Vox Populi
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Al Ortolani: Two Poems
Red Maple
At the college war memorial, my father
dedicated a tree to my mother. She wasn’t
a veteran nor had she served as a WAC
or in the WAVES or a member of the USO.
None of her children had been to Vietnam.
She’d been elected the Apple Day Queen, and
smiled like a schoolgirl from the campus stage.
She’d left college to raise children. I suppose
that was some of what my father was thinking
when he paid for the tree and the brass
plaque at its base. The memorial was
a quiet place, the names of veterans inscribed
on the brick path, all matter of rank and service.
So why not a mother and her sacrifice?
In the evenings, the two of them walked
in the shade to the tree. Sometimes
they sat on the marble bench with the sun
going down behind them. There was
a sense of all this growing beyond today,
barring storm or drought or insect swarm.
~~
Mom’s Big Orange Book of Childcraft
I imagined my mother by a fishpond
with garden rocks and submerged reeds,
a pool stocked with orange comets,
fantails, and spotted carp.
I knew them by the shadows they lit,
the stones that sheltered them.
She was a quiet woman with quiet stories.
When I couldn’t sleep, she read
to me from Tennyson and Longfellow.
I rested in her cadence,
the pressure of the iambs on her lips.
I felt her rhythm, her breasts
rising and falling against my shoulder,
her heart skipping if I asked
why the pretty fish hid in shadows.
She said nothing was as bad
or as good as we supposed it would be.
She taught me how to worry over a sonnet,
rather than tomorrow, to see how the octave
turned when the goldfish disappeared.
Source: Fishvet
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Al Ortolani
Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. He was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review.
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Two beautiful love poems.
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Oh lovely poems! The second was so evocative as my mother read poetry to me too and I hear those iambs in rhythm with a mother’s breath so well. Thanks Al and Michael. I’ve never seen Al’s poems before. I’ll be looking for them.
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Al is a wonderful poet whose work has not gotten as much attention as it deserves. Welcome to the fan club, Mary!
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Thank you, Mary. I’m glad we share a mother’s love of literature.
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Again, thank you, Sean.
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Sean, your responses are beautiful poems. Very fitting for Tarpon Springs. Thank you for your comments.
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Excellent work! I reposted the link.
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Thanks, James!
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I appreciate it. Thank you.
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I rested in her cadence. The perfect place to rest. That line will forever bless with its quiet power.
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Yes, Al’s poetry seems like an account of normal life, but somehow there are glimpses of truth and beauty in the lines. Powerful stuff.
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gracias…you make me feel like I know what I’m doing and not just banging around in the closet…lol
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Banging around in the closet is what we’re all doing, I think. And then our eyes adjust to the dark.
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Sean said it all — wise, discerning, beautiful — a calm and deeply moving elegy of hi s mother — but, yes, calm. Suddenly I hear this word in its musical beauty…
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Perfectly said, Laure-Anne. Thank you.
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Thank you, Laure-Anne. “Calm” is such a key to surviving this crazy, loud world.
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I love these lyrical rhapsodies about Al’s poems. Thank you, Sean!
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Such wise, discerning, and beautiful poetry. I waken from my dreams, not quite light out, returned home from a trip to the Gulf Coast, the Greek Enclave at Tarpon Springs and my body and mind consigned all day to the difficulties of the drive, three and a half hours, arriving to rainy afternoon and it seems the poems of this author are further places to visit and maybe this is yet still a lovely world we live in.
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Again I’m a beneficiary of the mini Anthologies of Al’s related poems, having visited this enclave of his heart. There is a gift shop there, where I spent a little money buying things for our granddaughters, and sat a moment and took a coffee and pastry from the cafe before moving into the deeps of what is here.
There is a waterfront where I ended up, an inexhaustible place no one knows the extent of.
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