Lenny DellaRocca

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The Drowning of Filipo Di Lernia

That guy out there singing in the trees looks  
like my grandfather 
as a young man, 
who used to sing  
in a language 
I didn’t understand 
though I know 
it had something 
to do with wine 
and women 
with olive skin. 
Sparrows drop 
in to listen,  
or maybe they’re 
teaching him 
to moonshine 
the night air  
like Caruso, 
with old songs about frightened men who have come 
to last days. 
Maybe they’re not  
on fire, the birds, 
though there’s smoke 
coming off 
their little tongues, 
which is to say 
there is wisdom 
in their lives. 
It washes a man 
when he’s close  
to the edge. 
Bewilders him 
so he can’t know 
the difference between 
bathing and drowning. 
Life after all is just 
singing while water dribbles over the lip of a tub.

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That Wicked Yearning 

After they come, the cleaners, the sweepers of my train, after  
time’s Clorox smile has 
flashed 
away the last speck of family,  
after all my friends are dead,  
and the circus 
has packed up 
the brainy elephants, after 
the last sleepy lions  
are caged, 
loaded onto starry  
boxcars to Brigadoon, 
and the huge yellow tents 
have been flattened out 
on legendary ground, slick puddles, 
what will be left?  
Silly word tricks? Halloween fire-prayers? Careful, immaculate 
faults and a jumping goat? 
No. 
A filament of a starboy  
with a caveman’s  
friendship with the world, 
the hot friendship 
of a wretch, a wolf’s 
lingering friendship, 
her bloody howling 
and howling 
along fading tracks. 
And me. Waiting, a lonely  
lantern, waiting 
for saints and lovers 
to save me 
from that train with its red caboose, its wild animals, its stars. 

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This Female Life (A Cento) 

As she read to me, her mouth began to curve down 
like the sap inside a memory of apples. 
She dove to a deep place 
on the bottom of the black ocean. 
Dear God, my friend needs light. 
Perhaps she dreams 
they are swimming. 
Later, she spoke 
of Portuguese cork trees. 
Weak with her potions 
and perfumes, 
I laid in bed last night 
thinking about a woman 
I don’t even know, 
a woman counting  
heartbeats. The Blessed  
Virgin appears 
through a water stain 
on an adobe wall. 
The stiff dandelion opens its parasol. How else could 
the prophets have made prophecy. 
The storm moves like 
the god the ancients knew 
it was, the exact latitude 
where color  
smudges the sky. 
This female life is such  
a secret vernacular, 
far away peals 
the radiating bell of a church. 
Enter, our exhausted heroine… 
I’ve never met the woman 
across the lake. 
When I visit her 
everything seems so broken, 
the world is a dreamless  
slumber party. There is no morphine. 
Oh, the darkness of it all, 
we could hear her heartbeat ricochet wildly inside it. 

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Sources:
“Salome” Judith Berke
“The Apple Trees” Mike Hettich
“The Widow” Denise Duhamel
“A Prayer for Maria Before Her final Radiation Treatment” Catherine Esposito Prescott
“Hurricane Sandy” Elisa Albo
“For Marlene, Who Asked Why I Switched Teams ”  Caridad Moro-Gronlier
“history lessons from my father” Geoffrey Philp
“My Pillow, A Stone” Judy Ireland
“A Note on Past and Present as Continuum” Barbra Nightingale
“Virgin State” Susannah W. Simpson
“Elegy” Perter Hargitai
“Visions, Signs and Bagatelles” George Wallace
“Glass Mountain”. Meryl Stratford
“The Sorrow of the Body” Deborah Denicola
“Flash” Maureen Seaton
“The Road Gang is served Supper at a Country Inn” Steve Kronen
“The Lost World Hollywood Pitch”  Michael Mackin’ O’Mara
“A Perfect life” Zan Gay
“The Hope of Rising Unexpectedly” Jesse Millner
“Dying in Two Rooms” Nicole Tallman
“When I Was Straight” Julie Marie Wade
“The Opposite of Mecca” Jen Karetnick

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Banner Art:
© James G. Howes, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train in Safety Harbor, Florida, 1992, Wikimedia Commons