From Part I: Eros’ Season
August in Italy
In the distance, small
coquettish olive leaves dance with wind and sun
Whisper ‘ drink to me with thine eyes and I will not look for wine…’
Before ancient trees one at a time enter the valley
On the balcony
Potted broad-leaved cacti
Fitted with small needles like a cat’s tongue
Red fichi d’India fruit plump as ornaments
Unexpected hot breeze swells curtains to nine months
You turn your tear-drop shaped breasts away from the window
Immodest sun on your shoulders.
Part Two: Substances inseparable and lost
Silence of the stars
Silence between stars bewildering
Messages to our pale blemished moon unanswered
Yet he remains our one true moody friend
Reveals to us evening music
Shadows on thick temple columns
Lips sealed beneath Athena’s sacred bush
Moon whispers don’t stop.
Part Three: Midnight
Midnight a nomad
Midnight a nomad drives past, past
Bleak deserted desert mall parking lots
Fronted by large low squat box stores form following function
Edging restaurants, mirages of pleasures, their names
Recall some homey or foreign place before Covid 19
Neither mind nor spirit can locate
Tug in a banal way at the heart
Alert as a fictional detective in an ugly prairie city
Empty bed unsolved.
Part Five: Blue Guidebook
Rome’s Starlings
Lisbon’s railway station cafeteria white vaulting arches
Resemble pre-historic bones
There three ticket agents smoke
On their lunch break each wearing a blue-grey uniform,
Official cap, black tie undone against a white shirt,
Smoke and exchange stories, chuckle like card-players
At their good fortune
Ignore the same beggar who approached them twice
At another table a woman with stern concentration reads Pessoa
Enjoys coffee and a pastry
My introduction to cigarettes, poverty, poetry, coffee and pastry.
-2-
Starlings in the evening sky expand and contract like a lung
Twist transform into an hourglass,
Effortless as if controlled by a mad Etch-a- set
Spin unsolvable mathematical parabolas
Below are stoic Plane trees along the Tiber
Elegant grey light softens edges of an ancient soft city
Ruins, churches, statues, thousands of stone steps,
Grey paved streets, yellow and red crumbling walls
And now the sudden arrival of starlings
Passing free through blue-sky light
‘The blue hour,’ Italians say.
-3-
Laugher, freedom, play without the scaffolding of the I
Stand on a bridge
to explore the relationship
between theft
and poetry
between the solitudes of winter in Canada
and empty sidewalk café tables at midnight in Mexico City
between an empty road
and a poet’s journey
Lunar Eclipse, South Winnipeg
Again, moon appears in one of my poems
May lunar eclipse almost complete
Curved church cupola end is what remains
White pale romantic heroine full of unspeakable longing
She is rare, beautiful, intelligent, free-spirited
Flouts social conventions and expectations
Sprite in the night sky yet pragmatic
Revealed under the cover of night
Bright monster worshipped by dark lovers
Romantic deviants, evening sky and stars.
Carmelo Militano is an Italo/Canadian writer and poet. Winner of the F G Bressani award for poetry. Provisional Eros is his 7th book. Go to his website: https://www.carmelomilitano.com/
