Three poems
The Little Red Wagon
hoc est corpus meum
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
– William Carlos Williams
My soul’s own Radio Flyer sags with age,
chipped and patched, it’s carried me along
from year to year across the bumpy stage
of earth’s uncertain highways, distance wrung
from wheels of no Merkabah chariot,
no desert tabernacle, earthly bung
of heaven’s influenza, no tidal knot
of singularity, no laddered rise
of Jacob’s dream, vehicular gavotte,
St Francis’ Brother Ass[1] in steel devise.
Just a means of getting here to there?
Of negotiating time’s and space’s lie
that spreads a treacherous floor, so hard to square
with all that springs from deeply delved desire?
The steep descent from etheric repair
to realised intention trips the wire
of fortune’s booby traps laid cunningly
beneath the enfilade of stellar fire,
arrayed athwart our paths, necessity
made visible in zodiac display –
marquee emblazoned over tangled destinies.
But my red carriage rolls its trundling way
beneath the glare of that auroral show,
its flakes of rust conceding time’s betray,
the toll imposed on Adam’s clay in slow
extraction of deep veins of anthracite
laid down when Death was young – his undertow
had barely just begun its work on site,
to grind the gears and squeal their tuneless whine,
to draw the shades that linger past this light.
However worse for wear, this wagon’s mine.
So much depends upon our fates conjoined,
as we rattle down this winding serpentine.
[1] St Francis of Assisi referred to his own body as ‘Brother Ass’, an affectionate acknowledgement of its slow, sturdy and stubborn utility to the spirit’s higher agenda.
Child of Adam
Dante in Low-Earth Orbit
I was born in free-fall. Liberty
subsisted in my power to consume
the weightless, substanceless commodities
that followed like a cloud, a glittering spume,
ejecta of my exit through the gates
that closed on paradise once I’d been flung
to tumble down the slopes of times and fates
and off true being’s edge, where I’ve since hung,
head cauled by this debris, an awkward pall
of orbital particulates that obscure
my view of purgatory’s mountain wall,
where I must find some purchase for my cure.
A common ill: mortality’s attaint
and hollow cheeks – consumption’s long complaint.
Post Mortem
Once I have sped, how shall I then express
my changed condition, how find words to tell
what scenes accommodate my soul’s recess?
Old words, congealed of air and blood that wells,
might simply settle sodden to the floor,
too weighted still with clay and Adam’s fells
to rap a table or stir a creaking door.
All clocks disarmed, what aspect, mood or tense
could flick my verbs with morphologic spoor
once I have stowed my metamorphic tents
and stepped unveiled beneath the heavens’ crease,
as sky breaks blue and morning dews condense,
unheralded in drops on grass and fleece
to lens in small the rising sun’s release?
Robert DiNapoli is a medievalist, poet and translator whose latest book of poems, The Gnostic Hotel, was published by Littlefox Press in 2021.