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Clare Woods, Golden Dawn, 2008

Breaking Silence - For My Son
-- by Patricia Fargnoli

The night you were conceived
your father drove up Avon Mountain
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.
I was eighteen and thin then
but the front seat of the 1956 Dodge
seemed cramped and dark,
the new diamond, I hadn't known
how to refuse, trapping flecks of light.
Even then the blackness was thick
as a muck you could swim through.
Your father pushed me down
on the scratchy seat, not roughly
but as if staking a claim,
and his face rose like
a thing-shadowed moon above me.
My legs ached in those peculiar angles,
my head bumped against the door.
I know you want me to say I loved him
but I wanted only to belong—to anyone.
So I let it happen,
the way I let all of it happen—
the marriage, his drinking, the rage.
This is not to say I loved you any less—
only I was young and didn't know yet
we can choose our lives.
It was dark in the car.
Such weight and pressure,
the wet earthy smell of night,
a slickness like glue.
And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching


The One
-- by Fred Johnston

He’s taken for a novelty now,
But he wasn’t always —
Back in the bad days
He ran the place. His word
Was our law. And no harm, either:
The soft welter of him now, you’d
Think he’d never
Been a clever
Man, but he was. He can’t sing
Now, but he could, back then.
Only the young can mock like that,
Urging him on
And his voice gone
He’s a fool to himself, feeling
The young girls’ slim backs
And thinking what was naughty
Forty years ago is naughty now —
I am his son,
I am the one
Who waits while he pisses himself:
I am the one who carries this old Christ
Up the hill to his bed of skulls —
I am the one who rolls the stone over his grave.


The Belltower
-- by Diane di Prima

the weighing is done in autumn
and the sifting
what is to be threshed
is threshed in autumn
what is to be gathered is taken

the wind does not die in autumn
the moon
shifts endlessly thru flying clouds
in autumn the sea is high

& a golden light plays everywhere
making it harder
to go one's way.
all leavetaking is in autumn
where there is leavetaking
it is always autumn
& the sun is a crystal ball
on a golden stand
& the wind
cannont make the spruce scream
loud enough