Mary Jo Balistreri

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Fourth of July

Sitting together on the porch swing.
Sipping Champagne, swallowing bubbles
of memory. Ropes creak back and forth.
 
How could we have known—without sparklers,
the flap and flutter of tattered twilight, shouts,
giggles, commotion of the children—we’d be so lost?
 
Fountains of light cascade from the sky,
pinwheels and spiders.
Your too cheerful voice offering one more glass.
​

Early Morning Blessing

Sleep-drugged and slow-moving,
the day sits cold and gray.
I cook sugar water for hummers,
court orioles with orange and grape jelly.
When the sun comes out with its long taper
to candle nectar and green silence,
shadows falter and slink away, replaced
by flickering votives to honor the day.
Now red-winged blackbirds flame the air
and finches, those haloes of buttery yellow,
hover above buds of palest pink until the entire
backyard glows in the vast rose window of morning.
​

​At a Writers Retreat in the North Woods of Wisconsin

A heron
braided in reeds and cattails
scans the lake
bides his time
A school of minnows
swims south in the pond
aware too late
of the heron’s spearsharp beak
Hunger quenched
the blue-shaped flight
disappears
in a gunmetal sky
 
An intracloud flash
brightens night like day
Thunder crashes—too close
And yet
a ruby-throated hummer
darts
untroubled
even as a rush of wind
swings the feeder
in a wide-wider arc
on the porch
Rain begins to ping
then pelt the windows
 
In our log cabin
screen door left open
we lie content on quilted beds
inhale fresh air
and pine
the busyness we carried here
erased by the green fuse
of incipient summer--
receptive to woods and water
fire and air
our bodymind fills
with a buoyancy
that almost makes us giddy
Your arm across my belly
you turn and ask,
What in the heck
have we been doing with our time?
​

Psalm of a Wild Solitude

The ocean wears
a rippled silk
of blue-green elegance
 
           and dolphins bear
           upon their backs
           a flash of radiance.
​

Genesis

This is the hour I love--
the day unfolding into itself
from darkness into light,
the sea and sky yet snug
under a gray duvet
while the slow rise of the sun
uncouples the lovers
from that silky crepe de chine.
Opening to the softness of pastel,
the sea puts on a wrap of palest
green while the sky lounges
in soft blue charmeuse.
I sit in the wonder of beginning,
hear breath upon the water,
smell the slight salty tang.
This is how it must have been,
how it will always be, creation
happening over and over.
Whether the lush garden of paradise
or a sea coast in the tropics,
everything in flux except for the one thing
that stays the same—when Phoebus
drives her fiery chariot across
the sky, or the God of Genesis
says," Let there be light"
the world starts anew,
the black of night rent apart
each day
by the blaze.
​

Mary Jo Balistreri's profile

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Bonnard Remembers Marthe in Evening Light
                                ~after Pierre Bonnard's View from the Artist's Studio

Click on painting for an enlarged view

​As I lean toward sunset, the tall trees
hold the sun in such embrace they throb
within me. The stone paths we designed
flow like rivers of molten gold in this heat.
I sit at the open window of my studio
and paint the outrageous color of our garden.
The pulse of hidden seeds beats soft
against the canvas like your small body
against mine. How present you are
in your absence.
 
The flowering orange drifts to the pink
oils in which I dress you, falls beside me as you
carry the pruned stems by armfuls into the house,
the air delicious with sweetness.
My eyes blur as you bend over your hoe,
something passing in that intense light, a
ripening, a flush, the way you open the baked
soil, coax and cajole it like a child.
 
Evening is upon us and a lavender breeze lifts
the hair on my arms. The blues and greens quiver
in the changed air, and you drape my shoulders
in a cloak of violet and yellow. Soon a sea of black
starlight will close over us.
      Je me souviens, Marthe;
life lives not in the brush stroke, but in between.

Riding Home
       For my dad, Wayne A Horton, 1918-2013

On the morning of my father’s death, he awakens with a smile. I help him put on his old robe, open the shade the way he always does and walk him to his chair. He looks out the window at the yellow warbler in the mesquite, the sky, and hummers spinning in nectar. Tired after a physical therapy workout, he falls asleep listening to Angels We Have Heard on High. Suddenly, his heart begins to beat faster, the oxygen level drops while the melisma of the Gloria, syllable after syllable of pure sound, pours forth. I hold his hand, one last time, as the voice of his music, calls.

            saguaro--
            in the desert sunset
​            flickering shadows
​

Reading Rilke

The sky presses down on the land,
a darkening. Rain begins a steady drone
on worn limestone paths,
swishes like a brushed kettle drum
on the log cabin roof. Inside I read,
and then surrender to weather
encrypted with its own stillness.
The lamp’s image ghosts through the window,
hangs like a lantern from the limb
of a birch.
 
Light wavers in the wind’s sigh.
I reach for distances not yet touched,
no difference between near and far. Wisps
of fog steam across the glass, clouds vision.
The perfect paper shell of the abandoned wasp’s
nest disappears.
How slippery the word reality.

Hurricane

A bullet train bears down
from the east. Unleashed
and furious it comes
A smoke-gray rumble grows
            Expands.
            Swallows everything.
Hoofs of a buffalo stampede
ground shaking a thousand rattles
A dark wall descends.
Windows blank out.
Air turns red--
 
As water surges
ghosts crouch beside the dead
​
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