FRAMED
Ten Poems by Leonardo Dellarocca

All that settles into matter only matters for an afternoon,
the moment one look discovers itself among
the thoughtless rain of life.
That moment to moment illusion of cause and effect
where the mind frames everything in its own abyss,
where contemplation is the only way out.
Before the physical world took hold, life knew its
face from the inside. And now with the imposed
inaccuracies of connectedness, it submits to
its own abstraction based on the echo of what it was
before it took a breath. Sometimes I yearn for the floorboards
of another house on which I walked without the
gravitational pull of this world.
Even my pulse remembers the dreamlike quality
of that certain hour in which the light was holy.
It still comes on blue afternoons of summer when something
seems to touch me like a star tugs on the blackness around it.
I see it in the eyes of some women who spend
entire days by themselves without saying a word. And
that does more for the wakefulness of a body than
a good violin or a black and white photograph
of a nude lost in its slumbering altitude,
pining for a red burst of roses in the gray ethereal
realm of its mortal desire. I flip through weeks of
magazines like that, quiet and unable to find the exact
words that tell the story of my life in terms of how silent
things really are, and the abandoned years in which I hoped
too much. But knowing I can never completely burn
anything so bad as to render it useless is the one unanticipated
freedom age has brought me.
All the broken things my hands lay claim to
are only smaller versions of themselves and as time
manifests itself in a changing dream, they grow whole again
in the vacant tomorrow of a new god
whose one true instinct is to heal.