You removed from the scenes
You painted?
Everyone has vanished
Down the wooden tunnel of your brush.
At the end of your life
It is said
Your appeared in photographs
With the calm gaze of an exploder
Back from where
No one had been before;
Offering proof in your faint smile
Absence was a disease from
Which you eventually recovered.
Piranese's Prison Drawings
An architect of solitude
Built us a home
Inside no where’s vast address.
The vertical prisons we stare
Into: enormous stone mirrors
Standing up, reflecting us
Alone in prison.
Our stares of comprehension: Shadows begging
Light from walls.
Our words of understanding, Endless spiral
Staircases we mount and follow
Out of view. Wearying
From such a climb, Wanting release from this labyrinth In black & white
We pause, gaze down and see
Only the landscape of darkness.
At the bottom of it all, his name
Glistens in the corner, like a key
Dropped from a great height.
Amy Ginnetti
