To see Carmine’s three other FootHills books, click here.
From the book:
Prologue
Writing Metaphors
A risk taken on the inside
without reckoning the cost,
revealing what is hidden
in the human heart:
a man writing poems,
keeping his sanity
when reality conspires
to diminish him
with illusion;
a man whose skin
is Rousseau-thin;
who trembles
with incurable guilt
when the world intrudes
too much
in its usual ways;
who holds his heart
in his hands,
fearing the breaks
that will surely come
with one misstep
in the watching world;
a man who knows, as he holds,
that it can become
the ordinary, four-chambered,
valved pump-apparatus,
liable to loss;
who says to himself:
“I won’t ask why”;
who goes on to write
Park-Sitting
Well, so I’ve soiled my hands
with life.
But what of it?
I sit here, moist in my beard,
spoiled with aging,
caught in a bourbon mist,
an old man, moldy in the mouth,
sitting with hands in my lap.
It’s not so much that I’m old
or that the world has ruined my face,
scarred it with a net of sins.
Others have risen with the sun
to stride across the day
and then not found their way.
It’s none of this, but—
park-sitting with the trees
on hand, with winter creeping
through the dead, dry grass;
watching a young, young woman
turn her hips—swivel,
her legs flashing in the light
of the late sun, shining.
But what of it?
She sees as she passes,
and I wink
with the lid of my left glazed eye.
But what of it?
I sit. I fondle my hands in my lap,
and I doze,
my eye still winked
as the wind, in an ancient gesture,
catches her skirt
and it rises and falls.
And she is gone,
but I sit, still winking
at the place she had filled.
But what of it?
The wind lifts my beard,
I nod, and I know
that it’s going to snow,
has in fact snowed.
But what of it?
Love and Loss
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