Photo: "Montauk Sunset" by Everett Potter
Today is Valentine's Day and what better way to celebrate the holiday by giving you some Italian-American poetry and introducing you to some fantastic national Italian-American associations?
George Guida is the former president of the Italian American StudiesAssociation (IASA) and the founding treasurer of the Italian American Writers'Association (IAWA). He is a professor of English at the New York City College
of Technology and poetry editor of 2 Bridges Review.
He is the author of recently published Pugilistic (WordTech Editions) and The Sleeping Gulf (Bordighera Press). Both
are collections of poems. He is also the author of Spectacles of Themselves: Essays in
Italian American Popular Culture and Literature (Bordighera Press).
His previous books are two collections of poems, Low Italian and New
York and Other Lovers. He is also the author of Letters from Suburbia: A
Novel and The Pope Stories and Other Tales of
Troubled Times.
As SIAMO focuses on preserving Italian American heritage
in all ways possible, we wanted to make sure we celebrate Italian American
writers as much as we can. Our poets and authors deserve to be heralded as they are a voice for
past, present and future generations.
My Montauk
Valentine
by:
George Guida
Don’t you
wonder sometimes
what to do
on Valentine’s Day?
I do, I
wonder, I wish I knew
how to honor
your love and this saint,
whoever he
was, at one time.
I’m glad you’re not a saint. Then
I would be
in love with a saint,
whose cares
would not be of this world,
whose
queendom and body and piece
of whose
soul would not belong to me,
or worse,
whose body I would have
to flay or
burn or crucify,
to show what
true love is.
I know there have been two
Valentine’s
Day massacres, but
I don’t want
to massacre you,
unless you
break my heart, so
don’t do
that and I won’t have to
tie you to a
stake planted in my brain
or immolate
your image in my fireplace
(though that
might be an original way
for a saint
to transcend these little
holidays
that can be so frustrating
in terms of
finding good gifts or
so busy that
all the Martini glass-
shaped tubs
in the world are booked
six months
in advance of good loving).
But wait, I have an idea: I hear
the seals
are in, lying on the rocks
at Montauk,
basking in the winter sun.
I know I’m
not as cute as a seal, but
you are, so
maybe they’ll bark for us
or wave a
flipper and say a prayer
to whatever
saint seals celebrate
on our Valentine’s Day.
The Length of Your Arms
by: George
Guida
I wish for arms as long as yours, as years
to touch your shoulder easy as a first
kiss, when I know each one is. Each kiss
lives
its fleeting life as pair of livid pillows
on which to rest our burdened, pretty
heads,
with which to smother dread. I wish
I’d thought
to say before today that death is dead
with you, but life with you is days
without
prayer, paths to flight or hope for other
ways.
when hours no longer stand in desperate
pools,
but evanesce like labial dew. You
are
my skin, the sheath between the world and
my
oblivion, the gift wrapping the world.
You are content to keep it next to yours,
as I am pleased by the length of your
arms.
That we love
each other just imagine
by: George Guida
that we love
each other just imagine this
us here in
this forest of tinkling glasses
and through
the glass lighted trees
over there a
cousin
whose life
to me just three years back
was as much
a mystery as God
and over
here a friend who, I suspect,
hoped I’d
meet someone—you—
to produce
the smile before you now
a wedding
photographer a florist a d. j.
more than a
promise more than a gift
a second
chance to say years from now
I led a
happy life I met you
in a city
far away over kebabs
and humus
you were wearing a black suit
would you
believe, you in white
in a black
suit? and seeming so impossibly
beautiful
and honest and wanting me
to study a
philosopher you loved
and sneezing
and wanting me to walk with you
for cold
medicine and asking to keep in touch
and just imagine you in this city
much sootier
than you’d prefer
but you
already have the black suit
and that you
ride trains underground
every day
you know how to get
to Wal-Mart
in the suburbs you know
when it’s
time to escape upstate
with the dog
that growled at you at first
now showing
his belly imagine you
know all
these great restaurants,
some of
which, after rent, we can afford
imagine you
love me, someone
like you
whose heart is as full of love
as the city
is of steam and feet and neon
and I could
say why didn’t I find you sooner
but then I
wouldn’t have been properly aged
you would
look fifteen years younger than me
instead of
ten instead I’d be
twenty years
less mature instead of just ten
so you
understand how I can barely imagine
how lucky I
am to be standing here
in this
place I jogged by a million times
and
wondered, who goes there,
when I was
even poorer
than we are
now with you
how lucky I
am with all
of these
people in formalwear and friendly
staff and
you there looking like Minerva
or whatever
goddess is the most beautiful
and wise and
great on the dance floor
where I can’t wait for you to take
me
