Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project, featuring new, previously unpublished poems by 30 different authors. We kick off the month with two poems by W. S. Di Piero.
What Have You Got To Lose?
Third floor walk-up, simple morning
complex with possibility.
Where will I find my garden?
Where wild roses for the darker hours?
Or yellow roses for safekeeping
to light these shadowed rooms
until tomorrow, when on the streets
Scotch Broom and mimosa bloom
in ambivalent greeting winds.
Salt
The bread tastes funny, you said at dinner downstairs, before we climbed the floating stairs to the monkish loft, balancing ourselves shoulder to shoulder up to the narrow bed. Monopoly that deprives makes certain people rich. Florence’s bakers quit salting bread when the Medici stiffened taxes. No salt since. The floured snow falling had held our tracks about as long as it took to open the apartment door. To go with the bread, I fixed savories — salami-ish, olivey, right? — with fried eggs and nasty lovable peperoncini. Dante says exile’s bitterest taste is the salt in someone else’s bread. One night was all we really wanted or needed. Just that taste. After we’d stepped to the loft, balancing palm on palm, you reminded me that he also said, let us not forget, along with that salt business, it’s just as painful to have to go up and down someone else’s stairs.
W. S. Di Piero
W. S. Di Piero is the author of nine books of poetry, the most recent being Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2007). The latest of his four collections of essays is City Dog (Northwestern University Press, 2008). In 2010 and 2011 he’ll publish three books: new poems from Copper Canyon; When Can I See You Again: New Art Writings from Pressed Wafer; and a new edition of his translations of the Italian poet Leonardo Sinisgalli, Night of Shooting Stars, from Tavern Books. He lives in San Francisco.
