Rooftop Poetry Club - Michael Tritto

Michael Tritto

Bio:
I retired from teaching in the Buffalo Public Schools in 2001.

I have been writing poetry for a long time and I have had work published in poetry journals throughout the US, and in England, Ireland and Australia.

I won several local awards from Just Buffalo, Niagara/Erie Writers and the AFL-CIO.

I have read my work in many places in Western New York to include the Burchfield/Penny Art Gallery Series in 2005.

In March 1990, my narrative poem, "Light from a Dark Canvas" depicting the story of the Holocaust, was the basis for a dramatic ballet that was staged at the then Pfeifer Theatre in Buffalo.

In January of this year, Sirius Satellite Radio read two of my poems on their program the Naturalist's Date Book, Marion Roach the reader.

Poems:

Alaska

Mystery is the first word of ridges
running wild from peaks to valleys.
Dall sheep hold like pins on cork boards.
They run in bursts, hard stop to a stand.

All the thrusts of clouds, the leaps
that boulder legs stretch over each other,
the struggling turns of river and glacier
suggest distant echoes of choral thunder,
yet offer only a mist lifting off rocks.

I am quiet at full speed.

I would remain here. I would run away.
I wait for words that quiet doesn't have.

The greens fall on greens, all shades and depths.
They are pyramid archives inside light and dark.

Mountain over valley to an ocean of mountains
are what the eye cannot manage. So, it holds
on to a fissure here with candescent blue,
a sputter there of a fall that hints of more.

All language has been cancelled by the sun.
Memory is adrift and makes things up.

What was snow and ice rubs into streams,
cuts crevices in the high slopes,
leaps in a long fall that foams the air,
its rolling twists surrender to the pines.

There is no waiting on this mound
that I will never leave because every leaf
of time has lost place and definition,
as wet has no weight in the sea.

I have never entered here before,
and I've been here all along.

I am watching beyond the moon and the sun.
I see the moose kick along in the stream,
the wolf tethered to a scent on the road.
I am connected as the grizzly to her cub.

I should have known from walks in the snow,
from waves on the shore, red in the sky.

The red-winged blackbird kept calling from the circles
of time that are place without measure.

Live at the Philharmonic

The baton rises for all of us, orchestra and audience.
Breaths are slow in the hold of caverns within us,
then the fall to a valley, updrifts of shadows and light,
syncopations of village lights along the far roads
open into the composer's room of first marks,
each one timed for all time, the beats of hearts on wing
weaving around the conductor's arms, the woods and winds,
the composer's feed into rooms where players first found
their mastery seeds, the sounding limbs of their new flesh,
repetitions stitch their hours into freedom of melodic sweeps
out to the faces, row after row, their companions within
childhoods and today, touch sorrow, touch a new chance,
the bent figure over paper and pen across cliffs of time,
faces known in the far gray, questions with windows and doors,
all members of tonight, each in singular flight
sit alone within each other on great blankets of sounds
that lift from rocks to rivers, hot breaths on an ear,
the harmonies, the simple tunes, raptures ablaze,
baton down, the great hall, and then the roar . . .

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra
JoAnn Falletta, Music Director
'The Overture to The Three Cornered Hat', Manual de Falla
June 13, 2004 Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo

Room for More

Breathe in the gull above waves,
embrace your eyes around its glides,
then follow light to a finch among branches,
to a woman wrapped in wind from the lake,
all these passengers on breaths pulled in.

A last breath breathes the gatherer away,
this soul that always found room for more.
All exhalations practiced for the end fall,
for a last turn on to path or flight,
loaded with harvest collections,
caches from walks among glints and songs.

Friday's Corner

Voices off ceilings in boils of bubbles,
they scatter through the froth.

Friday floats loose from all tides,
faces dancing in varnish along the bar.

The shine remembers some shining hour,
while talk drifts silently across the screens.

A young man sits next to all seats,
pumping up word clumps, hand on glass,

city elections, gas, women at the door,
a sip from the six inch narrow glass,

whiskey and ice, the barmaid checks,
he pans the colors, some throw-back smiles,

hears old laughters cupping music in their hands,
sees an outside press of boy eyes on the glass,

and the boy cups the binoculars of his hand,
excited by hand flights, raucous chords.

The barmaid looking younger than most
says nothing, checks and pours again.

A woman straight up at the bar, stillness
listening with a half, half again smile.

There are fingers pointing in all directions,
calisthenics underline heads down, heads back,

shoulders lean off exaggerated words,
'I know, I know, I'm the same way.'

And embraces are left to the eyes,
raise the glass, arms on arms, heads to heads,

as an old man slides and wobbles off the stool,
falls against shoulders, against a wall

that kindly leads him through the crowd,
head slumped, hand over hand in and out of shadows.

Voices and laughter climbing on each other
pushing into the silence of the screens.

Spotty quiets appear here, over there,
like cats watching from the corners of eyes.

Shadows have followed the old man out,
and lights brighten on glistens on damp skin.

'Hey, Mick!', a thin slur, 'What's up?'
There's a jiggle in the bubbles. The barmaid pours.