Table of Contents

Frank Paino

Cosmology
(for my mother)

Once you were a star, so the scientists say--
as were we all, though tonight I only want 
to consider you—a  former orb of light &

flame & great draughts of luminous gas
consumed & all consuming.  A sphere
that winked its story across the almost

interminable, airless dark to be read by
those who came before as a hundred tales
of earthly genesis.  Life from light. 

Let’s say that star, your star,
went supernova & you came to settle
here, on this watery planet, nothing more

than a speck of dust which,
for the sake of this poem’s deduction,
was swallowed in a glass of wine shared
 
by your parents years before they became 
your parents, leaving you a thing divided.
Half father.  Half mother.  The exact riddle

that eventually solved to you.
Born.  Named.  You grew & later gave birth
to other stars incarnate, before your own light

began to dampen:  faltering heart, breath-
starved flesh & bone the doctors began to cut
like spent blossoms—a wedge of calf gone

black, one toe…another, & next would have
come the spreading metatarsal wound.  Instead,
one winter evening, you left as softly

as you’d come.  What remained in that narrow
bed with the silver rails was not you.  Only
the husk of a star, its bright wick extinguished.

What they slid in to the retort’s brick gape
also was not you.  That quiet, uncomplaining
shape could not hear the serpent-hiss of gas,

or the muffled gasp of ignition, everything
charred, I’m certain, in an instant…
the sweater we chose with the brilliant yellow

smiling face you’d ironed on, & the simple
brown pants with their tired, elastic waist.
Forgive us.  We forgot your shoes.

Though you could fly, of course, & had no
need of shoes.  Nor of the body itself
which we gave back to the vault of heaven

in a baptism of fire, a rush of cinders
that climbed the stack & glowed a moment.
A fistful of stars against the darkening sky.

Candlemas, 1933
(The Papin Sisters)

Now that we have sluiced the blood
from our bodies…now that we have put away

the hammer and kitchen knife,
set the pewter vase back on its tapered pedestal,

come lie beside me in this darkness
that gathered around the burnt glass fuse and

filled these sterile rooms, first with evening’s
half-light, and now with black the colour of

our maidservant clothes.
In a handful of hours the vendors will

push their carts along the cobblestones.
Monsignor shall bless the tallow and wicks

that will illuminate the coming year.
He will pray to the Virgin who once more enters

the Temple, rendered pure by forty days
of solitude and no touch from Joseph’s hand.

Lea, in another life I was your husband
and you were the girl who drove me to my knees.

How odd is Fate to send me back your sister--
the one who waited seven years for you to grow round

beneath Mother’s tattered gowns.
And now we have labored that same measure

under this slate and copper roof.
You on your hands and knees before the silk hems

of that simpering brat, your beautiful mouth
stitched with pins and winking silver needles, 

while I stooped over gas jets, the stench of
fish and onions in my nostrils.  And everywhere

the polished silver bells to summon us
from each other…a bejeweled finger stabbed here

or there to spare them from having to speak
so much as a syllable to their mute handmaids,

the two of us supposed to smile as if we might 
pray each day to kiss the soles of their sleek

Parisian  boots.  Tonight, when your iron
scorched its shadow across

Mademoiselle’s favourite blouse and the 
house fell to its sunset gold 

after a shower of sparks at the wall-plate,
we knew without having to say a word

there would be nothing left to do
but what we had to do.  They would have

broken you with kicks and curses and
the strap that hangs behind the pantry door,

sent us into savage streets with no
letter in hand, the coins we’ve earned

locked fast within their cellar safe.
Lea, I could never let them touch you again.

You are safe now, my Precious One.
There is nothing between us but our own

scrubbed flesh.  Let me hold you one more time 
inside the narrow space of this attic bed.

Let me swallow you like salvation.
Soon enough the world will rush around us

like so much water from a cleaning pail.
Soon enough they will understand what we have

always known—behind those lovely, painted faces,
there was nothing beautiful at all.

This Is Not the Poem...

I intended to write, but here I am
again in this heartland where
I wake on stagnant nights
with thoughts of  how your hair
would trail in the air like spilled 
water as you’d run ahead of me to
some new, inviolate, place you 
wanted us to share, and you’d lie
down with me, the gauze of your
dress pooled above your waist.

This is not the poem I intended to write,
and today is not any anniversary
we would have raised a glass to, 
except that every day since 
we entered the cool shallows, 
kicked away from that canted, 
wooden dock, is like another
bead tugged through my fingers
on a string that reaches down to
my last breath…spiraled decades
wondering how I let you move so far
beyond me in that lake gone dark
with gloaming, where each
stroke of your winter-pale arms 
pulled you closer to that slick
confusion of sunken limbs 
with their heartless, unbreakable
grasp, and me swimming past 
–a few breaststrokes between us--
and no hint of your sudden
stillness beneath
the implacable waning moon.

This is not the poem I intended to write, 
but  then again, neither am I 
the man I intended to be, 
the one who would have found you
in those airless woods,  
dragged you back into the starlit
world where your hectic breath
would slowly slow again...
or at least the one who could have
taken your tangled place in that
panicked, weightless dance. 
I am only the man who slumped 
on shore, washed in frenzied waves
of blue and red light while divers
with their hissing tanks
rose and fell, rose and fell, 
until, at last, they brought you back
to the dawn-splashed shore
where you would be transmuted, 
in the numb days ahead, into a 
creature of fire and smoke and air.

Until the End of the World

(Dom Pedro & Ines de Castro: Alcobaca Monastery, Portugal)

After the assassin’s hearts are torn from them,
           after the new king feels their blood sluice

down his throat like a benediction of copper
           and fire, he lays aside his crown and bends to kiss

the burnished mouth of his queen, whose brocade
           hem lifts like that of a shy girl or an early

summer morning to expose one fragile ankle
           looped three times with gold.  Crowned and

jewel laden, her veiled head appears to float above
           a coronation gown beaded with the yellow

wax of smoky candles clutched in the uncertain
           hands of altar boys.  Her lips, frozen

in a two-year rictus that might be pain or
           aching pleasure, open onto a toothless black

beneath which lies the greater blackness of
           her gaping throat.  After so long a separation

that first kiss is like swallowing light,
           the way he’d once sworn he could taste

the sun in the purple flesh of a freshly plucked grape.
           Clutched in his hand is the rosary upon which

he has counted the days that have passed
           and those which are to come, each bead offered

not to the Virgin but to the woman who was first
           his mistress and later his secret bride.  


And though the gathered bishops turn in shame 
           from Dom Pedro’s sacrilege, they lurch forward

on his command, crimson miters tucked beneath
           sweat-stained arms as they kneel to kiss the ring

that rattles against their new queen’s stony finger,
           the air around her dark with the odor of earthworms and torn 

roots, though Dom Pedro seems to take
           no notice as he presses his mouth one final time

against her quiet lips, smoothes the scarlet veil which falls
           like bloody water around her wasted shoulders.

And when, at last, he watches her marble likeness push
           shadows across the face that he adores, he scatters

the beads before the gilded altar and curses
           the god who hides behind two doors of beaten gold. 

Six years later, Dom Pedro will lie down 
           in death across from his bride so they may rest,
           
as the words he had inscribed upon his tomb proclaim,
           “Until the end of the world,” toe to marble

toe, their bejeweled heads like cardinal points
           on a mortal compass—his to the north, hers to the south--

defiantly turned from the promised Second Coming, 
           their extravagant sleep testament to the permanence

of a purely human faith which declares
           what matters is beyond the reach of mere decay.

What’s left of love might be long as a femur or
           brief as a handful of ash.  On the day of resurrection,

when flesh is once again woven over sinew and bone,
           the wound in Ines’ throat will be no more 

than a memory.  The lovers will wake in darkness,
           holding a first thought which was long ago their last.

They will thrust aside the great weight of their polished stones
           and open their eyes against sudden brightness

that will shimmer toward a vision of each other
           more divine than the sallow light descending

from the east to catch up those who put their faith
           in a love that finally saved them only from themselves.

The Left Hand of the Devil
(Niccola Paganini 1782-1840)

Darkness. Fever moons on his gums wax
in the slim vault of his mouth which is bandaged
tight against death’s gape.  To his left, a woman
he cannot see weeps over a drone which reminds him
of honeybees drugged by smoke but still hauling
their impossible plunder of sunlight.

Darkness and darkness.  Click of rosary beads
like water on the forehead of a prisoner,
then a censer of frankincense to entice archangels
down from heaven, though it is the Devil’s feral wings
that graze him, rough as bull thistle across open palms,
sharp enough to fill the pink sails of his lungs,
to pull him up from stifling black and make his
boyish fingers flutter in the manner his father
had shown him night after interminable night,
stroking the whorled neck of a violin until flesh
and wood became one seamless note upon another.

It takes him only two days to rise from the dead

though decades to ascend Europe’s gas-lit stages,
face gaunt as the waning moon, his body’s hunger
for anything but music an abomination as he forces
one solitary string to sing for the broken throats
of its three lost sisters, his fingers stretched beyond
mortal constraint, tearing at the notes as if they are
satin under the polished dome of hell he’d once been
crushed beneath, the music itself a talisman meant to

outpace the black coach that forever races behind,
steel-shod hooves of Friesians sparking against
cobblestone, against that yawning invitation which
finally seals the legend of his grand impenitence,
pallid face turned from the priest’s white wafer 
even as Death leans over the Battenberg pillow to press
another cold finger to the knot in his throat
where cancer’s taproot feeds its deadly flower.
Knowing what he does of winding sheets and shadow,
how can he do anything but stop his lips against
that diminutive moon?  He will not offer himself
to silence.  He will not kneel before Death
and swallow him whole.

Frank Paino's poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including: Gettysburg Review; The Journal, Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest and the anthology, The Face of Poetry. Recent work appears in Hunger Mountain, Catamaran and Ekphrasis. Other poems are soon to be published by Lake Effect. His first two volumes of poetry were published by Cleveland State University Press: The Rapture of Matter (1991) and Out of Eden (1997). He has received a Pushcart Prize and The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature. He recently completed his third manuscript.

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