Poetry One

Elena’s Last Train

Our last train-
Pisa to Firenze-
her last train.
The last time seeing.
And this train today I go alone,
as I dreamed alone,
returning,
returning to save her- warn her.
And the earth shook,
opened up,
a protest against detouring her destination.
So I awoke,
like I awoke at today’s reckoning,
our crossed paths again parting,
a sense of finality always,
these ‘fare thee well’s’.
‘Until 2036’, we joked.
Me at seventy-five,
closer to death,
moving toward my ultimate aloneness,
asking myself again:
‘If I could have loved you more, then….?’
‘If I could have said to her, Stai attento’, then….?’
And in those tears,
in my approaching,
in your leaving,
in Elena’s taking-
accepting,
loving,
in death’s goodbye?

Firenze to Avignon, July 1996

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poppies free!

poppies free!
unfarmed not your sisters
in Afghanistan CIA’ed bulging vulva-ish poppy
cumming coming poppy ooze
reaped for trapped junkie’s desire
squeezing off blood poppy syringe

poppies pink poppy orange
sprinkling fire light over green trainscape
blurring poppy vision
of hot breathing eyelust

poppies poppies
crashing battle harmony
with brother yellow
over a thousand thousand shades
of rythymed greens

poppies poppies poppies
licking my eyes
seducing turning me
arousing reminding
your death dance mocking me
in fading blissful poppy carelessness

poppies papavale poppies a piacenza
tra i binari poppies
who’s thinking of you poppy
humans courting poppy perversions
fluids wetting seeds inseminating
sticky ecstasies of poppy season

poppies poppies
I see her sex in petals of poppies
of glistening morning dew
oh poppies do you know
the blue of my lover’s eyes
raise your poppy lips
to her open sky azzurro

oh poppy sweetness
her kisses
poppy caresses
in day’s fading light
embracing in poppy darkness
enfolding poppy sleep
poppy dreams….

Rocchetta Ligure a Bologna 30.05.02