The Littlest Amen
in serendipity, with Tanya
That’s a “winter” wind (hah), and that sky
flutes ashen shadow, dissonance
like glissando, soft and hushing
a true cold’s name: Lake Effect. Hoar
Frost. Black Ice. Because it won’t snow,
not here, this Old South in my beyond midlife
where foraging birds syncopate all these little
cantata clouds scoring, I dunno, caesura,
and the wind sounds off more as a boastful
cadenza, grace notes winged with a reverence of
such warmth, everywhere; great beauty,
beauty everywhere; everywhere faith. Hope. Still
I just want to go home. My home.
Yeah, yeah, I rose-color memories, and they thrill
sanguinity through me,
my lachrymose me, the sentimental
sap of me, all gooey. Except that’s, of course,
a cardinal, and there, those’re starling, that
a Carolina wren, none your basic
messenger bird, yet who with their trill deliver me
the littlest amen, a something like a sigh.
Ray Marsocci presently lives between place and work, continuing to construct book manuscripts while getting paid to perform behavioural-health jobs, living where he grew up, in Rhode Island, while trying move back to where he feels is his home, Vermont. His work has appeared in such places as Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, and La Fusta, as well as in the online zines The Smoking Poet and Carcinogenic Poetry.