Poems by John Tessitore

Metamorphosis

by John Tessitore

From Canary Spring 2021

John lives in the SuAsCo Watershed, feeding the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers. There are a few hopeful signs that this cradle of American literature, and of revolution, is finding its voice again, in the howls of returning coyotes and the nocturnal scream of the fisher cat.

The rattlebone branches of the maples
are tapping their skeletal rhythm, as the lilac
sighs its burgeon magenta, as the peaking
azalea hums like an engine, as the cardinal
sings with a cantor’s precision.

I rake the mulch of winter to a midden,
a buried mosaic of broken shells,
intentions hidden in soil, in time forgotten,
yet someone here once paid attention
to structure, to the marrow if not the nacre.

So here I will till with my grub hoe and trowel,
split the tamped surface and sift the compost
from my kitchen. Every peel, core, eggshell
adds a grain of texture, tilth to support
snow peas and peppers, heirloom tomatoes.

In this spring of severed connections
we will have leafy greens, yellow blooms, bees,
rangy vines that reach for the sunrise
and roots that burrow down through tiny shards
of oyster stolen from the sea, scraped

from the bottom of a bay. And nothing
will be wasted anymore, not the worm
in its labyrinth, not the pill bugs that molder,
not the spider’s web, and not the vineyard
that ripens by the woodshed—grape hyacinth.

Testimony

by John Tessitore

From Canary Spring 2025

He took his rest on a rock beside the brook.
By the time he sat, his clothes were as muddied
as the far bank, having caned his way across
wet grass like a surveyor, or a day-worker,
temporary labor on his grandfather’s land.
His face was worn stone in the sun and he stared
with the clear eyes of a man who’d seen his share
of struggle—but never a war, a blindness
he wore like a badge of honor. Every spring
he found his reward in the blooming wisteria
that framed his side-door, as it had for as long
as he lived there, growing wild in violent
waves of color. He told me it was “renewal
from every angle”—from this bare ledge beside
this slow stream, for example, across the meadow
he mowed once a month, weaving his tractor
around the tufts of native flowers, the patches
of wild raspberry thick with thorns, groundhog
holes as big as his head. “Once you beat the land
into submission,” he said, “once you drag it all
into the open, what’s left for you except to listen
to the boring rhythm of your own breathing?
That’s why mastery is always self-defeating.
Questions have answers, but awe is fleeting.”