Paul Violi

Where the blossoms fall like snow on the dock bring fifty thousand in cash or you’ll never see your baby again

Angiolieri's "S ' i' fosse foco" If I were fire, I'd burn the world away; If I were wind, I'd blow it down; If I were water, I'd let it drown; If I were God, I'd deep-six it today. If I were Pope, what would make me gay? To ransack every Christian town. If I were emperor, what would make my day? To see heads roll on the ground! If I were death, I'd run down my father; If I were life, I'd flee from him. As for dear mama, she gets the same. If I were Cecco, and that is my name, I'd take the pretty young girls to screw and leave the ugly old hags to you.

Whereas the porch screen sags from the weight of flowers (impatiens) that grew against it, then piles of wet leaves, then drifted snow; and Whereas, now rolled like absence in its drooping length, a dim gold wave, sundown’s last, cast across a sea of clouds and the floating year, almost reaches the legs of the low-slung chair; and Whereas between bent trees flies and bees twirl above apples and peaches fallen on blue gravel; and Whereas yesterday’s thunder shook blossoms off laurel the day after they appeared; and Whereas in the dust, the fine and perfect dust of cat-paw prints scattered across the gleaming car hood, something softer than blossoms falls away, something your lips left on mine; and Whereas it’s anyone’s guess as to how long it’s been since a humid day sank so low, so far from the present that missing sensations or the sensation of something missing have left impressions in the air, the kind a head leaves on a pillow; and Whereas the last of ancient, unconvincing notions evaporate from the damp pages of thick, old books that describe how, for instance, Time and Love once lay together here; how in a slurred flash of light she turned and waded back into the sea, and how the slack part of any day was and is all in the way he, half asleep, felt her hand slip out of his; and Whereas, the blue heron stands on the shore; while the sleek heron turns, broad to narrow, half hidden among the reeds; turning with the stealth, the sweep of twilight’s narrowing minute, of stillness taking aim; turning until it almost disappears into the arrowhead instant the day disappears, until, staring out of the reeds, the aforementioned heron is more felt than seen; and Whereas, you, with due forethought and deliberation, bite into an apple’s heart and wish it were your own

Please think of this as not merely a piece Of writing that anyone would fully Appreciate, but as plain and simple Words that attempt to arouse whatever Appetencies you, especially, depend Upon language to fulfill; that drench you In several levels of meaning at once, Rendering my presence superfluous. In other words, welcome this as a poem, Not merely a missive I’ve slowly composed And tucked under your windshield wiper So that these onlookers who saw me bash In your fender will think I’m jotting down The usual information and go away.

Look at me now, I stand before you, a man whom life has made a gullible skeptic. Life so obvious and strange, so full of marvels and dross even in our sleep we create monuments even in our grave What more can we ask than to never know what to expect Each day has a different emissary Yesterday she was sharp-eyed

For the second time this week I've watched snow fall at sunrise, dawn arrive on a breeze (the way I think it always does). I don't know which, time or the weather, woke me, charmed me out of a dream where a few of us floated around, gravity's jokers, face-up in the quiet water and the jetsam of a slow life. I had one line that I'd saved and let it go as though it were mine, calling for “Darker days and brighter gods!” Then I only had my waking instant, but it opened with that same shadowless light, a sense of change, of something both near and remote, first and last, blowing with the wind and snow through my reflection in the window. And then I lost it. So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee, an unfinished ode to idleness, cobwebs in high places, a spider that rappels down the bookshelves, and a commotion recollected in tranquility; sunlight pouring through, and another bright page with a peculiar darkness flowing over it — shadows of heatwaves from the radiator, or my thoughts going up in smoke. The glass, when misted over, reminds me of store windows, how they're swathed with soap, shrouded in secrecy before a grand opening or after an ignominious closing. Either way, not very interesting except, perhaps, when the grafitti, the anonymous messages appear scrawled across them by some child of the air, words you can see through or a clear smear. And at twilight I'm still here, the same place, the same light. Nothing to do but move with the view: snow, wind over soft ruins, unfinished buildings that loom like monuments to a spent curiosity. I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes roosting on soggy flunkgirders. Want a cigarette? Nope. Got a match? Nope. See any alternative to solipsism? Nope. Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope. Did you know that Maryland has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope. The creatures of idleness are pure speculation. They follow the weather, shadow the wind, fill in the blanks. Some are big and clumsy and sly and like to lick my watch; others, like gerunds, have already drunk themselves into a state of being. Another, with time on his hands and the sense of how windows are both inside and outside a place, stands there watching his silhouette change to a reflection as the light shifts and he moves forward or back, plays like a god stepping in and out of himself, and hears the wind as the breath of change when the last flurry whirls away in the light. The last flake grows larger

I don’t know how fast I was going but, even so, that’s still an intriguing question, officer, and deserves a thoughtful response. With the radio unfurling Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, you might consider anything under 80 sacrilege. Particularly on a parkway as lovely as the one you’re fortunate enough to patrol—and patrol so diligently. A loveliness that, if observed at an appropriate rate of speed, affords the kind of pleasure which is in itself a reminder of how civilization depends on an assurance of order and measure, and the devotion of someone like yourself to help maintain it. Yes, man the measurer! The incorrigible measurer. And admirably precise measurements they are—Not, of course, as an end in themselves but, lest we forget, as a means to propel us into the immeasurable, where it would be anybody’s guess how fast the west wind was blowing when it strummed a rainbow and gave birth to Eros. Never forget that a parkway is a work of art, and the faster one goes the greater the tribute to its power of inspiration, a lyrical propulsion that approaches the spiritual and tempts—demands the more intrepid of us to take it from there. That sense of the illimitable, when we feel we are more the glory than the jest or riddle of the world —that’s what kicked in, albeit briefly, as I approached the Croton Reservoir Bridge. And on a night like this, starlight reignited above a snowfall’s last flurry,  cockeyed headlights scanning the girders overhead, eggshell snowcrust flying off the hood, hatching me on the wing like a song breaking through prose, the kind I usually sing through my nose: So much to love, A bit less to scorn. What have I done? To what end was I born?

What’ll it be? Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo. Whaddaya want on it? A swipe of mayo. Pepper but no salt. You got it. Roast beef on rye. You want lettuce on that? No. Just tomato and mayo. Tomato and mayo. You got it. …Salt and pepper? No salt, just a little pepper. You got it. No salt. You want tomato. Yes. Tomato. No lettuce. No lettuce. You got it. …No salt, right? Right. No salt. You got it. Pickle? No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo. And pepper. Pepper. Yes, a little pepper. Right. A little pepper. No pickle. Right. No pickle. You got it. Next! Roast beef on whole wheat, please, With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice Of beefsteak tomato. The lettuce splayed, if you will, In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus, And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded In a multi-foil arrangement That eschews Bragdonian pretensions Or any idea of divine geometric projection For that matter, but simply provides A setting for the tomato To form a medallion with a dab Of mayonnaise as a fleuron. And—as eclectic as this may sound— If the mayonnaise can also be applied Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll And as a festoon below the medallion, That would be swell. You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva? Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. You got it. Next!

We, the naturally hopeful, Need a simple sign For the myriad ways we’re capsized. We who love precise language Need a finer way to convey Disappointment and perplexity. For speechlessness and all its inflections, For up-ended expectations, For every time we’re ambushed By trivial or stupefying irony, For pure incredulity, we need The inverted exclamation point. For the dropped smile, the limp handshake, For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift Or taken the first sip of a flat beer, Or felt love or pond ice Give way underfoot, we deserve it. We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot, The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back, The flat tire at journey’s outset, The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken. But mainly because I need it – here and now As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio Staring at my espresso and cannoli After this middle-aged couple Came strolling by and he suddenly Veered and sneezed all over my table And she said to him, “See,that’s why I don’t like to eat outside.”

In Breughel's great picture “Canal Street,” restaurant customers order roast swan instead of chicken, hurled salad instead of tossed salad, while shoppers spill through a maze of stalled trucks and scurry around the sidewalk stalls jammed with countless nameless things that housewives sidestep to surround a Japanese man in a broad-brim hat and painted silk tie as he demonstrates how one gadget can cut food 50 different ways and though they don't understand a word he says, they stand transfixed by his spiel amid the fumes and noise and loud fruitvendors dropping casual perfections of sun and rain into bags and sacks against a backdrop of silver towers and sea and fields vibrant with excess that giddy farmers hail by tossing animals, large animals, into the air to be carried away on the winds of exuberance to the four corners of the globe where the romping gods bear so many attributes they're a bundle of incongruities and no one takes them seriously not even their beaming angels who parachute drunkenly down to the shore distracting the dogs let loose on cormorants that ate so much they can't fly but not the boys in the rowboat who have caught a blowfish, tickled its belly until it's about to burst like a balloon before dropping it overboard to watch it blow itself backward to kingdom come, nor the other children who have stopped clamoring over the stranded whale's back to swim out underwater, under the swans, grab them by the legs and yank them down in a slow fury of bubbles and light and then sell them to the market near the restaurant in the foreground of Breughel's great picture “Canal Street.”