Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and short story writer.

Blue Ox Blues

Eyes blur over the name
on the box—likely not Belgian chocolates.

Little gifts should come after and love
dropped in as a word rather than

emotion, unless the palm reader knows
what we know. How strange it is

to be dispatched before making sense
of the windspeed and wind chimes

tinkling four notes of Chicago blues.
Words themselves condense

an experience with mountaintops 
or pristine lakes-in-woods and men

in red plaid shirts eyeing the tallest trees.
A summer of meanness cannot contain

the sunflower feel of standing arms spread
in a field, head tipped back to face 

the sun’s mixed blessings. Meanwhile
Paul Bunyan is waving.

Holy Holy Men

A zillion neutrinos zip through us and we don’t care.
You’re screaming at something else, clearly,
something you saw or read on your cellphone. 
I tap my wristwatch and you know what time it is:
time to pluck the medieval harp in the parlor,
time to enter a dark room wearing a wolf mask,
time to reimagine the house furnishings,
time to rethink its freak inhabitants, too.
But I also want to test the mechanical bull
before the John Wayne lookalike hauls it off
to North Dakota (that’s where’s he lives).
Sometimes I spin on the spot until I get
so friggin dizzy I have to sit on the floor.
I thought the day was done with us and 
our propensity for lighting votary candles
and pretending to pray to God or whomever.
Last time, you torched the redwood confessional.
Last time, the priest ran away when you cursed him.
Last time, you stank like a beast, in all spiritual frankness.

Unplayed Melody

I could say she played me like
a harpsichord. A simile I saw
somewhere, an old poetry book
perhaps or maybe I heard it
said in a bar over beers and
nachos or maybe it was on 
Bach’s birthday when radio
rhapsodizes the king of keys
the contrapuntal wizard lord
the deity as bewigged keyboardist. 
That is to say, she was no Bach
and a harpsichord never came
up when I thought of myself.
So nothing comes of nothing.
The date tinkled to an end
when without irony she said 
she had piano lessons first 
thing in the morning.