Sample Poems by Lee Passarella
Equinox
Wind shakes the colors
loose, patterns uncomplicated
from the folds as the quilt
is spread: the soft architecture
of new poplar leaves, scalloped
and gothic; the dogwoodsÍ
pilled flowers, knotted
wool; the labial wings
on the maples fingered coral,
red. But the pin oaks grab
their browns around them,
unwashed. Lent a word
small and blunt as any ritual.
You preach the creed
a thousand thousand times,
and always the same,
only rearranging the dust,
covering dead follicles
with a lie of green:
henna and celadon.
Somewhere the snow stays
-- brittle, a wafer;
the grass drinks from it,
learning the hard lessons.
Spring Song in South Georgia
The gestural intensity of a day
like this seems rehearsed:
the mareÍs tails are clouds
out of genre painting, studied,
perfected, mass produced at last.
The star magnolias too numinous/
numerous, the daffodils too Crayola-
yellow, even naturalized;
spring needs to be spontaneous,
as in West Philly, South Boston,
or the Bronx: the nude ailanthus
contemplating heaven from the alley
way, the gutter ice floes lovingly
sculpted in the black basalt
of cinders and exhaust. Then,
like the survivor of some private
Holocaust, the lone striped crocus
in the park the city forgot it owns.
Europa and the Bull
For some, just another weekday: Workmen
rebuild the pavilion at the park, stapling
tar paper, snapping chalk lines, hammering
as earnestly as the ochre letters on the sign
board beside the river:
NO WADING OR SWIMMING
THESE WATERS
ARE DANGEROUS
Indifferent, the black Lab prows the deepest
parts„calm as tea, bijou/Gulf-Coast green„
retrieving his tossed branch. Here and there,
fly casters fight the current to stay upright,
walk half a dozen rocks, wade out where
they can see their prey, eye, patience,
and at last a little muscle, little as possible,
engaged. As with the young sunbathers
on their rock out in the middle, she
in her bright, scant suit„knees raised,
spread to take the sun as she will him tonight.
Beside her, maybe he dreams of it
as he sponges sun, bare back dazzled,
as much of white as you can see
in this place of blotter-paper tans
and greens. Except the infrequent
culet the rocks cut as the river glances
at them, through channels like the sun visors
on old cars, that kind of green, that kind
of clear, the current hard enough to slice
through anything it finds: mud, grit,
rock, eventually, to show the business
that it means. But for the moment,
in that part of the mind that sees
exactly what it wants, yang turns to yin,
earth gets the upper hand, the outcrops
like some river-plying giant heading north,
away from the sea and surcease, trailing
wakes in a hundred different places.
The few lucky ones ride
the backbone of the beast,
gravity just another law to be ignored.
The Death of the Fossil
after Elizabeth Bishop
The jetties gripe
at the beach, holding atoms
against the flux: two fucoid
twists of stone drying out
as the tide leaves them.
The figures in the mist,
waiting like gulls at the edge
or walking the bevel of the granite tops
where barnacle bud cases are just ready
year on year to put forth
the hard little life that lives
at the edge. Around it, the mealy-
brown, the isingreen sheets of seaweed.
Rods snap, filament hauled screaming
to the backwaterÍs crab-ripe slime.
A rod doubles; a child reels, straining
as if he had hooked the bottom of the sea.
The grandfather takes over,
his features going slack
with expectation worn so differently
on the childÍs face as the black bucket
of the carapace slogs up the rocks.
He wheels it to the top:
a horseshoe crab reeling
on the swung filament, its feet
circling like the spinnerettesÍ mad gyres
over the spiderÍs blown web,
then the chitinous slap
on rock like sweat-hardened leather.
He grasps the line
above the self-involved
forked feet. One flick of the knife.
and the insulting hook
free, spins away. Then a skittering kick
to the pit, where the eye specks
that flank the shell are jammed
in the black angle of the rocks,
breakers trolling the incandescent blue
of lost fishing lines over the blind
but compass-perfect circles
drawn by the whirling, useless feet.
The Geometry of Loneliness at Brigantine Island
At intervals as sure
as jets on hold maintain,
the boats come in;
sea-tarnished charms hung
on a silver chain of wake,
they circle the brief neck
of land. Turning, they draw
the slim white reach
of their outriggers up,
as if in a shrug
of uncertainty.
In sun and summer
they plumb a paradox,
when the cities mulch
the red spreading blooms
of algae (these blooms all
sex, all pistil, no petal
prettiness) that carry their
Red Death along the coast:
the cities incontinent
of hunger and of slough.
Though now the sea,
fluke-ripe, smooth and beryl,
black where clouds haunt
it, mats the island,
makes a picture of it„
white, squared and low„
the three blue, tumid
standpipes mastering it,
hinting at its loneliness,
the rampant causeway,
a blue capsulated race
back to the mainland,
echoing its loneliness:
as silent and distant-
blue as the inlet beneath,
sun-sheathed, like a neuron
firing its tale of backwater
woes in slow electric spurts
at a sea huge, inter-
stitial, and disinterested.
The sea makes this
such a lonely picture,
haunted black,
as the trawlers
circle and circle,
waiting to land.