Poetry: Selections from John L. Stanizzi

Burn

            a meditation

 

                  He’s singing a song for you at his own expense. 

                                                              -You’re a Big Girl Now

                                                              -Bob Dylan

 

 

*

 

Another summer come begrudgingly,

El Nino, furtive, spirituous,

out there with the yellow warbler,

wood thrush, the next secret surprise.

Everything busy.

These are the first hot afternoons.

Temperature near 90 three straight days,

starlings panting,

everything left undone.

 

 

*

 

As soon as the rain calmed enough

to be gentle

the frogs started.

 

Shadows and lights,

the surface of the pond,

silhouettes of birds darting,

saxophone darting,

the deck liquid,

chairs and plants floating

on the slick surface.

 

You know as well as I what it is to float,

burdened by deep water.

 

*

 

tree frogs

louder than geese in fog

 

at dusk

exquisite and peaceful

rain all night

 

and now

thick clouded gray morning

just after sunrise

leaves absolutely still mist

rising from the river

pond black and gray

the whole scene lit

 

by the diamonds of dew

on the tail of a grackle

fingers poised at the keyboard

mouth shut

 

*

 

The stars shine tonight,

boundaries of brilliance,

sustenance,

idleness.

 

Perhaps that is the blessing.

Otherwise the one desire

might flicker and vanish.

 

Who are we to say,

traveling tentatively

in among the shadows,

the lights, the movement,

that there will be something else

that will make us burn.

 

*

 

There is good cause for mentioning birdsong,

for being drawn in, over and over again,

to its constancy.

           

You know, the fog, the river, the clouds.

 

You’ve heard it all before.

 

Gawking at the hills,

waiting like a fool

to be battered…

Imagine?!

 

A strand of haze,

a brown branch snapped, hanging down,

all that green,

or perhaps a shadow

whose corner is lifted

to find what has been swept under it.

 

There is such ease in crafting excuses.

 

Each bird singing at his own expense,

and the room crowded with laziness

while out there,

(OK, I’ll say it again.)

the horizon is crowned with an aura of mist,

entire flocks of sparrows come to eat;

 

the dirt road is soft clay,

the stream misplaced in the woods,

reflecting all of it,

all the gestures,

and all the stagnant waiting,

wedged between nothing to say and less.

*

 

First trace of coolness,

humidity thinning,

the wide, straight shadows

of the corral on the clay road

fade under spreading clouds,

the same hills, trees, water,

a diary where it is written patience,

after which winter arrives rudely,

taking its slow dragged-out time

**

Bad Karma

Footprints in the sand validate the moment.

No matter what I am doing, I am faithful to

the day’s wild unpredictability,

the bedlam, the quiet, insidious formlessness,

a day that smolders away

like shadows on water in sunlight.

The sand undulates, erases its own punctuation.

 

How often what we say to each other,

and how we say it,

in spite of all we know,

confirms the idyllic perfection of isolation.

 

Mid-summer, young doves poke at sunflower seeds,

the haze to the north scrims the hills,

the cloudless sky is taut and glossy,

the air remarkably thin and overflowing

with the sound of birdsong,

and nearer, the gratifying sound of feathers.

 

 *****

Consummation

Red-winged black bird like a god or some jeweled royalty

audacious yawns at the feeder before gorging

blasé in his mottled blackness

and I keep returning to the same question year after year

 

It has become unbelievable to me

this unmitigated persistence that on occasion

crosses the line from irritating to funny

 

So today or now anyway

I will gather what’s in front of me

inkling of sunshine brightening the fog

hangover and the patience

to wait until morning for relief

birds in all directions

cluck and coo and melody

humidity burying its head in everything

birdseed distended and juicy

mockingbird doing cat cry

jay call hawk screech wren chatter

and the voices of children playing

as I fight the urge to yawn

the urge to consume everything at once

 

**

Blackout

asleep with thunder asleep with lightning

under wet blankets of rain

lightning the color of daylight in dreams

 

*

 

morning’s slow breathing

bright tunnel of recollections

and the ghost of delusions silently closes the door

 

*

 

twenty sparrows’ tracks

where they have flown

in the sky

*

 

silver spotted skippers dance in the close air around the butterfly bush

touch down on purple blossoms

quietly applaud

 

*

 

the day moving forward slow and enormous

and exactly like this

just this once

 

*

 

morning’s wrinkled sheets

stiffness in the body

and the bones of annihilation in a heap at the door

John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants,Sundowning, POND, and The Tree That Lights The Way Home. Besides A Thin Slice of Anxiety, John’s work has been widely published including in the journals Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, Praxis, Rust & Moth, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Laurel Review, The Caribbean Writer, Blue Mountain Review, Tar River, Poetlore, Rattle, Hawk & Handsaw, Plainsongs, and many others. His work has been translated into Italian and appears widely in Italy, including in El Ghibli, The Journal of Italian Translations Bonafini, Poetarium, and others.  His translator is the Italian poet, Angela D’Ambra. His nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, Scarlet Leaf, Evening Street, Praxis, Potato Soup Journal, The Red Lemon, after the pause, and others.  Potato Soup Journal named his story Pants “The Best of 2020” and it appeared in their anthology celebrating those works. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. For many years, John coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut.  He was also a “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud; he spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. A former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, and New England Poet of the Year (1998), John has just been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction – 2021 - from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and Culture for work on his new memoir. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, and lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.