Preservations below the Moon
“We belong to the earth.”
That’s the mushrooms talking.
Someone else is sobbing in the shadows,
hiding behind piano fingers.
“I need to go home.”
It ain’t happening, mate.
You drove us into a tree
and all the colors clashed.
Let me tip you over
and see if you can roll up again.
It’s not winter yet.
That explains the rust tones.
Dogs are barking,
but cautiously as if
they too resent the unknown scent
creeping through the night air.
Light the lamp.
Its glare will liberate
your words, baring their teeth,
ready to leap like apes.
“All the red, all the red.”
It pops, no doubt, a clotted vermillion.
Like the red of love,
or blood when it’s spilling.
Mini-interview with Salvatore Difalco
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
SD: I guess the death of my immigrant Sicilian father when I was 12. It tore up my world and tore me up for many years. He lived a hard life and died a hard death and I won’t allow myself to forget or diminish that.
HFR: What are you reading?
SD: I am reading D. Nurkse’s Country of Strangers (New and Selected Poems). Thumbs up. And also Philip Larkin’s High Windows. I like it and I like Larkin, I don’t care what anybody says.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Preservations below the Moon”?
SD: A boneless editor who had lustily rejected a batch of my poems described them as “concussed surrealism,” a designation that rather than dissuade me from writing as I do, encouraged me to stick to my guns and fire away, concussed or not. I guess this is the sort of poem I strive to write.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
SD: I am bouncing between writing poems and prose ejaculations that likely have no place and no right to show their monstrous faces. Nobody wants to publish a book of them, but that’s cool.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
SD: I know I’m getting effing old when I admit a deep longing for a time when people weren’t hunched over handheld devices. Eye contact has become a thing of the past. The human face has been reduced to a blank albeit menacing mask. Talking to people other than family and friends (and sometimes even them) has become an incredibly awkward undertaking. Say the wrong thing and momentary catastrophe results, firebombing, war, extreme violence. So better to say nothing, crane your neck and gaze blankly at the pretty pictures scrolling by on your handheld.
Sicilian Canadian poet and author Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of five books including Black Rabbit & Other Stories.
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Heavy Feather Review 