Four poems by Sam Silva

WHEN THE POET SEES

These facts appear like magic!
Those abstract birds
you made
with wild paint on a tropical canvass
seem to my failing eyes now
a nocturne
where such colors still keep swirling pure.

Such a painting frames the world above
my desktop
next to shadow and lamp glow

…idea and image fall this way
suffuse with the patterned chaos of life
my bony head
when I lie on the sofa
like a dead
man knowing the things I know

…the living things
with their flutter of wings
…the dips and swirls
of angel movement

disappearing into dreams.
Ah!, wild patterns like a lullaby
which the poet wonders if he hears
and these facts appear like magic
when the poet sees
with the naked eye.

THE COMING DARKNESS AT THE CORE

Birds of the sky!,
we are halfway in your southward migration
from the northern reaches
to the sweltering tropics
fleeing the snow and ice of your passage
and alighting at once
on the trees you all choose.

Lullaby
of imagination
…the mountains and beaches!
…the cliffs and their visage!
…singular world and borderless nation!
…the fire and ice of the minds deep center
lost in a world
which we never lose.

THE DARK BIRDS AND THEIR SONG

A little shack! A little hillock
above the fields
of corn and tobacco
which the flat earth yields
Anguished thoughts
from terror’s lonely hill.
Notions brought
not by the brain
but by the sour stomach and the pill

…in hidden rooms
where mumbling people watch
the traffic through the window
and flickering computer screen
before they go insane
and curl up in a corner
as lonely people will.

The only comfort they may have
are those scavenged works of art
which decorate a peeling wooden wall

in that dilapidated house
which they cling to with a heart
as dark and trembling as the place above the fields
where old crows call…

OUR ISLAND FULL OF ART

Dark expressive etchings
and on the other hand
the wild color
of such paintings of the tropics
as would bring about
our island full of art!

And when you visit there in Winter
I stuff myself comfortably
in a house rigged like a castle on our hill
and watch the cold Carolina brush
go utterly leafless outside

and perhaps just one brief snow
late at night
while I listen to Mahler’s soprano
or soft instrumental jazz

on my computer stereo!