Poems by Louis Gallo

GENESIS

In the beginning was nothing
until nothing twitched,
given current knowledge,
and ejaculated itself into, what?
more nothing? itself.

And itself begat itself and
expanded until this moment
we call Now and may or may not
so expand forever, or, if not,
cave in on itself and zoom
back to nothing where it will
once again fluctuate and
begin anew.

 Might as well
say in the beginning
was the Word. A word is nothing,
a mere signifier, a random set
of scratches on a blank page.
And out of the verbal Nothing
here we are, thinking about nothing
and everything and how they tango.

And the body is meat
and its neural circuitry
begat an even greater nothing
called consciousness, the pour soi,
a hole in everything solid.
And that hole took dominion
and fears and loathes
what it is—nothing . . .

and, verily, will soon enough
melt back into its mother,
the meat from which it bloomed,
and this is called tragedy
or comedy or, in the end,
nothing, void, Zero.
And God so loved the world.

 

I. FOUNTAIN OF SUBCONSCIOUSNESS, or,
MELATONIN DREAMS

I’ve forgotten the difference between Xerxes
And Darius or Caligula and Heliogabalus—
Has that ever happened to you?
Half awake, half asleep, that shady zone
Where I learn I have been assigned to teach
A course on Optics (wait, I know nothing
About prisms, spectra, refraction, et al—)

Who did this?  I see him, the military Chair,
Standing aloof at the helm while Rena
The beautiful student takes my arm
As we stroll among the course offerings booth.
And that other one, the other Rena, watches
Us askance, beyond boiling pissed—she rushes forth
To jam the textbook on Optics into my pocket,
Hisses then rushes away.  Who assigned Optics?

I detest OneDrive and the Cloud of All-Knowing—
Saw myself dissolved into its miasma.
It must be the Dawning of the Age of Asparagus!
Old Hickory said we could take them by surprise . . .
But they ran through the briars and the brambles,
They ran through the bushes where a rabbit
Couldn’t go.

Introducing, Ned’s plaque psoriasis . . .

Or when I am driving on a foothill
Of Popocatepetl, a narrow-winding road
With no brakes and a mudslide coats the windshield
And I’m coasting blind into the horizon.
Or when the piano from my remote past
Reappears in a warehouse apartment
That I rent after the diaspora.
Who can fathom the intricacies of the fathoms?

 

II. SIMPHONIE NOSTALGIQUE

The disgrace notes in its score defeated me.
I quit the orchestra in molten shame
Because Papa used to say that nostalgia
Was a disease—he, sorely afflicted.
I played Bach’s Suite 2 Badinerie
On his German sterling silver flute
With ebony mouthpiece while dancing
A jig for my dear life.

                                

                                     Without memory
Forgetting sets in, gangrene of the mind.
We’re reduced to slivers of ourselves
Blowing bubbles across verdant meadows
As Apophis veers ever nearward—
To crumble entire civilizations like cookies.
Where’s that flute?  I must pipe out
Some stately dirge or perhaps a sailor’s ditty.
I must pray with fierce intent to St. Vitus.
Those who know, know BDO, eh?
Ergo, I know nothing.  Count me absconditus
With the Western Wind.

 

PERIPETEIA

You have heard the stories, everybody has,
usually whispered in hallways and vestibules,
grocery store lines, telephones . . .
of those who, without warning, just drop,
no usual interface of days of weeks
lying on a hospital bed, no gradual diminution,
only that abrupt metamorphosis
from the quick to the quickly dead.

Every family knows the story—
Uncle sitting at a kitchen table, chatting
with his wife, the counter fan abuzz,
she rising to turn it off
only, when she returns, to find
Uncle hunched over the table, washed
in sweat, blue. No indicators, no omens:
“He was in perfect health.”
Or that high-school basketball player
who went down like Galileo’s stone
in media res, flat on the court.
Ultimate reversal of fortune,
and if Greek we might say, insight.

But insight into what?
What knowledge can these eerie, sudden
corpses claim? How can they know
that everything they knew was wrong
when they now know nothing at all?
Life was wrong, we want to suggest,
as if a spark between the long oblivion
before and after, the body at rest,
ground zero, that almost holy silence.
And yet who among us would prefer
the prolonged, horrific interface when,
given the grand stretch of eternity,
interface and instant seem identical twins?