Because I want to see how thin the veil is.
To fly beside him on the stork
he came in all day into night
where the clouds become rain.
Because I want to hide with him
under a midday swelter insisting on summer, turn my eyes
from the bleating geese as we, the Corybantes, hear flutes in the air
sharpening the middle music of the season, to the cello overture
he whistles, listen to his stories of its deaf composer,
the passacaglia played to keep its two-fingered specialist busy
holding the chords he’d gathered out of the great
chorale’s consummation in Napoli at the royal parties.
Because I want to watch a new rind of moon stain the meadow
before dusk with colors I’ve never seen before.
He would tell me how much the splotches of this otherworld’s light
matter in the grand scheme of all the sunsets I’ve witnessed I can only hint at with words:
ematite, corniola, diaspro
splaying the Elysian fields in Italian.
There is a Hebrew character his mother taught me standing in
for a word I can’t wrap my hand around the characters’ presumptive arches
to draw out the assumptive mood just right to break the pebbles into ellipsis
of echo between my first stutters in Beit Me’ir where we propitiated God
in the brooding prescience of his absence always was. Thinly veiled or no veil at all,
the stone-shape of that guttural mark threads its path toward the sunlight
past the first block of my mind as he turns to leave.
There is nothing I can write to convince him to take me along,
so I cut off my right hand and
place it in a cardinal’s nest.
When he looks up to inspect the auric egg it opens—
Nicholas Skaldetvind is an Italian-American poet and paper-maker. He holds a M.A. from Stockholm University in Transnational Writing. He studied papermaking with Tom Balbo at Wells College and was an apprentice for Roberto Mannino in Italy. He serves as an editor for California Quarterly will begin a Ph. D. at University of North Dakota’s English department in January.