Glen Vecchione, Poet

Glen Vecchione is an author and illustrator of 15 books for Sterling and Scholastic Publishing, Inc. His science titles for kids are published in several languages and distributed worldwide. Before writing, Glen worked as a software engineer, web designer, composer of television jingles, playwright, and actor. His one-man show "Cowboy Bo and the Train Whistle" has been performed all over San Diego and Orange Counties, earning Glen the description "a Spaulding Grey for kids" by Uptown magazine. With Quiet Zone Theatre, an Orange County-based company of hearing impaired actors and dancers, Glen adapted the Dr. Seuss book Bartholomew & the Oobleck for American Sign Language. Abstract expressionist painting is one of his passions. Another is shopping for tasteful Hawaiian shirts. I like to think of my poems as snapshots from a fast-moving car - everything stretched out and streaking by. But then you stop at a light and have to look really hard at something.

Twister
sestina

Under gigantic cauliflower, ponies fret,
whinny, bolt for shadows, until someone rescues
them; roadside sawgrass flattens beside the white-peaked
houses, like fools'-caps, in the lowering weather.
A tableland squall: women pull wet wash from cords
and bright yellow schoolbuses race for safe basements.


We are prepared: step down into sturdy basements
while a hard wind picks up, tearing over the frets
of railroad tracks and bashing telephone poles, cords
slick in the furious warm rain. No one rescues
cars or bicycles abandoned when this dark weather
ballooned on the horizon and red flashes peeked


from behind trestled water towers, some peaked
with lightning rods that discharged in their basements.
But we're safe and warm, feast on canned peaches whether
we like them or not; play cards, the radio, fret
about what will happen above – the thick, black cord
of a twister sighted two miles south, and Rescue


Crews surprised by the force of it. We can rescue
ourselves only – we listen, slowly calm our peaked
frenzy over damaged things; a tightening cord
of love and fear encircling us in our basement
sanctuary, our chapel, the altar a fret-
ted ladder slanting up towards dangerous weather.


And soon we can hear it above us, the weather:
roaring like a train, that contemplated rescue
of a forgotten pet, impossible. Noise frets
our nerves; the funnel must be tearing our prim, piqued
garden into shreds, leaving only this basement
and a dangerous tangle of snapped power cords –


a black, bellowing, thick-throated monster; the cords
in its neck stretching as it swallows farms (whether
it likes them or not), but ignores lakes and basements.
And who will find us? – will they know what to rescue
in the ravaged aftermath, a town stripped of peaked
churches and domed silos? As the tremoring light frets
the wall — silence.
Silence.


Shall we wait for the rescue siren's clear-weather?
See our homes, like cords of wood, above their basements?
Peaked with dread, we climb up towards the light, fret-by-fret.

Carousel

What can you say about it,
this strange island world going nowhere –
polychromed, the beasts and chariots sailing
in crankshaft undulations

      around emptiness?

Borne up on bearings like a gymnasium-
sized skateboard, a plywood wobble at 45 rpm;
the ungepotchket bouquet is thrown into dance
to the calliope's toot and chuff,
      and children l e a n o u t w a r d with streaming hair
beneath the garlanded oculi.

Still, what can you say about the
snarling horseheads, impaled
bodies frozen black in a dead canter?

I say: ride the carousel.
Fix your eyes to the post.
Let the world outside run amok in unfurling
bolts of cloth.
Hold tight to the bright-shelled hardness:
it's a kind of practicing.


            San Diego CA 1990

Christmas Elegy


This is how it is: clocks, calendars, assignations
all in lockstep – meetings nightly where the cup of grief
passes among the supplicants – a litany of painful separations

as the days shrink, and shadows, like dark roots,
creep across parking lots.

Even now, with every house its own constellation
and garlands glittering like broken glass
in the aisles of supermarkets;
with Christmas bearing down like a runaway train

and I'm the dubious hero in this melodrama, tied to rails
not unlike those that silvered under the stars for us
as we trudged back to supper,
the great wooden trestle six miles behind.

Let it roar over me, this Christmas wreck
with its wreath of ash -! let the wall-eyed beacons
glance across my body before severing limbs from trunk

then let me lie perfectly still to take in
my new situation, my life as a stationary man –
the jet of desire cupped into a measured burn,
the calm of going nowhere fast

and the memory of Mozart's G-minor,
caught between frequencies, as we drove
through forest toll-gates.
Now where will you travel, and with whom?

My drawer is filled with maps folded the wrong way,
hotel brochures, a calendar stretching rows of blank days
like a parade of vacant boxcars
beneath a scene of white meadows.

Somewhere in the aspen grove our frozen footprints
remember this uneasy truce of love
and wait, like me (listening, listening), for the swelling of groundwater,
for the first warm rains of spring.


            Escondido CA 12/20/02

Jellyfish Warning


The small ones are like so many contact lenses.
The large ones drag crinoline flounce behind their

smoky cockpits, move in aeortic spasms
and both eat and shit through pellucid skins.

I suppose they make love, somehow – the faintest
tincture of green caviar, cinctured deep within the

jellyflesh of the gelid-pellicled jellyfish:
delight to those osseous pisciform bundles,

also the tortoise with her razor-beaked brood
who'll tear even the giant Cyanea capillata

into scraps, some of which pulsate, still:
a living shatter that contracts to re-form itself.

Some are islands, populated by millions in nascent
bouquets: Bluebottle and Jack-o'-the-Sails dragging

deadly streamers under milk-container buoys.
Swimmers' Adviso: avoid those sickly bladders borne

on warm currents; avoid, and avoid again the brush
of angel-haired medusae glittering in a knife

of light for the diver. Jellyfish! –
protean, protoplasmic, growing both into water

and out of it; a dream of them rising like blisters
around our dinghies, dropping like parachutes with

hundreds of their fellows' fluxioned bellows –
a fallout of stinging jello jellyfish!


            La Jolla CA 1992

Old Argument


Sleep? Sleep resolves nothing.
Dawn splashes blood against the closet door
and it's the same routine each November:
I'm leaving you again – leaving you

across the river, where Jersey smoke drifts stiffly
like a hard-edged continent over Williamsburg;
where the row houses begin to stand apart,
getting used to the idea.

Oh, what an unhappy country this is!
You, pert under the careworn crimps of your Peruvian blanket;
me, clattering along avenues to the Belt Parkway,

scanning, finally, each backwater town for telephones
then roaring past them, as if you could know.

It's the old argument come back around,
sticking to the edges of facile conversation
like a baste-stitch, wide and reckless, until our faces blacken.
Yours, anyway.

How inconvenient,
those spoiled Sundays, foreign films, drinks
with your father – and just when we needed the money.
Look at us: mashing gears until our clutch is stripped,
running from friends' houses after the opera

but before the great dessert.
And speaking of opera, I'll never whistle "La Boheme"
so you can return the video.
As for returning, I plan to drive through Yonkers
just to see our old neighborhood –

of course we're in love,
too much in love.
Nothing could be worse.


            New York City 1988

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