Nick Visconti
All day the branches
All day the branches twist—drop-dead petals,
demolished symmetry; bygone fractals
levered apart and scattered over summer,
across; repeated. Again and again,
beside the moss-rich pond I wished,
as a bored child, could harbor red snappers,
horned frogs, sleeping gods; the frenetic
cold tap my mind drew out its dreams from,
bubbling senseless sense—why else wouldn’t I
have ever dived in? Wrecked bells chime
their tangled harmony. King Dog,
rain-ridden, in the storm beside me. Glyph-
light dissolving down the cratered mirror,
our coats darkening to match the weather.
Dark-coated, our home
Dark-coated, our home in hushed weather
dripping memorial. A hole, worn through
December’s discography, an eye ajar—
(The song refuses to resolve. Over-
cast recurrent intervals in loops
of a three-second fragment: allegro,
calando, Kind of Blue scratched to skips.)
Swept up in sound, I can see it,
as he could’ve been now: hair widowed,
salt-and-pepper, laughing crow’s feet;
his Mets lined up for a weekend sweep,
cacciatore on the stove. No silence
filling heads, lathing our living room,
a sound scattering the mourning doves.
Morning drips, in the light
Morning drips, in the light between dove wings
as drones nibble on the dropsy dahlias
and shape them—flowers fledged so fully in
this reconfigured, open-window after-
noon, when Clair sits still, immersed in Gray’s,
compelled, inspiring compulsion,
more our father than I’d ever want
or like to be. Our-father-who-drove-off
for-work-and-never-returned: she knows him,
drawn immortal in her mind: Laurent,
the laurelled one. She couldn’t rest, safe,
content with what he knew. She learns sign,
symptom, syndrome, recrudescence, while I
wide-eyed watch the dropsy dahlias change.
Nick Visconti is a writer living in Brooklyn. He plays softball on Sundays.