IDENTITY
The entire past up for grabs!
Who are we but our memories of the past?
Yet the “experts” tell us that what we think
We remember about our pasts is fantastical,
Mostly untrue, mostly false, mostly invented
As we grope along attempting to chisel identities
From shards, scraps, hangnails and fringes.
Thus you can be anyone you want to be—
Say, Ponce de Leon scrambling for that
Fountain of Youth or a Xerxes or two.
Since I remember a coonskin cap
From the party store, I’m Davy Crockett.
King of the Wild Frontier . . .
Or was is Dan’l Boone?
Or maybe you’re somebody you don’t want to be,
A grotesque Pol Pot or Vlad the Impaler.
One thing we’re not—this phantasmal creature
Living and breathing right now, in the present.
The present doesn’t exist. The moment you say “now,”
Now is gone, buried along with all the other
King Tutian doodads in some dusty pyramid.
So get used to this alternate you, the real one,
Except when the shindig’s going on and
You’re too drunk to notice or care
And you’re neither here nor there.
CHILDE ROLAND RETURNS
I took a wrong, sinister turn on Annunciation
And wound up in the Alley of Bones
Where a stagnant sky drooped down
And the mule dropped dead on arrival.
Nothing glorious about it, no dark tower
This time, just a crumbling ant hill
Coated with ash and an old paint can,
Some rusted sofa springs and a roll
Of tarpaper—all new at one time, now
Consigned to the dregs of history.
But look, a feisty catbird has lighted
On this sagging maple branch
Where it sings of glory and, anon, bells
Ring in a tower made of air that rises nowhere
So that it seems to me, grudging witness,
That this must surely be where I want to be
Or at least need to be or thereby destined
Unless of course worse comes to worst.
NOW
. . Sweet is old wine in bottles
–Lord Byron
I’m reading Byron’s ‘Tis Sweet’
While listening to Beethoven’s sixth piano sonata
As I lean back in the Subaru awaiting the return
Of my girls who moments before dragged Cinnamon
Into the vet for her rabies shot
Fire which Prometheus filched for us from heaven
(whoa, the second movement, Ludwig getting wild)
I wonder about that filched fire—
Was it worth gaining cooked over raw,
To be chained to a boulder as each day
Birds of prey devour your liver anew?
Was it?
(third movement—here it is, the slow fire,
A deep burning, the uncanny beauty)
Rabies, madness, death . . . (the piano
Rumbles with bass tremolo punctuated
By treble rejoinders)
Greek children extracted Byron’s bladder,
Blew it up like a ball to play catch,
Byron who loved dogs more than people
(hear that, Cinnamon?)
Between grief and nothingness I choose grief.
‘tis sweet,’ yes, brief yet sweeter than old wine
And we must rejoice in that grief
As the Promethean flames consume our hearts
And Cinnamon will emerge immune to madness,
Joyous to chase the soccer ball in our back yard.
Oh, it was cold this morning in early June,
So cold the fire clicked on . . .
I understand nothing, am dumb to grasp
The meaning of all that I cherish
Each moment as the conflagration of the future
Singes even now the passionate tips of our fervid desire
OSTRACIST
When they ostracized me out of Colonus
I crept to the vaporous cave at Delphi
To seek the advice of Sibyl—
Oh, what a hag she was, filthy, blind,
Demented and dreadful.
But she had a reputation whereas I,
Disgraced for exposing crimes and lies,
Needed succor.
She muttered gibberish that I understood,
Advised me to hitch back to Louisiana
And consume some hot cross buns
And honey dew at Dolly’s Pastry Shack.
And thereupon I ate of the bread and wine.
Call it transfiguration! The ease
Of a satiated man! Dolly scrubbed my back
Of dirt and grime it had acquired over time.
She sang soft threnodies as she scoured
Then returned to her kitchen and baker’s racks.
Restored, I stumbled upon a rhubarb plantation
(Which you know now as Audubon Park)
And held court with the lagoon ducks.
Those quackers taught me a lot about how
To stay afloat in deluge—easy, just float.
Some day I’ll revisit my home in Greece
But for now it’s all the bread crumbs I can eat,
The usual trifling triumph in defeat.
THE EVANESCENCE OF EFFERVESCENCE
Some strive to explicate the inexplicable human condition
by plunging into the infinitesimal ocean of quarks
while others soar toward the edges of the universe,
blue-shifting motes in a star beam as they traverse . . .
plucking out the music of the spheres on a banjo
and why bother, knowing all along that we can never finally
and fully cry eureka! That what is not and never has been known
can never be known because we cannot escape the scaffolding,
the architecture, the hangman’s noose, the playing arena,
to gaze upon our strange selves outside of ourselves.
Leave it to some scraggly poet to chip in with another homely metaphor:
our ephemeral lives evaporate like the fizz in your carbonated sodas—
sprightly as tiny John Phillip Sousa ditties, brief yet Fourth of Julyish,
gas escaping, the froth of an Atlantic wave churning onto the shore
of the New World, fleeting razzmatazz, razzle-dazzle, dizzying leptons
crashing against a ziggurat of stalwart bosons . . .
ah, I crave the champagne, Louie, even when it goes flat—
which I’ve heard some can even savor.
About the author:
Two volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Crash and Clearing the Attic, will be published by Adelaide in the near future. A third, Archaeology, will be published by Kelsay Books. His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.
In the artist’s words:
Gary Frier qualified as a Graphic Designer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in 2004.
