Joseph Fasano

MAHLER IN NEW YORK

Now when I go out, the wind pulls me
into the grave. I go out
to part the hair of a child I left behind,

and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind.
If I carry my father with me, it is the way
a horse carries autumn in its mane.

If I remember my brother,
it is as if a buck had knelt down
in a room I was in.

I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me.
What is it to have a history, a flock
buried in the blindness of winter?

Try crawling with two violins
into the hallway of your father’s hearse.
It is filled with sparrows.

Sometimes I go to the field
and the field is bare. There is the wind,
which entrusts me;

there is a woman walking with a pail of milk,
a man who tilts his bread in the sun;
there is the black heart of a mare

in the milk—or is it the wind, the way it goes?
I don’t know about the wind, about the way
it goes. All I know is that sometimes

someone will pick up the black violin of his childhood
and start playing—that it sits there on his shoulder
like a thin gray falcon asleep in its blinders,

and that we carry each other this way
because it is the way we would like to be carried:
sometimes with mercy, sometimes without.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner
2008 Pushcart Prize Nominee

§ 6 Responses to “Mahler in New York” by Joseph Fasano

• Matthew Terry says:

  February 21, 2009 at 10:25 am

  [Comment deleted. This is a space to talk about "Mahler in New York," not share your own work, unless it responds to the poem above.]

  Reply
• L. Kovinski says:

  February 22, 2009 at 1:07 pm

  Seldom is drama in music so touchable as in the songs of Mahler.

  Reply
• Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer says:

  April 1, 2009 at 8:02 pm

  so much to love about this poem, but what stands out for me is not so much what is said, but all that is left unsaid. It seems to be a poem that wrestles with silences, with pregnant pauses, with that which can not be named. This allows the poem, ironically, to go to the places where words can’t go. So much room for mystery in this poem, room for questioning and wanting and wonder. Wonderful.

  Reply
• 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize Winners | RATTLE: Poetry for the 21st Century says:

  May 6, 2009 at 1:41 pm

  [...] Joseph Fasano Goshen, NY for “Mahler in New York” [...]

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• Eleanor Little says:

  September 22, 2009 at 1:14 pm

  Mahler’s darkness is drawn forth with this poem of loss. I love the images set forth by the Sparrows, Horses, male Deer and Falcon, all of which relate to a mystery I cannot quite touch. The Falcon with blinders is tied to the horse, the black violin to the ending of life. Mahler’s music is alive in words.

  Reply
• Recents « Threading In The Choirs says:

  August 11, 2011 at 10:21 pm

  [...] of Colonies of Bees – Giving Dirty Gold – Roar Hammock – The Longest Year Joseph Fasano – Various [...]

  Reply