Thomas Festa managed to get through nine years of grad school and sixteen years’ work as a professor of early modern English literature before returning to his first love, writing poetry. He still makes a living through his teaching and uncreative writing.
Excerpts from Festa’s debut poetry chapbook, Earthen, published by Finishing Line Press (2023):
On the Death of Miles Davis
by Thomas Festa
In the hospital where I was born, St. John’s
in Santa Monica, my grandmother cared for Miles Davis
till they turned the machine off
and he breathed his last breath.
Before that, his breath and I
had only ever been connected by machines,
acquainted by vinyl and silkscreen:
my father’s abandoned record
collection, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain;
and concert t-shirts
for the Tutu and Amandla tours
I helped Keith make at work.
She told
of the ravages he suffered, singular at the end
as he had been from the start, mightily
protesting himself into a coma.
It is not
the tone of another world, but this one,
cussed and sutured so to heal,
scars within earshot. Not turning away
from the audience, as in later years onstage,
but outburst from a backlit thunderhead.
She mentioned
flowers, followers,
hangers on,
ambivalences of family,
all peeled away, dropped
like petals
into municipal water
in a glass vase.
I can’t believe
Bitches Brew
is as old as I am.
What drove my grandmother’s years of volunteering
comes to me like forgotten names of constellations.
Feline, lithe in your approach, we have hardly made you out
in the night sky, nor can we glean your shape,
a breath through innermost brightness, the bell
of that last trumpet. Another, tolling.
Each one of us listening, sounding
the syncopated notes of our own desolation.
Rowing to Innisfallen
by Thomas Festa
What else but ruins
did the guidebook promise?
Sika deer, foxgloves in flower,
the sun lifejacket orange behind
stained monastic stones...
We crossed the Lake of Learning
in a listing boat,
each under the cowl
of our own dark ages.
Counterweight unshifted,
we drifted through the apocalypse
till the graves yawned awake
and marriage ended, or began
to. Silent, the deer swam by,
climbed to shore before us
like lepers, monks, high kings
—not an unrecoverable dream,
but the childhood of familiar things.
Ripples from cardinal directions
galloped against the stern,
miniature horsemen
of the compass rose.
Peregrine Question
by Thomas Festa
An answer lies among the dark brushwork,
calligraphy of the leafless poplars
in the wind. The raccoon’s curved carcass poses
no question. What quandary the turn
of the dry ravine, or tart, barbed curl
of the wineberry shoot? How to get by rote
the hierophant markings of the algal blooms
greening the inkpot pond? Stranger,
thorn flower and thistle syntactically arrange
your dominion in a sentence no
convict wants to hear. But all below
await the verdict of beak and talon,
the revelation of your lethal grace.
You spread your throne in middle air
as if at the world’s last session
and plunge toward the work of judgment
devouring every flutter of doubt.
Alien flowering, true north of curiosity,
my nib’s hooded, my head bowed.
Yours are scriptures we could never write
much less learn to read with the conscious mind,
should it exist. At your cry, I look up,
glimpse only your vanishing motion,
and hear the flex of hollow bones in flight.
Field Trip
by Thomas Festa
Waves of stone rise ahead,
swells in an earthen ocean.
On the mountainside, early
morning, mid-October.
Mist rises from the valley
floor, the glint of river
scything through. The air
is thinner, it gets harder to
lie to yourself, on the ridge.
Slopes look gentler from afar
than up close, sheer crags
and scree, surge of shale
and graywacke sandstone, bedrock
lifted up and warped
in the Permian. These breakers, too,
someday will crash.
They image permanence
for now, like the group
shot we’ll snap at the peak.
Classmates you’d rather play
with won’t matter in
a dozen years, but they’re
as important as you think
for now. Dense geologic
folds—synclines, anticlines—
dot the horizon like
opposed fates you could choose.
To own your homing you
must listen, not to me
walking near, but to
the silent expanse beyond
that vanishing point. And so
we hike together, Son,
for this brief time, this being
all we have. For now
we breathe hard together,
remember, it is glorious.
You of All
by Thomas Festa
Against a backdrop of paths through tall grass in sun showers,
the mountain ridge falling away into the day’s last light,
and the ring of footfalls echoing down
the corridor of a mental ward; against
chance and probability, ends and odds
calculated or imagined; against hope and others’ judgments:
I choose you.
As a charm against foreboding, doom, and predicted failure;
fragrant against reason, scents,
and rhyme, memory and forgetting, time,
eternity, and whatever’s in between; as talisman
to ward off insomnia and nightmare;
against exes and hexes, faith and disbelief:
I choose you.
Against the grain and the grape, beyond fear and confidence,
are the words you gave me
braiding together to form an oath
knotted by the mind against time;
against myself questing toward you, up against
the world, or you, finding and binding a new self each time
you choose me.
