December 2024
Bio Note: I was born in Italy and moved to Northern California as an adult. I enjoy spending time outdoors and many of my poems reflect that. My first poetry collection Survival Time was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (2022).
When people are asked whether they were better off four years ago, I wonder what they remember of the pandemic months of 2020.
When people are asked whether they were better off four years ago, I wonder what they remember of the pandemic months of 2020.
Winter in Berkeley, 2020
Rain sheets down sideways against windows,
the house a ship riding waves.
You listen to water whipping the roof,
gushing from gutters, rushing down the road.
Between storms, the light is amber honey.
The city sighs, as if sliding into a bubble bath.
Between storms, you walk around the neighborhood.
Flashes of color from leafless persimmon trees
laden with glowing fruit, citrus blinking yellow
or orange among glossy green leaves.
Christmas decorations: lights strung in patterns
on top of fences, around trunks, above doors,
giant baubles hanging from bare branches,
stark against deciduous trees’ seasonal nudity.
You hope they will stay past the Holidays,
placeholders for promised buds and blossoms.
Some magnolias are ready to bloom: purple
tepals that open up into white hearts,
just as the solstice ushers in lengthening daylight
and you, survivor of another siege by darkness,
breathe more easily. In the theater of your mind,
you show all this to the family children, living far,
farther this year of no travel, no hugs, no sitting around
a long table decked in the tapestry of conversations,
punctuated by bites of panettone. You carry them
with you, baubles of amber light, towards spring.
Brown Pelicans
They fly over the bay while I scull,
dark W shapes against the pale sky. I stop
to absorb the scene, the boat bobbles
in the breeze. They descend, glide inches off
the water. I sense the small space between
their bodies and the surface like a charged
electric field, wish to place my hand there,
feel the cool water, the feathers, and feet.
We know how nearly touching releases
a current, our bodies exchange energy,
we smell closeness as sweet brine. It's all there
with the birds, except I can't explain
the physics, only the physical,
if you encounter it, you'll know how true.
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