Five poems by Sam Silva

MUSICAL STILL LIFE WITH COMPUTER

Guitar serenade
…the plucked harp of my soul
lingers as well
in the cave I made
of my heart with its hole

echoing through computer wires
with their flickering lights
like electric fires.

WHAT SAY YOU COUNTRY BOY?

Bland things now! Bland and dull and easy!
The painless ardor of a mind entombed
by cigarettes and old fashioned cough syrup
…the bottle and the butt
suckled and consumed
to distinctions made in circular smoke
and wandering thoughts
whose narration comes to dip and drift
in summers long ago
and more recently in Winter

…friends and lovers! Miracles
and tragic loss!
now even as the steam exhales
and death trains move away from here,

The child released his future
and a vagrant began his wanderings
down paths as different
and decayed

as were the ways
of such an age as this.

WHAT A THING LIKE WINTER SUGGESTS

Like a cat huddled
among the cold weather briars
…four even paws
and a ball of fur
shaken ruffled by wind

I, in the quiet nuance of my words
in this Southern U.S. house in a field
full of winter birds
have muddled and shrunk
in a frigid place

where at night
with its stars and its bars
and its dim gas fires
…why, nights like this cause
the blankets to be peeled
where no one sinned
and yet, sin we did on this lonely planet
in outer space!

AMONG THE DEAD THINGS WHICH WE DOUBT

Among the dead things which we doubt
religions of the dead devour
the kiss of life
with their bleak flower

…that old gray heaven like a choir
of static voices
rasping out
the essence of all dryness
…like a throat on fire
which longs to whisper
…not to shout!

AROUND THE CANDLE AT MIDNIGHT

My ache for you is existential
…your pores breathe life in a painting
and the days are getting furtive and hungry
against the loud bebop of my computer streaming
or the cool jazz grown to a list of lazy facts
parallel to this Carolina winter outside.

Cocoons envelop my passion!
And a cold and spiteful world surrounds
…you paint for me
like our years of lovemaking
an image both crisp and still and perfect
and yet so serenely celebrant
in laughing the language of light

made of body
and spirit
framed and held up.