Poetry: Anthony Bernini

by Timothy Cahill, November 30, 2007

Anthony Bernini was born in Manhattan and holds degrees from Hamilton College and Albany Law School. He lives and works near Troy. His first volume of poems, Distant Kinships, was published by APD (2002).

CUPID AGING

Old man, gone now out of fashion,
fooling with confounded arrows,
what became of men who claim you,
Aphrodite’s son, each one spun
into light by your sweeping flight,
held close in the deep of Aphrodite’s glance?
Then you found the world’s wayless thighs.
Flesh wounds in the tender narrows
flowered from your quiver’s careless sway and dance,
sweet surprise on a trail of sighs.
A host of seaborne hearts gathered to one
in the golden age of guileless passion.

The goddess’s divine surround
is strewn in pearls on bony slopes
where shadowed settlements are found,

and bristling perimeters prevail.
The old man is a late day light
who leans along the stilled vertical walls
of glass and steel. Though sleeping, they reveal
the closeheld life of lightfilled things.
He listens to the robin song that last light brings.
He listens just outside the boss of hide
that holds each seaborne heart,
awaits the tiding of the night.

The old man and his mother know
that he and I are not too old
to lie in wait along the pale moon road
that runs along the river flow
down to the starstrung sea,
for scattered ships to catch the early light,
steered in from starry height to starry height,
holding some you returning always to some me.