THE SANCTITY OF SILENCE

I must confess.
I talk to memories
and animals
and faded pictures
of memories
and animals.

I also profess
that I am relieved
that my conversations
are not protracted
and are one-sided only.

I don't hear voices,
unless it is the sound
of my own voice,
which is music to me
when the sound
of silence
mimics the ubiquitous ache
of a small pebble
in my shoe.

I don't feel unbalanced
because I initiate
the exchange.
It is not as if
I have an alien device
welded to my ear
that decrees,
by a Pavlovian frequency,
that I salivate
on demand
to something other
than my own cuisine.

I don't have a beeper
or a beeper
that beeps my beeper,
nor a phone
that phones my phone
or induces withdrawals
when we are estranged.

I am not
goose-bumped
to orgasm
by titillating sounds
from anything
that can't
share a good
bottle of wine
with me.

I only raise
the intensity
of my voice,
Pavarotti style,
in the shower,
never in a church
or a confessional,
or a train
or a plane.

Never in a restaurant
or a funeral home,
a bank
or a movie theatre,
or in a supermarket
to phone home
to discuss food groups
or preferences.

If I am important,
I am important
with or without
my phone.
In fact,
I was important
before I met
my phone,
at least
to my baby.

She loved me
even when I whispered
or had nothing to say.
She would love me now,
despite my idiosyncratic
transgressions.

Love,
like life,
seems to grow best
when it slows down
to a trickle,
like reluctant droplets
of honey
cascading from a spoon.

Only then
can one enjoy
the perfection
of unvarnished stillness
and the sanctity
of silence.

© JOHN PISCATELLA

THE BLUSH OF A ROSE

I moved in your atmosphere.
You moved in mine.
Together or alone,
we merged
from petal to flower,
in the depth of a single heart,
to the heart of a single rose.

We made our own circle,
from friend to lover
in our sweet youth,
from lover to best friend
in the measureless hours
of forever.

We were like
expanding stars
in cosmic time
that light the night
and flow like rivers,
not only into shadow and space,
but into each other.

I can't hold your hand
or touch your smile,
but I can visit you
in my poetry or prose,
or in the blush of a rose
in the quiet beauty
of our garden.

Love never vanishes.
Love worth loving
is worth loving
for always.

© JOHN PISCATELLA

A JOYFUL MAN

What I have lived
I unlive this day,
except in my heart
and my poems,
and in the gardens
left behind
that carry me to you.

These are not petrified gardens
of melancholic monuments.
They are living testaments
to a life well lived.
They are an ongoing tribute
to a lifetime of offerings
in place of acquisitions;
of friendship without motive.

Often, I confess confusion,
but never with this irrefutable truth:
From the day I met you,
until the day when I become
a shadow and a dream,
I have never been,
nor will be,
abandoned by joy.

Joy often hides
behind ephemeral clouds,
or occasionally flips upside-down,
or even whirls,
in a spiritual journey,
like whirling dervishes.

But what it never does,
even in spells of loneliness,
is leave me.
Joy is always with me.
It will always be
because you were here.

You are in my heart
and in my poems.
You live in my center,
as both the girl
and the woman
of my story.

I know this,
I never tire of dreaming
or writing about you.
I never tire of being
a joyful man.

© JOHN PISCATELLA

YOU ARE ORCHID

More than beguiling
are your orchids,
as they slothfully awaken
from the loving silence
of a kindly California winter
to greet me
in the half-light
of a snappy
February morning.

Morning and our garden
have merged
to come of age;
the cycle of living
naturally transparent
in this corner
that was once home
to your footprints.

Time stands still
at the moment of separation
between night and dawn.
Your orchids,
which occupy the same space
as they did one year past
when they bloomed
only for you,
now blossom
in a different dimension,
somewhere beyond myself
and the shifting tendrils
of illusion.

I water them once a week
and feed them once a month,
as you did
in the graceful shadows
of distant yesterdays.
I have conversations with them,
much like I do with Woodrow,
our whiskered counterpart,
and they answer me
with their efflorescense
of beauty
that have more meaning
than lost poems.

You are orchid.
While you sleep
orchids bloom.
You are one
with the morning;
every garden
I have ever known.

Yesterday's spikes
were suspended
in quiet anticipation.

Today's buds
are in a perpetual state
of boundless freedom,
open to the beauty
that is in all of us,
and the ramdomness
of destiny.

© JOHN PISCATELLA

YESTERDAY'S ROSE

To some,
my poems are songs of sorrow
that can make dreams weep.

To others,
they are moonbeams of hope,
that not only shine
on the sanctity of breath
and the silence of death,
but on the importance
of the space
that comes in between.

For me,
they are the children
that we never had.
The flowers that made
a garden between us.
The treasure-house of dances
that come from her song.
The music of her name
that I can touch
with a thought or a smile.
The vivid colors
of the emotional palette,
deep-seated in my heart,
that echoes the rainbow
that wraps itself
around her soul.

They are the conversations
that flowed seamlessly,
Cross-word puzzles
and wine at 5:00 PM.
The sound
of the night rain
on the skylight,
The refrain of Woodrow
purring with pleasure
on the lap
of his most devoted admirer.

As long as I write,
she endures,
as do I,
and her memory
will never be erased.

As long as she is a dream
where forever remains,
not only on pen and paper,
but in the hearts
of those of us
who loved her,
she will never become
yesterday's rose.

© JOHN PISCATELLA

A JOURNEY FOR JOHN BOY

When I am alone,
the hours are larger,
but not as large as
when I can't sleep or dream
in the protracted hours
before dawn.

Behind closed eyelids,
I see lights,
visible like stars,
that sparkle and wane
like the sun and the fireworks
across the bay.

I think of things
that might have been
but never were,
and sculpt reflections
of places and spaces
that vanished and were forgotten
but now seem unforgettable.

I saw Joe DiMaggio in Yankee Stadium,
with my Dad and my brother Joe,
play in his last season of baseball,
with a rookie named Mickey Mantle
at his side.

Across town at the Polo Grounds,
on another day from another train,
we saw a young Willie Mays
bedazzle, with his sheer athleticism,
fans of all colors and persuasions.

Four years later I felt the same surge
when I hit a home run
in the Little League All Star game.
I can still hear the cheers
and feel my parents' pride,
as I rounded the bases.


Manny, at his deli,
smiling and laughing,
as he fixed me a pastami sandwich
with a half-sour pickle,
as I stared at the numbers
etched in his arm.

I see everything and nothing
when I can't sleep or dream.

My nine year old friend
and next door neighbor Billy,
who fell from a motor boat
and drowned in a Connecticut lake,
and now lay,
dressed in a uncharacteristic suit,
in a satin-lined casket
never intended for anyone his age.

The first polio vaccine,
in the shape of bullion cubes,
that I ingested, like jell-o,
because Jonas Salk
found the cure.

My first kiss.

Whiffle ball in my back yard
with my best friend George.

Playing catch with my brother,
before girls changed
the strike zone forever.

I see everything and nothing
when I can't sleep or dream.

The sunken faces
of the fifty year old indentured farm workers
from Jamaica and Puerto Rico
who I picked tobacco with
for .75 cents and hour
when I was 14 years old.

Walter Cronkite and Eric Severide,
when we had real reporters
and real news,
long before
it became unfair and unbalanced.

Rocky Marciano
when he knocked out Joe Lewis
and Cassius Clay
before he was transformed,
like a butterfly,
into Mohammad Ali.

The sickly stench, still in my nostrils,
of the convalescent home
that we visited
every Sunday for two years,
to see my grandmother.
The sound of my grandfather's last breath,
as I stood with my family
by his hospital bed,
when I was 16 years old.

I see everything and nothing
when I can't sleep or dream:

Cheerleaders at my soccer games,
chanting lyrics worthy of a Stephen Sondheim musical:
"what a fella- Piscatella, go John-go.

A young black man
in downtown Hartford Connecticut,
violently draped over the side of a car,
abused and harassed by two policemen,
because he was the wrong color
at the wrong place in time.
The race riots in the north end of Hartford.

The sadness in my mother's eyes
the days that President Kennedy
and then his brother Bobbie
got assassinated on national television.

The golden oratory by,
and the inevitable eulogies for,
Martin Luther King.

I see everything and nothing
when I can't sleep or dream.

Fort Campbell
after enlisting in the Army Reserves for six years.
The plane ride to Kentucky
in the middle of August,
because Canada was too cold
and South East Asia was too hot.

The bus ride, three months later,
to Fort Sill, Oklahoma,
the day of my brother's wedding.
My first , and only, sighting of an armadillo.
My first, and only, granade launcher,
strapped to my shoulder,
like a bad rotator cuff.

The pain I felt
when my fiancee and I changed course.
San Francisco
where I searched
in vain for myself.

Connecticut
where my search ended
at age twenty -four,
when a twenty-one year old girl
named Florine
in a mini skirt
designed by God,
walked by my desk
and into my heart forever.

Oh what a Journey
for John Boy.

A name unsuited to my years,
but affectionately given to me
by my Babe
the day my journey officially began.
The mere sound of it,
even from my own voice,
makes me alive
between paragraphs.

I heard those words
every time she walked through the door.
They were part of a package
that came with a smile and a hug,
and love,
honed to a fineness
that had more meanings
than an orchid or a rose.

I have crossed the universal seas
at both ends of the same day.
Now I am my memory.
Now I sleep.
Now I dream.

Oh what a Journey
for John Boy.


© JOHN PISCATELLA