Paul Vangelisti                      
    from La vita semplice
Emilio Mazzoli Editore, Modena 2009
          From Two
Talisman House, Greenfield (MA) 2010
         
                         
    Vampire
For Josephine & Nicholas Vangelisti
  Zebra
For Amina & Amiri Baraka
      Alabaster   Dado   Exedra  
                           
Vangelisti, La vita semplice   Very much might depend on nothing at all, says my vampire, which is to say, never, when you’re strange, deploy your father’s tintinnabulations.
Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, says I, or any few democrats sassy as can be in their deprivation.
Nor neglect the sound of theology, says my vampire, only to recall just about anything eversore like vinegaroon and vixen, vicuna, veery and vacilla whose vegetable love may grow vague as most privilegi concerned for the cost of literature.
Moreover, says I, abjectly other.
Or adept at this, says my vampire, always blaming Western civilization when there is yet to civilize the west.
A way you have of comforting another, says I, while the pronoun changes.
Listen, she says, with that livid honey of a smile, bivalves and validation, value and squid (a lovely Latin thing to eat), all show a negative adagio or not, given the climate. In short, says my vampire, I’ve got your simple life vanishing, and you?
  My zebra has seen another generation of pseudonyms thumb that old serpentin the name of progressor the next Madonna. Zesty a place as any, he admits, to poke a golden ring or pistol.
Wouldn’t be from out of town? says I.
No, my zebra says, I’m a stranger here myself, lazy enough to memorize the streets, aspirin and feminine, and even those with too many commas, whose angels wouldn’t mind a steeple or two to straighten up or fly right, until they were wings enough to squawk and blind misery, historical or not.
So how, says I, beat the apparatus of impossibile tenderness and jazz, the dead notwithstanding?
Your sentences could be more consistent, says my zebra, finishing off a zero, or tolerant of zealous voices. Else there's always guilt and piety to once again make us realize there are millions and millions of ordinary people, adds my zebra, with a listening ear or helping hand, reaping the odds on the simple life.
  Vangelisti, Two   Almost any thing between joy and survival,
both anxiously here to needle a tragic bearing,
comfortable besides with things, speechless things face up or
down, commonly lavender or sometimes blue with that
everyday delirium born from the briefest pleasure.
Forgetting even who listened hard when it came time to sleep
given forewarning that there is a presence in the house,
how gone or faded is that kiss, that pale inventory
in hand of broken promises, moral arrogance
jaded in time to hold your breath, count the steps of a
kinder justice than the memory of faces in the dark.
Little known of navigating nostalgia, passages
mostly languishing in a forest of tender speechlessness,
now more ready or wounded, cruel, unforgiving
or not easily admitting loss as a stable element,
past or present, whispered hallways, tremors, shortness of breath,
questions put in ways to guarantee embarrassment,
readymade quarrels if not mutual insincerity,
somewhere right next to patience, diligence, even caring.
That small door far back in the ceiling of the closet
usually there after more than a half-century of neglect.
Various unfulfilled desires exposed in remodeling
without vain hope beyond profit, a lump, a spasm in the night,
xeric within that certain daze, that drowsy vexation.
Yes, xeric, that mauve citizen of ritual and doubt,
zealous you find that inch of satisfaction in contriving.

[A dense, translucent, white or tinted fine-grained gypsum.]
  Anything but technique — take your fireman and his fine ignorance
by any sleeve you must. O the goddamned something or others
capitulating below in the margins, O the athletic
dowagers copulating in the eaves, leave the temporary
enough doom or dancing to bury your heart in lavender
far-off even from the mumbling waves. The rest of us shadow
green furious ideas so colorless in the empty
house, given the steps, the graceful echo of who went there, who
in here has risen like Lazarus on 50 mg. a day.
Just intimating spring’s mortality feels older, newer than
keeping judiciously to oneself the approach now taken,
lingering keen as a schoolboy on a dare, the blasé scholar
merely leaving a note to himself always and forever.
Not more likely what but where we hear is a method for
obliging notions stumbled upon, forgotten, dowsed in a
pert or priapic locus of opinion, entrapped one by one
by questions parenthetically raised in doubt or somehow
required quite guiltily of those who often care to know.
"So Rare" seemed less a question than a loss of ideas. O
Thomas-me-not on the lone prairie took a genuflection
undoubtedly to be wished of nobody but a tail
victorious, unless noticed. Shadows come and go sometimes
when very little wanted. The house is following you
exacting, windy, shimmering along your bones, the house is
yawning extra wide, empty as the sky — your sullen heart
zealous yet extraordinarily benign as a sudden, drowsy claw.

[The section of a pedestal between the base and the crown.]
  Again, as before the hot spell, spring claims these dazzling,
breezy afternoons, as if only the old love, the killing,
courting blind forgiveness, figure new ways to savage thought.
Do call your friend and tell him how much sparser with age,
even despite a rare tropic adoration, benumbs the waves.
Failing every try at lemons or heartbreak in the fog,
gangling fathers who never sang, real in their imagined shame,
heart-sore, going without to further worry, exemplary
in how they perplexed us from the house, the deep blue quiet
jingling in the night, overhead a single engine plane
keening just enough to dream. On a crowded radio dial
lap kindly what you can beyond the survival life
mimics lingering in the shadows. Nobody but
nobody, most of all who can sing his annoying heart
out nigh everyday, approaching anything but humble.
Poor or rich the invisible crowns that fatal kiss
quite properly with moon glow, lies, squirrels or anything
rightly questionable enough to lead a better life. O
Susannah, right here right now, are the old obsessive enough
to simmer and watch your slow reconciliation, this
unusually tender investigation into profit and loss?
Very unlikely taking stock of that which has been
without verifying how many faces and souls remained
x-rayed with their derbies, fedoras, even children's messy heads
yo-yoing expertly under their hands. Say cheese while we
zero, yes, zero in on your sentiment notwithstanding.

[A portico with a curved continuous bench where discussions were held.]

 
   
DIALOGUE