The Eastie Jolt: Three poems by Thomas DeFreitas

Apostasy of Love

The most unthinkable
Flower that ever will have grown
Is the explicit lilac with its lurid scent,
With its vivid hungering and tremulous lips,
A breath alive, a flesh unknown,
A world springlike and full.

The ripest sweetest fruit
Turned liquid on the swirling tongue
Becomes a wine-drunk whisper tasting loud,
Revives forgotten midnights in the gut
And blackish dreamlike saccharines
Stimulate the tooth.

Two souls, four lungs: each nerve
Breathes fulfillment of its dream
While this unbidden love, the tide's great surge,
Turbulent ecstasy of rapturous urge,
Makes live, in one climactic rhyme,
Epitome of sense.

If all else fails

Write about all the proper themes
Write about bridge-builders and icon-makers
Write about massacres and resolute measures
Write about popular music and cultureslaves
Write about the Book of Common Prayer
Write about the grousings of overpaid first-basemen
Write about formality and decorum
Write about sartorial splendor
Write about religion and discount prophecy
Write about the whited sepulchres
Write about September 16th on Hampden Street
Write about ethics in journalism
Write about the President of the United States
Write about the burning issues of the day

Write about all the wrong things
Write about Silver Lake New Hampshire
Write about the death of American poetry
Write about nihilism and prenatal infanticide
Write about the sparrows 30 minutes before sunrise
Write about Hildegarde of Bingen
Write about an appointment at 2:45 pm
Write about the drunk who met His Eminence
Write about women who make the city heaven
Write about Westminster and Windmill Hill
Write about the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Write about sinners and dense theologians
Write about the mysteries of life
Write about taboos and kinks and addictions

Write about things you don't know about
Write about people and places you haven't met or seen
Write about mediocrities and blithe spirits
Write about the second cup of coffee
Write about Dutch waitresses who pretend to be Irish
Write about serious things like Hollywood marriages
Write about the contemporary scene with detached irony
Write about the French because somebody has to
Write about Saint Monica who prayed for her son
Write about cappuccino at the Kendall Square Cinema
Write about dashed hopes and broken promises
Write about red leaves in late August
Write about variety being the spice of life
Write about a sturdy hammock in suburban shade

And if all else fails be silent
Because silence never makes mistakes

A Shepherd's Calendar

My love is a purple snowflake that's newly tumbled in January, earthward from the æther;

My love is a timorous groundhog that blesses its own shadow in the flinchings of February;

My love is a sun-porch, homey and embracing, blazing with glacial light in the middle of March;

My love is a boon, an unexpected windfall, my true love embodies the spendless treasures of April;

My love is a mint julep, a winning wager, a blue blossom with yellow streaks, a silver sky with tracks of teal, in most adventurous Maytime;

My love is a splendid saint, a candid apparition, a white-robed roisín dubh in the secret places of June;

My love is a forest of fireworks (out-bursting politely : drastically glowing) in the luminous night skies of July;

My love is an unexpected cool spell, a Saint Lawrence autumn, arriving timely in August;

My love is the impatience of scholars, the vehemence of evangelists, the sharp first frost in the suburbs of September;

My love is a scientist (not unlike a scientist), circumambulating the cloistergarth of a ruddy blushing October;

My love is a bastion of withered foliage, a glorious cadence, a crisp epigram, a blind and desperate bluster in November;

And as for December -- well, what of it? Take your bewitching solstices, and your bright red-green eternities. And add a spark-and-a-half of miracle and glory. Plus hope, plus faith. And laughter for good measure.

She's the thirteenth month of the year, with a billion birthdays of grace, every minute, every second, every sleeping millisecond, every lively wakeful thousand dreaming hours.

your name

                                    your name
                                    is a white
                                    rose

                                    is
                                    a bright
                                    sparrow

                                    awakening
                                    the sleeping
                                    leaves

                                    *

                                    your name
                                    is a psalm

                                    is a warm
                                    world

                                    is a dark
                                    star

                                    *

                                    your
                                    name

                                    is coronation
                                    and consolation

                                    *

                                    your name
                                    is a silent
                                    dove

                                    singing canticles
                                    of tumultuous
                                    peace

Heaven

Heaven : Serena, Penelope, Cynthia.

The blue heaven, the wide heaven. The wild heaven, and the heaven of postcards. Penelope's smile, Serena's slippers.

Heaven in the active valley, heaven on the passive mountaintops. Then there was Karen, and the girl that looked like Karen, her sister perhaps. Sixteen parcels of heaven. There was a robin who spoke to Robyn. A spacious heaven, a farmhouse heaven. And Cynthia's baseball cap. And sunlight, and winter, and purple petals, rose-petals, petals from the spotted lily. Heaven strewn likeflower-petals among the magazines.

The frantic precision of commercial heaven. And the voice of beatitude, impinging upon our affairs, restoring prelapsarian innocence. C'est le premier matin du monde, comme unefleur confuse exhalée dans la nuit. The heaven of Gabriel.

Here we have heaven and an accidental psalm. Here we have heaven and October memories. The bumblebees, the lecture-hall, the voice saying "Hey!" The abstract heaven of the fine arts gallery.

The heaven of laughter is a most acceptable heaven. The heaven of tears is amost acceptable heaven.

The heaven of poets with their particolored stanzas, their kinetic rhymes,their unassuming modest amphibrachs! And the heaven of artists with their symphonic colors, composing a heaven, a song, a hinting picture, an opus of heaven.

The heaven of silence and pine-trees. The heaven of starlight. The heaven of Kimberly, Tracy, Aisha, and peaceful names. The heaven of Kobayashi and his dewdrops, his autumn wind. The heaven of Petrarch, of Laura, of the sonnets of centuries past.