Ray Marsocci - One Poem

Whenever, After

Every other year here I’ve not let the lawn
ankle with leaves—thorn ash yellowed, red
maple browned—I’ve not let the mold fester.

Every other year I’ve husbanded a wife’s
garden bedded now in its own detritus,
the mulch of a milding autumn outside this

home echoing absence, a reliquary
emptied brittle like the yard I kick across
back and forth, packing my car with

The End, with the desire to live happily…

All last week each morning the freeway rushed
slowed, traffic piling past cars
crushed, windshield glass frothing

an eddying I wished would engulf me
as if into a final scene’s crescendo of violins,
the climax an undertow I wanted swift me away.

I am miserable with melodrama.
I am the light divorced of any deservéd now,
driving into coda’s swelling, sound’s silence.



Ray Marsocci continues work on a novel, now onto its sixth draft, having refound place in the Rhode Island town where he grew up; still, he needs a real job. His writing has appeared in such journals as Quarterly West, New Delta Review, and La Fusta, and most recently in the online journal, The Smoking Poet.