Five Sublime Poems by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

 

The Return                                                                                                                                            

 

You wait for me as I echo

Like a note reverberating

 

From the centre of my turns

on a carnival ride.

 

I sit on a white paper

Maché, gilded horse, circling

 

The flowering wood rings

Of my years at the edge of time.

 

At that merry-go-round

You stand eternal.

 

A fixed star.

Pattern of  my seasons.

 

Steadfast, you wait for me

To alight from my manège of vagaries.

 

I love you blindly

Like protons and electrons

 

Love the nucleus

Of their atom

 

Without knowing it.

Magnetism of centrifugal force

 

Spinning coherently, returning

Constant on its swivel

 

Out of simple physics

God particles

 

You and I

Ghosts in the spin

                                                                                                                            

Of our continuous return.

We are the waves

 

Oscillating towards space.

Sunlight fading to starlight

 

And moons repeating in cycles,

Spyrographing reality

 

Into a melody

Of life’s familiar refrain.

 

Heart beat

Blood pulse

 

A carousel

Of pastel paper pulp

 

Childish vehicles  and horses

Prinked with gold and silver

 

Roses, curlicues & diamonds

Of broken mirror glass

 

Reflecting the passage

Of our vanishing

 

Faces, our miraculous

Temporal voyage.

 

           

        Refrain

Tempus inreparabile fugit

           

Piano music trickles like water,

liquid waves of sound, undulations

 

Of light fragments, Escher                                                                                                            

Scapes repeating

                                                                                                                

Unto themselves

Before disaster

                                                                                                                      

Before the sparking

Spinning top

 

Of your molecules

Spun out unbound

 

And your form

That face of love and goodness

 

Turned away from me

Into a black scarf of stars.

 

Yet for a while we held

that wheel of chance.

 

They say that time is non-linear,

But circular, a cochlear spiral.

 

We return inescapably

Through memory

 

To those circuits we incised

With our living

 

In the universe’s vinyl long play.

You will always

 

Be waiting for me

Like the sun.

 

Look! I am a child

Showing off for you                                                                                                    

 

Riding that princess chariot

In the peach organza dress 

 

You embroidered

& that green panno lenci

 

Hair band with the tiny blooms.

You’re still young, in your prime.

                                                                                                                        

I know nothing

Of what’s to come ahead

 

Assured only of this moment’s truth.

I will return endlessly

 

Here and to all the other points

We stitched  in time.

 

Maybe they are other worlds

In superposition

 

Other dimensions, heavens

And dreamworld scapes

 

Spaces lit with love and sun.

A luna moth fluttering,

 

Spins a pale green carousel

Of diaphanous wingtips.

 

Feeds on sunlight

Ever circling an invisible centre.

 

So joyful!

So beautiful!

 

She is so young.

Her life, so brief.

 

The Possum and The Moon                                                              

 

Are out tonight

And they are not the only ones

On this cool May dusk.

 

The sky, a blue gas disk,

The moon, a plate

Of abundant metaphors

 

Spills out

Its captive sunlight

 

And beside the tallest pines

Cassiopeia’s brightest point

Blazes a beauty mark.

 

I stand

In my unavenged awe

And wonder

 

Inside the star-lit glass dome

Of this terrestrial sublunary world

Womb of my skull’s carapace.

 

I have placed slices of bread

And cut apples

For the silver possum

 

Who visits my stone porch

At the closing of each sunset,

When humans recede

 

To their slumber

And animals surface

Seeking sustenance

 

Safe at last in night’s cover.

Just me, the moon,

A few  stars and the possum,

The trees charcoaling to night forests

Nestling God’s creatures

In their nests

 

The possum’s hands

My hands

The silent atrocities

 

Of nature’s food chain

My own angst and tragedies

The planetary remoteness

 

Of this night’s own sadness

At the defeat of light

By all its negations

 

Except for the captive refractions

Of it in the blink of each star,

Each stone, bloom and animal

 

Silvering Earth and the face of the moon.

In Those Meticulous Rituals of Dressing In Our Sunday Best                                   

 

You and I created the world

With our gaze, our observing,

 

Holding on to the sturdy axis

Of our balcony. We were the cosmos

 

In a timeless, eternal spark

We will forever inhabit.

 

I clung to you in orbit,

Ellipse of a moon to a planet

 

Of the same substance

Broken off in two.

 

Sunshine: source and illumination

Of our spirit bound entanglement,

 

Though light years divide realities

On calendar pages. My smallness,

 

Your grandeur, my unavoidable growth

And our slow receding to absence.

 

Our forms were the infinite

Husks, masks of all being

 

Returning for a season

Like the vermilion roses.

 

Oh voice of nurturing and reason,

Tell me again of the order of things!

 

Those rituals of meals, finesse, manners

And fashions. Clench my insignificance 

 

In your shadow, sheltered

And enriched by your knowing.

 

Give me the city once more,

The sun and its blue penumbra.

 

Let me bask in your ideal, iridescent

As your necklace of glass pearls.

 

Protect me from the precarious void

Lurking beyond the railing.

 

Come back through the centuries

Mother! Lace us up one more time

 

To the brightness of this day.

Now that I am old.

 

Now that we have lost the centre.

Now that you are gone.

Silt                                                                                                                           

 

Weathering. Regolith.

Frost shattering and haloclasty.

 

Abrasion. Fluvial comminution.

Attrition. Grinding. Blunt force.

 

At 0.0063 millimetres

In the Udden-Wentworth scale,

 

The ethereal lattice of quartz

And feldspar silts the fertile deltas

 

Of the world. A crystallography

Of atoms. Molecules. Dust.

 

I too am made of this.

Sedimentation of centuries. Eons.

 

Ephemeral fragments of ruins.

Rubble of collapsed walls. Bones.

 

Pulverized. Windswept. Crimson.

Erstwhile stone and flesh.

 

My days, effluvial silting.

Routed in veins below my skin.

 

You wondered how they’d look.

Carved inward. Lifeless.

 

Alluvium of clay to sift through, blind.

God sparks aligned by love, instead.

 

Arranged in predetermined order.

Alive at the centre. Neutrinos. Cherubim.

Feux Rouges                                                                                                               

 

At the carrefours, avenues

Usher us, divergent.

Trace bridges through clouds.

Over lakes. Tether neuronal

Intermittent-yellow line segments.

Roads branch out like deltas

Of concrete labyrinths. Loop serpentine.

Unfurling in the expanses of the world.

 

In the toxic hues of sub-zero dawn,

Nauseous traffic exhales exhaust.

Night shuts its wings

And the sun, ethereal egg to the east,

Makes its way westward

Over this town, where this morning,

Like each morning, we are reborn to ourselves

Huddled in our parkas, with our coffees,

Our car radios, breakfasts on the go.

Revamped into one more time slot.

This day we name and carve with our rituals,

Born again to adaptation. We are words tumbling

Onto a new page of some half written book. We coalesce

Some sort of meaning from the totality of our days, the whorl

Of them coiling into an ever strengthening helix

Surviving winds and blunt force on this tangible terrain. 

 

The page is blank and seems benign,

With all the tabs open to a thousand yesterdays,

The memory of them, intruding pop-ups

Of non continuous text claiming attention, stitching upon this

What I imagine to be time’s arrow, past to present

Continuity to future me on an invisible trajectory

Through places, faces, events, my life, this story

I weave of the years, these words.

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews is a poet, author, teacher and the host & coordinator of the Oakville Literary Cafe Series. Her latest book of poems Sunrise Over Lake Ontario, was launched in 2019. Her previous poetry publications include: Sea Glass, The Whispers of Stones, The Red Accordion, Letters from the Singularity and A Jar of Fireflies. Josie’s poetry has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, Descant’s Winston Collins Prize, The Canada Literary Review, The Eden Mills Literary Contest and The Henry Drummond Poetry Prize. Her poetry has won first place in Arborealis Anthology Contest of The Ontario Poetry Society and in Big Pond Rumours Literary E-Zine. Some of her poems feature on The Niagara Falls Poetry website. One of her pieces was included by Priscila Uppal in Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, Mansfield Press, in 2018, rated by Chatelaine Magazine as one of the best Canadian poetry books of 2018. Josie is the author of two non-fiction books: How the Italians Created Canada (the contribution of Italians to the Canadian socio-historical landscape) and In the Name of Hockey ( a closer look at emotional abuse in boys’ sports.) Josie teaches workshops for Poetry in Voice and for Oakville Galleries. She writes and lives in Oakville, Ontario.