INTRODUCING THE FOREST TO VIVALDI
Ignore the crows, their rude calls from the balcony
of trees. This concert piped through speakers
isn't meant for them but you: dulcet chorus of vireos,
cardinals, wrens, doves, whose daily rhapsody
goes unapplauded. Allow yourselves a brief
intermission and settle into plush evergreen.
Listen to the strings and flutes, how they seem
to imitate you in their fluttering grief
and patient beseeching. But how can
we match a music of constant hunger and quick
relief, your allegro heartbeat, life a short, lit wick?
If this serenade can offer any lesson,
it will after the last note, when silence swells
your throats with its hum and seeps
into folded wings like the moment before sleep.
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WORDS TO UNPIN YOURSELF FROM THE WALL
You want to be somewhere else, out of
the three-hour lecture, the marathon reading,
out of your pinned skin, inside
the wild commotion of small birds hidden
within a massive tree that seems to swell and vibrate.
To be inside one feathered throat pulsing and the vortex
of autumn leaves pulling the last light to itself.
Tell them you must go, then speak no more. Risk all
for the last leaf and the other-worldly calls at liftoff.
Feel the magnetic imperative of that high,
black string drawn across continents. Stay
until you can't see sky or the up-turned face
of the stranger who's joined you,
and it's the wind that has the last word,
blowing sharp leaves at your lips--
such rough, red kisses.
_______________________________________________________
GIRAFFES, ONCE DISMISSED AS MUTE
speak in a frequency
too low for us to hear,
conversing in their own
music of the spheres--
just as the stripped trees,
comatose we think,
might be humming
sprightly tunes to one another
on a cracked-ice night
such as this as we lie trussed
in blankets, awake
to the huffing of snow,
syncopation
of winter-weary hearts.
__________________________________________________
Copyright ©2012 by Maria Terrone. All rights, including electronic, reserved by the author.
three Eco-poems by
Maria TerroNE : INTRODUCING THE FOREST TO VIVALDI ;
WORDS TO UNPIN YOURSELF FROM THE WALL ;
GIRAFFES, ONCE DISMISSED AS MUTE
Maria Terrone is the author of two poetry collections: A Secret Room in Fall, co-winner of the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and The Bodies We Were Loaned, (Word Works, 2002) plus a chapbook, American Gothic, Take 2. Her work has appeared in various anthologies including The Heart of Autumn (Beacon Press), The Milk of Almonds (The Feminist Press) and Sweet Lemons; Writings with a Sicilian Accent (Legas, 2004). Maria's poems have been published in such magazines as Poetry, The Hudson Review, Crab Orchard Review, Margie, Rhino, Rattapallax, Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review and Poetry International. Winner of various poetry prizes, Maria Terrone is a lifelong New Yorker and former assistant Vice President for Communications at Queens College of the City University of New York. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her husband, Bill, a physics teacher. Visit her at www.mariaterrone.com/