Poetry

by Robert Del Mauro

The Art of Love

The smell of freshly cut grass filled the room,
replacing the stench of anxiety in his nostrils.
An artist had shaded the rolling hills gray
so that they would appear green from a distance.

He was drawn closer, discovering
strokes that delicately caressed
his skin like soap, emerging purified.

He would visit this drawing after class every afternoon,
submerging himself in a different nuance each time,
starting with the small tulip at the bottom,
eventually arriving at two pins near the top corners.

This impurity would grow more profound each day.
At first, it was easy for him to stop at the clouds–
his thoughts cushioned by the artist’s imagination.
Yet, these clouds seemed to drift into the paper,
contrasting with the pins that were violently protruding.

He returned one Sunday
as the rain fell with the orange and red leaves,
dissolving in the breeze.
The pins fell to the floor as he slowly pulled
paper from the wall like dead skin from a sunburn.

On the back was the artist’s first attempt, overwrought
with misplaced lines and awkward shading.
All at once, the hills stopped rolling,
the clouds stopped swelling,
the smell of grass no longer permeated.

The drawing fell to floor
He realized that he could no longer look
at the delicate strokes without also feeling
the harsh ones.

---

Concerning Photons and General Relativity

You compress my bed sheets,
warping the spacetime continuum.
Like a single particle of light,
I move through your wrinkles.

However, if you were to disappear for eternity–
collapse into a single particle of infinite mass–
this continuum would never return
to an uninterrupted state.

Like a black hole, your absence
would be more telling than your presence,
and your infinite mass would bend
the continuum with enough strength to alter
the path of any photon.

---

On Evaporation

 First is evaporation:
water droplets remain trapped
in the leaves of a plant–
swaying with the late autumn breeze–
or in great stretches of ocean
before breaking free.

 This vapor rises through the air,
defying the very standards upon which
it has been confined for so long
as if there is a slight chance
it could escape this atmosphere.

Then comes condensation:
the air turns cold and can
no longer allow for such wishful thinking.
The vapor conforms, turning into dense droplets
that must succumb to the forces of gravity.

I’m on the rise.
I can feel the wind through my hair
as the colors of sunset swallow me whole.
I can only hope that when I fall,
the sun shines through the clouds,
dissolving the gray like sugar,
disappearing into my coffee,
leaving a rainbow in my trail.