Issue 7
June 2001
Philip Vassallo
Philip Vassallo's poetry has appeared most recently in Cyber Oasis.com, Decathlon2000.com, LucidMoon.com, OpenSewer.com, and Red Booth Review.com. His essays on education, communication, and the arts have been published in numerous periodicals and websites. Seven of his plays have been produced Off-Off Broadway, and he is a recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship.
All work © Philip Vassallo
ANOTHER REVISION
So many revisions are there to do
even when writing my own thing.
What seems to most as so matter-of-fact
is the awe by which my life swings.
I do it again: my words taking off,
propelled by invisible wings.
And hanging on the edge: a teardrop
about to cascade in a paper spring
not quite causing a splash.
AN APGAR SCORE* OF 10
The baby shocks her parents
into the memory of their birth.With her every change they learn
as much is lost as what is gained.The sky descends for her to walk,
for her to speak the language of God.They try to stop the fleeting world
but dizzy in how she spins it.
* The Apgar score is a rating system (from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest) to determine the relative health of a newborn child's vital signs.
THE PURGATORY TO WISDOM
They speak to her,
if not at each moment
then as close to earth
as she's ever come:
Donne, Keats, Shelley,
the poets centuries dead
whose words she reads aloud
naked as a corpse
on this empty bed,her way, she tells herself,
of keeping the dead alive,
of keeping memory present,
of fixing the past
like reading a certain book
one knows the ending to,but it's beyond that now
for she's read the words
of the poets centuries dead
from the print to the air,
having cremated their books
in the flame of fading
intellect, remembering each
word, each without meaning
but remembered just the same.She's read her way to wisdom
from that first poem till now,
still naked on this empty bed.
PERMEANCE
1.
Humanity's reflecting place:
this prison's vents and concrete walls
all edging on our final space
before becoming shopping malls.2.
Our simulated nuclear reactor:
a power so impregnable,
installed with malfunctioning capacitor,
now scrapped as impractical.
3.
A high tech breath of toxic air:
the systems they did not inspect
now feed what none of us can bear
except the everlasting insect.
4.
The beat of a schematic design:
terminals networked in sterile halls
monitor a radiation tolerance line.
Baby, the acid rain must fall.
QUOTE FROM A NOBEL LAUREATE'S LECTURE
I quote destiny
and the foolishness
of it all,
not just mankind's
rise and fall,
but the call of nature,
from the paramecium
splitting in two-
as we do atoms
(or consider,
if you will,the continental shelf)-
to the bald eagle,
soaring over Rocky Mountains,
sleeping in Pacific waves
on the blowhole of a humpback whale,
(Jonas's? Hm-mmm)
with Newton's apple
in his weary mouth.