No Matter How You Dress It Up, We Are Alone
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
“Love is all.” The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
Charles Randall Stanfield Italo Calvino
Perhaps the sonnet Chuck would write to me
If he were living in the trees he used
To climb, would be about theology,
The weirded thinking in which he refused
The Bible, well, the parts he found to strict
And inconvenient. Or he might instead
Imagine me among his trees, depict
The two of us with them, the ones he spread
On canvases before he died. The lines
Would say, “Another autumn comes, you staid
And I am gone. A lightning strike confines
My ashes underneath the forest shade.”
Two autumns come, the one for him, the one
For me in life. He left me for his son.
~ Phillip Whidden