New Poem, Volley, Revised, for DVerse Open Link Night

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Volley

Van Gogh wakes in the grave, leaning into a green

cemetery silence, listening with the tuning fork

filaments of his residual ear. Insomniac ghost, he sees

everyone running, whispering  “Je ne sais quoi!”

into the dark.  He billows off, the hem of his shroud

trailing in the bend of the voluble Seine, looking up

to see a luminous ball on the tip of the Eiffel Tower:

great sentinel moon rebuking all of Paris. Now Sartre

and Toulouse-Lautrec gather at the foot; it takes all three

of them, Van Gogh calling the plays, their white wrists

extended, to spike the ball loose; in unguarded awe

they watch it make its way east through molten skies.

ii

In St. Petersburg, something tugs at a Dostoyevsky long

entombed within piling snow and dreams of forbidden love.

He finds himself in his dark carriage, driver lashing

a lathered team through the frigid and dormant city

where, like the face of a vagrant revolutionary, the great

moon floats above the Winter Palace. He summons

the Brothers Karamazov from their peripheral graves; once

more, a determined volley, and opalescent and immense,

broken from its orbit, the moon travels on west, through one

time zone then another, over alpine ridges to Verona.

Iii

On the redolent piazza, dreaming in his mantle of forlorn

pigeons, the Carrera Dante notices an ascendant

luna errante over the square. All Veronese lamplight

is abruptly quenched in deference. Sitting at a sidewalk

bistro table after hours, one expat had been saying

to another, “… but St. Thomas touched the stranger’s

wounds-- explain that away,” and the other person

could not, except to say  “We see what we yearn to see—

look:  Dante himself comes unto us now, broken from

stone, holding a wayfaring moon by a filigreed strand.”

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012