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
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."
