Joseph Fasano
Wheat Field with Crows
Try to remember the seasons
when the wind was new, when your hands
were good fire in the hands of travelers,
when the foliage brushed its music
against your body and nothing wasn’t music,
when your future was the cool air in the garden
and to gather it was to know the losses
wholly, like songs composed for one hand
in the darkness.
Whatever you have opened to
at the end’s door, try to remember the hours
when the sleeper walked unwoken in the night air,
when the wild winds rumbled past you in the fall fields
and you blessed them, you surrendered
to splendor, when you lifted up your ruins on the old road
and the hard law of the luminous moved through you.
Look at it. Look at the wind, now.
Stand there where you’ve asked your life to stand.
And if love
should come, its wool glove
on your shoulder, if love
should leave you kneeling on the roadway—
the bitter wind, the lost flocks
rocking by you—kneel there, in the dim
wind, as it sings you; kneel there,
as you must have done, in your first
world, when the wind
was wind, when your ruin
was a music—you
who were no one, once, and colder,
and were open so wholly to the brokenness
that you sang to whatever left you empty
like the cello in the cello maker’s hands.
Joseph Fasano is the author of four books of poetry: The Crossing (2018); Vincent (2015); Inheritance (2014); and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year." A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books and as the Director of the Unamuno Poem Project. His writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Verse Daily, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, among other publications. He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College. His debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, will be released by Platypus Press in 2020. For more please visit: http://josephfasano.net/
Return to September 2019 Edition
Try to remember the seasons
when the wind was new, when your hands
were good fire in the hands of travelers,
when the foliage brushed its music
against your body and nothing wasn’t music,
when your future was the cool air in the garden
and to gather it was to know the losses
wholly, like songs composed for one hand
in the darkness.
Whatever you have opened to
at the end’s door, try to remember the hours
when the sleeper walked unwoken in the night air,
when the wild winds rumbled past you in the fall fields
and you blessed them, you surrendered
to splendor, when you lifted up your ruins on the old road
and the hard law of the luminous moved through you.
Look at it. Look at the wind, now.
Stand there where you’ve asked your life to stand.
And if love
should come, its wool glove
on your shoulder, if love
should leave you kneeling on the roadway—
the bitter wind, the lost flocks
rocking by you—kneel there, in the dim
wind, as it sings you; kneel there,
as you must have done, in your first
world, when the wind
was wind, when your ruin
was a music—you
who were no one, once, and colder,
and were open so wholly to the brokenness
that you sang to whatever left you empty
like the cello in the cello maker’s hands.
Joseph Fasano is the author of four books of poetry: The Crossing (2018); Vincent (2015); Inheritance (2014); and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year." A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books and as the Director of the Unamuno Poem Project. His writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Verse Daily, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, among other publications. He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College. His debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, will be released by Platypus Press in 2020. For more please visit: http://josephfasano.net/
Return to September 2019 Edition