Millenium dust

by Joseph Ceravolo

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

A poet sometimes associated with the New York School of poets, Joseph Ceravolo began writing poems in 1957 while completing his Army service in Germany. In 1959, Ceravolo earned a degree in civil engineering from the City College of New York and enrolled in Kenneth Koch’s poetry workshop at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

The New York–born son of Italian immigrants, Ceravolo died at age 54 after publishing several books, establishing a career as a hydraulics engineer, and raising a family in New Jersey. His 1968 collection, Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, was published by Columbia University Press and won the first Frank O’Hara Award for poetry—“intended to encourage the writing of good new experimental poetry.”

Ceravolo’s other publications include Fits of Dawn, published in 1965 by close friend Ted Berrigan’s C Press; The Green Lake Is Awake (1994), with poems selected by Larry Fagin, Kenneth Koch, Charles North, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, and Paul Violi; INRI, (1979); Millennium Dust (1982), which includes poems later anthologized in The Poets of the New York School; Transmigration Solo (1979); and Wild Flowers Out of Gas (1967).

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"His heart was clear on one point:
he knew whom he loved. . . ."

- The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Millenium Dust is divided into three parts: "Winds of the Comet", "Apollo in the Night", and "Millenium Dust"...

from "Winds of the Comet"...

I'm a blank
The sun is out
The wind is cold
Walking but not going.
Why didn't you love me?
On the beach
the shells still move.
Summer will never change
But you do, you changed

the face of the mystic
that wanders around in me,
that abandons me
when the rising moon surges
above the loneliness
of this beautiful world.

- Volcano Tears, pg. 13
*

I know
harm can destroy
what trust there was in love.
But no, not us,
walking in this bright
universe. What is in it?
No face, no love, no rage?
Among the transversal beams
of our giving up,
of all despair,
soothing at each end,
there is one thing left
in this raging dispassionate lust.

- A Last Song, pg. 18

*

I try to lighten myself with
prayer, sunshine, sex,
but I'm really as heavy as you are.
Brother of summer,
when all the hydrogen transforms
are you still
as instantaneous as you are now?

But what will be left of you,
and what will be left of us someday?

- Barbaric, pg. 21

*

At night when you are off
in a dark-eye sleep

and I look in the mirror
at these young shoulders,

my face filled with the wild flowers
we passed today,

it comes to me like a skunk
in the woods

that someday I won't
be standing in this cosmos.

And I am filled with
a strange energy

to alight my mind.

- Today's Night, pg. 23

*

The winds of the comet are quiet.
Tonight the rain turned around.
The way I held it and held you
was over the hill.

I see the distance fade
and holding it tightly
in my arms like a two year old,
I feel a great chill.

I am not a fool,
but love is so breezy,
as I live from day to day, more and more,
on sprung meditations.

- Winds of the Comet, pg. 31

from "Apollo in the Night"...

I fight and fight
when I'm away from you

Everything obscure and lonely disappears.
When I walk I feel my legs.
I think until
there's no air left inside me.

Forget me! Forget it!
The forces I have
are the same against and for.
They're never loaded as you are.
They live within the organs
like a cold night alone.

- Cold Night Alone, pg. 57

*

Eyes are swollen
after last night.
My head is empty.
There're stones in my shoes.
My voice sounds like a cricket's.
My arms are heavy
carrying my own body.
My neck is moving with resistance.
The heart and chest
are tied up in the sacrifice
of love that may never come.

Your kiss is still ringing in my ears.

Don't expect too much from life.

- Morning Insults, pg. 58

*

December! end!
this
beneath my house
alongside
by
into
of milk silver
that sprang up
in
leaves which
bloom
and as
in the. . . . .

O stars!

- Star Song, pg. 65

*

What, no one here? No one
around here? No buffalo?
Like sleeping on the toilet bowl. . . .
Drifting toward love. . .

The dogs are out this morning
jumping on top of each other
Is there a real release with them?

But, no one here.
There's no buffalo, only dogs,
this morning, where dawn
and a wild wild bird fly away.

- Great Plains, pg. 82

from "Millenium Dust"...

The city is up now
in the ultimate distance.
For some ocean beyond knowledge
my back has pains.

O Past, O Future
crashing together
O two equidistant stars
in the chance-ordained firmament.

- Sacred and Profane, pg. 90

*

I sit here, it is 4 AM.

Death sits on me
and overbounds my physicality.

It must be my underlying thought.
But now i know where it comes from.

I sit here, I lie here,
it is 4:15

out in the open,
under the stars,
let it rebound in my body,
my non-existing corpus,
into the snows of abstract flesh
that flood with light, my sorrow.

- Can't Sleep, pg. 95

*

The sand is washed from eroded rocks
The ocean with the sun shining off it
the colours of the god of the sea
and memory of a silver fish
in the dying sun.
And not to eliminate
the falseness of my life,
the son of the mankind
dispersed from that starry water.
If only the tensions of real poverty
could be dissolved
like the tensions of sin
in the baptism of the sea.

- Tensions, pg. 103

*

I don't feel it,
that kiss from the muse
that deadens me to this world
into the new land,
that strings me and paralyzes
even the world for me.
I don't feel it now.

- Not Really Punishment, pg. 110

*

Earth is only scraping
among the unknown stars.

I sit here relaxed. I'm dizzy
without any direction.
My senses reel.

When I imagine
there are no more people
on the earth,
adrift I ride
into unequal rapids.
It's happening now
to the forces inside me.
I'm fixed in these emotions
moved in directions of energy
that leave me finally
totally alone, and away
from everything I love.

I wake up and I sleep.
Cut myself loose.
I lose myself,
I see and I do not see.

- No More People, pg. 118

*

The spread of suffering
rolls away like dusk into the moon.
Flesh of these arid bodies
are more than what man reduced them to.

O archaeology, producing more
and more intensely
the feeling of being alone.
Abated, enchanted in a suffering
more magical than life
on these temple stones
that roll away enchantment
for a newer day.

- Millenium Dust, pg. 120