June 2018
Having grown up on the East Coast of the United States, I now live in Perugia, Italy, where I work as a teacher of the English language. I have been writing poetry since 1998, and published my first poems in Pivot - now defunct - in 2000. Since then my work has been published in Rattle, Poetry Salzburg Review and other places. My favorite thing about writing poetry is the chain of unforeseen discoveries that happen during composition - like going to bed in one place and waking up in another - which never fail to produce a sense of wonder in me.
To the Night Sky
Stars flicker, alien in their distance.
A group of boys scuttling by my window
howl like werewolves
at the half-hidden moon.
I stand here connecting the dots on a wax paper sky
sticky with residue,
13.6 billion years of light
give or take a hundred million
converging on exhausted retinas.
Out there somewhere
beyond the heavens I can’t make out
your atoms pasture.
How far they've grazed
since I last saw you!
Where are they now? In what dim constellation
have they forged a new and temporary home?
Luftmensch
“Isn’t there enough to interest you here
on Earth” my wife taunts, “instead of looting
stars and planets in search of yourself?”
She’s right. There’s quite enough here to keep me
forever bound to this rock of thoughts and dreams -
gravity, for instance, I’m helpless
against it. She’s the pragmatic one
between us. Luftmensch, she calls me
using a Yiddish expression I taught her
years before we got engaged, meaning one
whose head is always in the clouds. Yiddish,
it has been said (by Yiddish philologists
mostly) has an expression for everything
though to my knowledge there’s no way to say
one with her feet planted firmly on the ground
as roots were mainly used for making soup
in Ashkenazi Jewish homes, the rest
relegated to books and parables
more readily smuggled across the border
between two kingdoms - along with a few diamonds
in a secret pocket - than a timber house.
Maybe that’s why I look up at the stars
because I know my true roots go outward
not downward, like the top half of a tree
reaching toward the elemental sky
the photonic blaze tightening it until
it’s taut as a wire. The soul, wrote Amichai,
is like that, an invisible string
running from mouth to heart to anus, sewing you up
like a ragdoll, each of us a conduit
twixt
earth and sky, a human telescope aching
to rediscover its origins, to pull the string
as tight as possible before it snaps
To Ink
Poetry is what I say to myself
when no one’s listening, the words
I speak to the wind and the gathering storm
inside. It’s what I do
when no one’s looking, my shoulder left unguarded,
my tongue spurred on by a thought or dream
that grabs me by the nape and won’t let go.
When no one’s listening I tell myself
what I can’t repeat to anyone else. I speak
to paper, to ink.
Paper is porous and has tiny ears.
Ink is like wine - in vino veritas.
It acts like a friend, but will eventually
betray you.
To the Night Sky
Stars flicker, alien in their distance.
A group of boys scuttling by my window
howl like werewolves
at the half-hidden moon.
I stand here connecting the dots on a wax paper sky
sticky with residue,
13.6 billion years of light
give or take a hundred million
converging on exhausted retinas.
Out there somewhere
beyond the heavens I can’t make out
your atoms pasture.
How far they've grazed
since I last saw you!
Where are they now? In what dim constellation
have they forged a new and temporary home?
Luftmensch
“Isn’t there enough to interest you here
on Earth” my wife taunts, “instead of looting
stars and planets in search of yourself?”
She’s right. There’s quite enough here to keep me
forever bound to this rock of thoughts and dreams -
gravity, for instance, I’m helpless
against it. She’s the pragmatic one
between us. Luftmensch, she calls me
using a Yiddish expression I taught her
years before we got engaged, meaning one
whose head is always in the clouds. Yiddish,
it has been said (by Yiddish philologists
mostly) has an expression for everything
though to my knowledge there’s no way to say
one with her feet planted firmly on the ground
as roots were mainly used for making soup
in Ashkenazi Jewish homes, the rest
relegated to books and parables
more readily smuggled across the border
between two kingdoms - along with a few diamonds
in a secret pocket - than a timber house.
Maybe that’s why I look up at the stars
because I know my true roots go outward
not downward, like the top half of a tree
reaching toward the elemental sky
the photonic blaze tightening it until
it’s taut as a wire. The soul, wrote Amichai,
is like that, an invisible string
running from mouth to heart to anus, sewing you up
like a ragdoll, each of us a conduit
twixt
earth and sky, a human telescope aching
to rediscover its origins, to pull the string
as tight as possible before it snaps
To Ink
Poetry is what I say to myself
when no one’s listening, the words
I speak to the wind and the gathering storm
inside. It’s what I do
when no one’s looking, my shoulder left unguarded,
my tongue spurred on by a thought or dream
that grabs me by the nape and won’t let go.
When no one’s listening I tell myself
what I can’t repeat to anyone else. I speak
to paper, to ink.
Paper is porous and has tiny ears.
Ink is like wine - in vino veritas.
It acts like a friend, but will eventually
betray you.
© 2018 Marc Alan Di Martino
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF