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Four poems by JOSEPH FASANO

Child Trapped in a Barn Crypt

First the breathless flight              
            from the village, the whip's

small script on your tongue. Then stench, 
            then rest, then silence. You'd not thought
 
such spectacle persisted: thick wool             
            shifting in darkness, each beast

to its own monk's cell.  It was winter, then 
            winter, then winter. Remember the door 

cast open, owl-song
            swirling above you, brittle  

as an orphan's dominion?               
            How you crouched in a piss-laden      
 
cellar, while the blade's hymn 
            whispered for more? Moon-
 
stone, strong-
            box, psalter: You will wait here

alone, into hunger, where the floor's 
            good granite 
 
surrendered, in the crook 
            of your cold-stone 

hollow, in the ghosts
            of the arms of the poor: 

the lamb's blood thick  
            on your jaw now, where the wind's 

wild hand 
            still lays it, saying taste

and see, and surrender,  
            as though filth were the brilliance's door.



10     The Paris-American

Inheritance

The wind tonight is a mere
            savant in the throes

of his deep prayer again and you are here, still, 
            when I drift in,

a small bowl
            in my hands like the nest

of some unfledged darkness, your own
            bread's odor in my clothes.

Take this, woman, and eat
            it, the moon's coins uncounted

around you, the light
            laid up like hornet's

gold, shimmering in your best black wool.
            Surrender? Surrender

is nothing, 
            the negligible music of a dressage harness.

Let the wind's hands
            riffle these hymnals, their script

like flocks under pasture
            ice, their own wings

shrouding their croon.
            It is only your son

come homeward
            to lift up your long hair

from moonlight
            like the hem of a mooring rope,

broken, to fold down
            your own hands forever.

It is only the wind and the holding
            fast--the wind and the rest of it, soon.



11     The Paris-American

Vigil

I remember the years of our slumber.  Someone
            had wounded you, and you could not say.

A young man hung above you, in briar.
            Years happened.  Fire.  The wind blew the walls

away.  I drifted
            in a spruce wood, bluebells matting

the acres.  Go to Spain, you
            said.  I went to Spain.  The sea

was white where I traveled.  Milk-deep.  Brimming
            with opal.  I smelled the darkening

pines of a mooring, the ripening
            cliffs of another.  Something was rising

from the fathoms.  I thought of rooms at the edge
            of a pasture, hornets

dismantling their rafters.  Of a dark wave rising
            from your body, its music

in my hands, no harbor.
            Of the wind, of the word

of your hours, its hand clasped over 
            its whisper, like a monk in a shattering

cloister.  Of the horrible Archer
            in the star-lanes, laying his bow

on my whisper.
            Of his strength.  Of the taste

of his armor.  He was No One.  He was never 
            our father.

He was going to shoot me out farther
            where I could visit you no more.



12     The Paris-American

Solstice

Like the Dutchman who hacked out               
             a 2,000-page treatise on the soul

of bees, I was doing my work:  
            Autumn. Winter.  I was trying to love

the story of the composer 
            who carried his frail mother from their burning house

at Wolfsgarten, then stood 
            in a scherzo of blizzard 

until she perished of bitterness for this world.   
            I was trying to hold

the feral face of the possum 
            like the wild boy of Avignon, moving its slow

lips that would not end.  
            I was Leviticus.  I was Revelation.  I was

the child excavated from the battlefield at
            Agincourt, then hanged

a second time, 
            moths in the moonlight of her forearms.  

One night             
             I will whisper it, in toto: how I discovered

a river 
            like a suitor, abandoned

my dead to its vigil.  How obsession
            wore his silk-red 

kimono, his wine-dark 
            mouth at my table. 
 
How I was neither
            the falcon nor falconer,

the singer the singing
            nor song.



13     The Paris-American

Picture
Joseph Fasano is the author of Fugue for Other Hands, due out from Cider Press in January, 2013. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Yale Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Boston Review, and other publications.  He won the 2008 RATTLEPoetry Prize for "Mahler in New York," and he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee.  He teaches at Columbia University, among other institutions.  About Fugue for Other Hands, Jeanne Marie Beaumont has written, "...this book  embodies 'further, deeper, wilder'...it is never timid or tamed, has no easy comfort or uplift to offer but immerses us in the disturbances of living on this mortal earth from start to finish."

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