Poems by Alfredo "Al" Terrigo


True Confession

"I have lusted in my heart."----Jimmy Carter

Good for the soul, my old teacher said,
but whose he didn't say.


The father-confessor? huddled in the dark,
listening to the pathetic petty pecatta
of school girls, the funky lust
of pimply adolescents,
the tales of lying, cheating, stealing,
unspeakable acts recited with remorse,
whose heart is darkened by the soot
of so many candles, whose spirit is broken
by the recital of so many sins,
whose soul is laden with the guilt
of all old Adam's progeny?


The mother? reading a letter from a son
admitting to bad behavior but more angry
at being caught at it and blaming her,
and she wondering if it was true,
if somehow she had sown the spore
of these poisoned mushrooms in him,
if in all her gentle scoldings was the denial
of the cracks in her own veneer,
who, for all her protestations of belief,
feared death more than madness,
who would go silent toward the last,
and smell sulfur with her last gasp?


The son? hearing his mother's voice
utter unthinkable words,
"I've done a bad thing,"
and trying to guess what could be so bad
as to rob this woman of her right mind,
veil her face with hell's own ashes,
suck away her breath and leave her staring
past him, who believed that she needed only
his logic to see clearly, only his touch
to wake her from the dream of death,
who found himself complicit, tried,
and sentenced to breathe
the thin air of her absence?


The husband? made to listen,
to his wife admit to dreaming
of some dark Hamlet, prince of her heart's drumming,
denying anything but dreaming,
protesting corporeal loyalty to him,
who after all is not guiltless, who tells her
under pressure that he too has lusted in his heart,
but who has kept it to himself under some quaint notion
that it's not something you just blurt out,
and who wonders if she ever dreams of him,
as he dreams of her, in the throes of abandon,
but who wakes up and it's just a dream,
who wishes he could wake up
and it would all be just a dream?


You? having heard all this,
having problems of your own,
having heartaches enough to deal with,
having no remission from the cancer of your own sins,
having no respite from self-loathing, having shared,
who come hoping for pretty verses, some, at least, that rhyme,
who know what you like, who like what you know,
who know there are some things
it is better not to know?


The Strangler Fig

"Isn't it pretty to think so?" ----Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

It is such a cliché, you know,
the unhappy spouse.,
the wife who drinks a little,
the husband who drowns himself in work,
the things left unsaid between them
the things said that were better not spoken,
the nights spent in silent sleeplessness,
the bed divided left and right,
the void between where passion once engaged them,
the broken dreams, the broken promises,
the spite over trivial slights nurtured into
the loathing that smothers like a strangler fig.


Remember that strangler fig
that grew on the far side of the corral
in Villa Carona, so intertwined with the oak that hosted it,
that one could hardly say here is one, here is the other?
In bad verse they might serve as easy simile
for marriage, until you remember,
that one is killing the other with its avid embrace.
Yet rufous robins rustled in the intertwined leaves,
children sought shelter in their shade,
and life so flourished in and around them,
that one forgot the only end was death.


That place seemed an Eden then,
but even with that clue we didn't see,
the fig for what it was. Not until later
was the fruit offered, ingested, digested,
singing in the blood, roaring in the brain.


Let us invent another trope, then,
a unique universe in which everyone is content
with what simply is, where silence is shared
like well-aged wine, where the only language
is a kind of laughter, as at a joke
that does not need to be explained,
where there are no pronouns for our separate selves,
where there is no one and no another,
but only we.

Let us imagine we live there,
flourishing together in perfected love.
Let us at least pretend, as children do,
that such a haven does exist.


Copyright © 2003 by Ex Machina Publishing Company