Donato Buccella
By
Wally Swist
Giraffes
When I phoned you yesterday
to placate the inner voice guiding me to just to find out
how you were, you said you pray for me, and although
I didn’t phone to renew a relationship that had lasted
years, but would end every time we tried again to begin,
you said you might consider my leaving the door open,
which now I regret offering, since there actually is
a mountain between us, which I look up at every day.
You live on one side of it and I live on another,
as two giraffes might live on a savannah, dotted with
trees. I have learned, with humility, that I no longer can
feed on the leaves of the tops of the crowns of trees, but
need to bend my long neck, which I carry on my small
body and relatively short legs, and I retrained myself to
consume the leaves on the lower limbs, due to
the strength of the heat of the sun. I understand from
speaking with you that yet again I was pulled into
the undertow of your needing to dominate what
shouldn’t need to be controlled. For someone who
speaks about spirituality as much as you do, apparently
you haven’t fully understood that the ability of releasing
one’s ego is in direct proportion to your being graced
with any amount of divinity. As I am nibbling leaves
on the lower branches, you are still seeking to feed off
desiccated leaves higher up on the crowns. As I browse
tree to tree, I think of you on the other side of the mountain,
unable to open to the light you so frequently talk about,
but, ironically, sometimes even bask in. Undeniably, you
hold to your side of the story: that my anger is the issue,
which is incorrect, and so very self-righteous. If love is
higher consciousness, then we both have not loved
nor have we found a pathway to realize what has been
described as true bliss, both of us only having evolved
to being giraffes, roving the woodlands without ever
satiating our hunger, bowing our great necks in obeisance,
avoiding the wild dogs of our best intentions
by galloping in one direction, or another, but otherwise not
making much of a difference to anyone at all.
Lloyd
The angry voices from the gray ranch
were loud enough to echo throughout
the neighborhood, and I had managed
to extricate myself from the confines
of the house, choosing to sit with
my head in my hands on the curb.
They were at it again—
my stepmother Marcella, who doesn’t
deserve to be immortalized in a poem,
and Fred, my father, whom I would
find out was suffering from Alzheimer’s
on my twenty-first birthday. You could
hear dishes and glasses breaking against
a wall from the street. They had
a special spot in the dining room that
they would choose to throw China
and crystal, where there was a palate
of color from all of the food that
splattered against their target in
the Dada of their rage. Whatever they
accused me of doing, and for what
incremental offense, they threatened
the honor student who wanted to go to
Choate with sending him to Cheshire
Reformatory. What surprised me was
how the sound of them in there traveled
and how clearly you could hear their
every word, the vitriol of their contempt
for each other and life itself seeping into
the balm of an otherwise delightful
early spring evening. This is when
Lloyd came over to me beside the curb,
our neighbor next door, whose garage
was always filled with a collection of
adding machines from his job as a
salesman with National Cash Register,
on which he supported his wife and
four children. Rumor had it that Lloyd
had lost his job and he was suffering
from a breakdown, but he sat down
next to me on the curb and placed one
of his large arms around my shoulders
to console me. He quietly told me he
understood, and that things wouldn’t
always be this way for me, that they
would change for the better, and that
I would be able to leave one day.
His presence filled me as if God, or
one of the angels, had come to buoy
me up from drowning in my own
sorrow; and he sat there with me until
night fell, not saying much, but
making certain to make me feel better,
having offered me from his very
depths the salve of assuagement and
the ointment of consolation,
the fragrance of the lawns blending
with that of the cooling dark macadam.
Porcupine
My Labrador loved Saturday mornings,
knowing that day of the week was the one
I would spend more time with her than
any other, the sliding glass door opened
on a mild day in May, that sweet transom
between spring and summer, when
her woof led me out of the kitchen to see
what held her attention, nose pressed into
the screen, and there the porcupine bristled
in all of its quivering intensity, its quills
flaring from its coat like an arsenal of
spines, its body the size of a piglet
or a small dog. I quickly took hold of
my Labrador’s collar, so she wouldn’t go
right through the bulge she had made in
the mesh, and slid the glassed door closed,
since just beyond the other side of the porch
the rotund animal’s waddle had come
to a halt, and it glared at us from
its pinioned shawl, its flat porcine nose
working to pick up our smell,
its small black eyes glinting with
annoyance and dread, as if we were
the ones intruding on it instead of its
barging through our own existence—
so much so that it barked at us once
before righting its arc of direction, to
continue to trundle past the windowed
apartment in the refurbished barn
and into open meadow to the reach
of the bracken, not before the lance
that its impression left caught in our
collective memories, where the tether
hooks of their shafts could never quite
pry themselves loose from safe recall—
with that one ugly bark precipitating
compassion for the strictures of
the natural beauty of its harrowed life.
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