Tag Archives: Dante Di Stefano

On Losing My Wedding Ring While Planting an Orchard

That this small band of white gold has been lost

among the roots of saplings, which will grow

and, perhaps, shoot a finger through the hoop

that will choke the bark coasting underground,

is no small consolation; that the hooves

of deer will silk the dirt above it now

and at the hour of my death, and of yours,

is a brittle thought that breaks like hills

whose trees cycle through a blaze of autumns.

That my friend, whose orchard this is, will let

his little daughters build imaginary

kingdoms between the rows where an empire

of apples will one day scud what once was

pasture, and that our initials will be

buried, unacknowledged, beneath their dreams

and beside their father’s hope, is a swan

that origamis the endless mountains.

I will buy a new ring and remember

how the original, encased in earth,

hooping worm and rock and root and desire,

remains unbroken, a trancing of loam,

subterranean, shining in the dark

that gallops and gallops still underfoot.

<< Brass Band Epithalamion

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Dante Di Stefano earned his PhD in creative writing from SUNY at Binghamton. His poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer’s Chronicle, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, the Bea González Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize.

Brass Band Epithalamion

While the sousaphones, walking the bass-line,

groove on a riff, and the crescent moon casts

crumbs of light like a screwdriver on

a cymbal attached to a bass drum played

by a kid in a varsity jacket

and camouflage pants, while the three trombonists

hurl salvos at the crowd on the corner

of Chartres and Frenchman, while twin trumpets

punch pins into the umbrella of our

hand-in-hand understanding of the dark,

while teenage boys, sag and swagger, waggle,

cakewalk, strut and bump, to the snare drum’s roll,

I am content to contemplate streetlights

with you and to wave the white handkerchief

in time with the wedding march that breaks down

across boarded up storefronts and holds us

in a levee of melody more true

and insistent than your pulse, my heartbeat,

our hemoglobin adjudicating

evening. In the small hours that follow, you

will whistle “I’ll Fly Away” on the banks

of the Mississippi and I’ll outlook

the strain a busking violin puts on

my memories of imagined futures,

but for now we listen on the dancing verge

and nothing can curb the sound of this band

as it plays “I Ate Up the Apple Tree,”

welcoming us to the Mardi Gras of

an Eden we’ll be forever leaving.

<< Paper Anniversary 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
On Losing My Wedding Ring While Planting an Orchard >>

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Dante Di Stefano earned his PhD in creative writing from SUNY at Binghamton. His poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer’s Chronicle, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, the Bea González Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize.

Paper Anniversary

Marriage is a new way of telling time

against chronology. It is the end

of please rewritten in indigo ink

on the tip of our tongues. It is how thanks

will paint all of the hospital walls blue

in our newborn dreams of dying alone.

It is light that stags the doe in transit

through the underbrush and brings her to still

herself at the snapped twigs scrunched underfoot.

It is bunny hop and a pocket watch

that will travel through dresser drawers unused

until one day it finds itself become

heirloom and shining. It is a promise

that calls into question the visible

colors of the ultraviolet spectrum.

It cattails the breeze in marshland evenings

and smacks the warble out of the red-winged

blackbird’s beak that serenades our footsteps.

It is, in fact, done with all serenades,

all indigos, all vaults and vestibules

of autumns reimagined on leaf stems.

It’s as useful as knowing how to change

a car battery or a toilet’s chain.

It is the most unromantic knowledge

of the greening need at the heart of so

much aging ahead. It’s: “I no longer

mind cleaning the bathroom sink tonight.”

It’s you switching your toothpaste brand to mine

without hesitation. It’s the word help

become holy, memorized as a prayer.

It’s what most outwalks us when we walk out

the door together into days laddered,

like the fine blue lines on loose leaf paper,

with the things we are supposed to do now

that we are who we are supposed to be.

Brass Band Epithalamion >>

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Dante Di Stefano earned his PhD in creative writing from SUNY at Binghamton. His poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer’s Chronicle, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, the Bea González Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize.