Leaf
To Jan Hendrix
What is a leaf?
What is a forest?
There is a whole forest
inside a leaf
Between the ribbing
there is light breaching
right left
infinite meanders
laborious millimeters
morning arises
the afternoon draws itself
in its delicate hinges
in its green arteries
Is it a leaf?
Nothing more?
Where does it begin, in the branch
pinned to the tree
ribboned on the trunk
linked to the earth
its roots tightened in the dark?
Or does it begin
millions of years ago,
the same concentric, circular leaf,
that all of us are, the ribbing,
the green breathing at us,
the earth that we are
we were and we will be?
Shadow Line
I want to be alone
while the deepness and the silence last.
Álvaro de Campos
Because I don’t want to be no one
somehow I’m everyone.
My figure dilutes
in the fuzzy edges
of a city that goes on
like rolling hills.
Perhaps I was much more than I thought
and much less than I felt;
never more inappropriate,
now I am a bonfire of words
where fiction and truth are already the same,
and my shadow line
spills out
in each verse’s light.
Sky Villages
“As above is below”:
so I looked one night,
upon the open field,
upon the mountains,
far away
from the cities that never are
completely dark,
the lights of a village
like stars
in the middle of the earth:
a sky leveled to the ground.
The stars up high
became villages of infinite light,
so far away from my hands
like the streets silhouetted
in the distance,
but the two of them the same:
the starry streets
a mirror of the terrestrial ones,
the two of them glowing,
together,
each night.
The Last Sunday
To Toni Deltoro,
who died on Sunday.
Some Sundays
the thought sleeps
like the leaves on the limbs
of winter.
Minutes look like
telegrams that someone dictates
in a time
where telegrams don’t even exist.
Perhaps all of the Sundays
come from childhood.
Each day brings us closer
to the Sunday
that will arrive wrapped
in cotton, anesthesia
and children’s playgrounds
where we will dance
our last round.
Translated by Arthur Gatti and Roberto Mendoza Ayala
Poems from Moonstruck/Lunática (New York: Darklight Publishing, 2023)
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Photo: Hannah Domsic, Unsplash.
After studying poetics with poets Milton Kessler and Stephen Stepanchev, and carrying on correspondence with Robert Bly, Arthur Gatti graduated Queens College with a minor in poetry and a few honors, notably the 1965 CUNY-wide Dwight Durling Award for a manuscript of poetry. He was a co-founder of Queens College SDS, collaborator with the late Mario Savio of Free Speech Movement fame, and co-community-organizer in Newark, New Jersey, with the recently deceased Tom Hayden, of Chicago Eight fame. Political involvements eventually led him to journalism. He published hundreds of articles and columns and two books, wrote staged downtown comedy shows and sold a screenplay to the Hollywood powerhouse, New Line Cinema. He’s won various writing awards and has been published in The New Mexico Quarterly, America Sings, The East Village Other, PiF, The New York Hangover, And Then, Image9, Allegro, Riverside Library Poets Anthologies, 2015 and 2016, Jefferson Market Library Poets Anthology 2017, The New York Times “Metropolitan Diary”, and the international anthology From Neza York to New York. In 2015, he published a book of poems he wrote about what he sees as the sister nation of the United States, called Mexico—Dust in My Blood. Songs of Mute Eagles / Canto de águilas mudas (New York, 2017), which brings together his poetic work from recent decades, is his second book of poetry. Since 2016, he has translated more than twenty-five poetry titles for Darklight Publishing.
