Three Poems by Frank Graziano
painting by Auguste Renoir, 1881
Full Moon Over Las Galeras
Islands surface as the mist
lifts and if the light is right
you see bodies phosphorescent
in moonlight like oversized
bioluminescent specimens
with one (me) awkward,
gawky, a self-conscious caricature
of inhibition.
I try to disguise my vulnerability
with serenity. I knew to move
through your affection gently.
I hold you close in a float of elation,
drifting toward myself drifting
with you, entangled in your body,
settling toward something like peace.
Your seductive elegance
spreading out on the surface
of the water, discreet,
understated, the tactile sensation
of your gaze almost like a shadow
that you lift to put a kiss
on my face and your stressless
touch subtle as sekishu.
With sufficient humility maybe
we could spread some grace.
A Sunset Picnic At The River, With Entomological Commentary
Suddenly in the serenity
and spontaneity and intense simplicity
of this moment you’re dumbstruck
by the epiphany that you’re not at home
in the home you built around yourself.
A beetle’s prehistoric crawl
across a salami sandwich is eternal
because the oversized carapace drags.
You’re on shore leave
from yourself, homebound
and restless, half housebroken
and half—what?—ungrateful,
undomesticatable.
A picnic blanket cornered
with stones, moss
on polished river rock
ebbed happily in backwash,
a pug-nosed tugboat pitching
on the swells and a kayak
cradling in the wake.
A line of ants in military formation
returning to the hill with crumbs.
Sometimes near the naval base
a submarine surfaces with eerie
slow-motion hallucinatory irreality
like a mechanized whale breaching
from a post-coital nightmare.
Moths fluttering in panicked
elliptical orbits suddenly divebomb
suiciding into the lantern
and the cascade of mothdust
in gravitation downdraft
settles gently on your sandwich.
Nightfall and a silhouette of trees.
You have to clear away
the emotional debris that impedes
acquiescence to complacency.
Trading Fours
I must be someone
—Fernando Pessoa
How often can you reinvent
self-identity before collisions
of abandoned selves fleeing for the door
leave you wounded in the crush?
A rocking chair in ghostly
slowing auto-animation
when a woman rises
in haste (too late) for the phone.
My face is the mask
I give to the world
while depleting reserves
of self-deception.
A lamplit still life, bruised fruit in a bowl.
An hourglass among houseplants.
A lost sock in dust fuzz under the couch
and the acoustics of an empty kitchen.
Beneath my humility, even shame,
can they see the pride I hide
also from myself, the vulnerability
camouflaged with apathy?
The rolling glide of pool balls
on felt over slate. Sonnetized pain
because this blessing is a curse.
Cave walls saturated with echoes.
I think life loves living
the lie of becoming.
Is the wreckage baggage?
Test reality where it hurts.
Frank Graziano’s early career included the publication of several chapbooks of poetry, as well as editions of works by Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Mark Strand, and James Wright. Following a BA in poetry writing from the University of Arizona, an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, and graduate studies in Lima, Peru, Graziano received a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico. He has published several books of nonfiction with Oxford University Press.