Tony Trigilio

Kindling Ceremony, New Year’s Eve

I learned to keep concealed the peevish
complaints about myself, a technique
that’s overstayed its welcome. I’ll write one
with golf pencil tonight on a scrap of paper
and bring it to the altar to be burned.
I can’t summon the right defilement
to disavow. I’m flying with conceit—
the ache lights me up from inside.
I’m holding the blank square of paper
handed to me at the doorway when
we took off our shoes. Maybe I’ll write

about the 10-point rise in systolic pressure
since my last physical, my fear of dreaming
about dead relatives, the constant jolt I feel
in back of my neck on the train platform
when I realize anyone could catch me off guard,
push me on the tracks (embarrassing).
I’m relieved the chanting is in English
and before rising from my seat I write:
Anything my mind does to fuck itself and make me
indifferent to love. I walk heel-to-toe in synch
with the man in front of me, the candlelight
fidgets as we approach the altar. All light

in this room comes from tiny candles
cradled in our hands, and my palms
flinch from the heat. My turn at the altar,
I’m thinking about the odds I can catch a cab
after the service—New Year’s the deadliest
night for pedestrians, most walkers hit by cars
drunk themselves. A senior Zen student,
cross-legged, burns the paper I handed to her.
It simmers a moment in the water-filled urn,
smoke the odor of chocolate and basement musk.
Here we go, burning land to make a garden.
​

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Peeling Out of the Garage

                                          
I can’t taste the falafel when you swerve
this close to the parking garage pillars.
I’m sorry about earlier, when I said I’d take
a cab if you wanted to stay. It’s hard to eat
when you take the corners so fast. Drive
like this—ride your finger and thumb
along the rim of a glass. No one should
strand you anywhere. Just don’t give me

the look that says you wish I owned a car
when actually you’re jealous I’m chewing
falafel, not driving. If only the goddamn
garage didn’t dump you onto the one-way
street we didn’t take here. Remember,
​I don’t hold it against you for owning a car
​

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Ancestors

We’ll never escape them, so it’s about time we accept
they were farmers even though there were cities
to live in. They caught fish with bare hands
through lucent streams. Their descendants (not us
but those in the old country) make hoot and catcall
at your girlfriend and it’s condoned the way we allow  

the dying to flirt with their nurses. We can visit
our friends in love in Paris who promised
to find us a one-month rental in their neighborhood,
smoke in the studio where they write with the front
edges of their desks touching. We can vow to travel
only where the Métro takes us. Then fly back
to the States, where we pretend our ancestors

were famous. But, really, some of them—we can’t
tilt the machine for a more favorable outcome—
some no doubt were run over by their own tractors,
even though they prayed for rain and rich soil
to a shepherd god imprisoned in the underworld.
I’m telling you, not everyone in Italy is a farmer,
and people live in cities in Sicily just like they do
in Pennsylvania, where it’s Pittsburgh, Philadelphia,
and everything else is farmland.


 

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Tony Trigilio’s newest collection of poetry is Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011). Recent poems are published or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, South Dakota Review, Sou’wester, and Spinning Jenny. He is also a co-founder and co-editor of Court Green.