Three Poems

by Craig Constantine


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​​
​Salzburg

1. 

Eternal morning.
Call and response from a mediocre star to a planet
Of singular, fretful genius.

Dawn-struck, the hills blaze with black-eyed Susans.
Golden petals bloom with heat, atomizing the nectar
That calls to the virtuoso mason bee.

A chaffinch pierces the air with his aria
Of bright trills and cadential flourish.
A songless diva alights on the next eave,
Tremulous with desire.

Cream-colored bread truck labors up the Linzer Strasse.
Profaning the air with a cough of exhaust,
Then perfuming it with the intimation of new life.

Lovers awaken in a muss of limbs
And cloud of stale wine breath.
Their many indiscretions of the night
Erased by their first sips of cappuccino.
Absolution that Capuchin monks
Courted for fifteen hundred years
In the monastery crowning the hill.

2.

Dying, the Tethys Ocean crystallized into purest salt,
Prized like eternal fame.
Calling forth the operatic fortress on Hohensalzburg hill,
Which called forth the cathedral and palaces.
Which in turn called forth the monastery across the river.
Eternal call and response,
Vainglorious whims of salt kings
Answered by the abstemious ways of the monks.

From this fretful congress of decadence and self-denial
The music poured forth,
Like the lovers-swarmed river flows out of the Alps.
As naturally as Edelweiss spills like milk over the hills,
With one supernatural exception.

Call and response:
Monks and crowned heads alike pray for millennia
For the Second Coming, or the semblance of any miracle.
Yet when the power beyond the sun and planets finally replied,

Singularly blessing them with an impish, bright-eyed,
Prodigally gifted son of their otherwise provincial city,
They snub him until he slips into the unmarked grave.

3.

The newly sated lovers are seated in the Mozarteum,
In a hush not unlike that before the act of love.
As familiar as it is note-perfect,
And bestial and sacred at the same time.

Now the orchestra irrupts the urgent fanfare,
Now strings caress it with a lover’s tenderness.
With call and response
As of extinct ocean to city of salt,
As of fortress to monastery,
As of songbird to mate,
The concert begins.

Posing once more
The eternal question.
Which burns longest?
Our mania for immolation
Or scattered, divine sparks of invention?

Which will outlive the other?
The planet Jupiter
Or the symphony by the same name?


A Walk Up Russian Hill

I’m consumed by sex.
How Amazonian it is.
How Everest-like.
My life’s a base camp
For that sinuous push to the summit.

How strange, then, 
To be distracted by scrollwork? 
Gingerbread eaves? 
A baluster here, a bay window there? 

Green Street tilts straight up. 
​But its cottages climb serenely, 
Garlanded by ivy, 
Bejewelled by stained glass. 
Matronly in their pastel robes, 
And great-aunt’s cologne of garlic and tomato 
In the bay-flecked air. 

Halfway up I break a sweat 
In the presence of these ladies, 
More elegant by the block. 
Now with turrets and bay towers. 
​Divorcèes and heiresses 
Glistening like mimosas 
In their eternal luncheon. 

Take me back to your Victorian times 
When this cur had a muzzle. 
Or at least discretion and ceremony. 
And all those lavishly dressed lies. 

It is altogether too much. 
This monomania 
Of genitalia and such. 
This sweaty fever needs to break, 
At least for one night. 
We will drink my bottle of cheap white. 
I will be your Gabriel Oak, 
You my Bathsheba Everdene 
In our unrushed twinning 
Of souls before lips. ​

Breathless at the summit of Green Street 
I press the button for 132. 
And there you are, with wet blonde hair 
Smiling like a she-wolf, ​
White bathrobe gaping. 


Places

They are all in their places.
The man who is strikingly young.
The man who is not yet old.
The woman who is too young.
The dog that is racing through time.
The globe that is ancient.

They are silent for the moment.
Dinner and conversation
And the fullness of their time together,
Digesting. Word-gathering.

They are all going places.
The young man has a ticket
To any place you can name.
But he is in no hurry.
He has never been in a hurry,
Which earned him the ticket.
The plane to where everything happens
Will leave when he’s ready,
Not the other way around.

The man who is not yet old
Is traveling too,
At the speed of chiaroscuro light into this canvas.
He has always been in this hurry.
Now he finds himself in the place
He’s always been rushing to.
He turns every brush stroke of this miniature
Into memory and words,
So it will last a while longer.

The woman who is too young
Is going home.
Earlier and earlier into her girlhood.
She is radiant and wistful,
Like a watercolor slowly fading.

Look no further
Than the dog that is racing through time
To see how replete is this place.
He, the athlete and savant of his kind,
Is with the utmost restraint
Dozing at feet, and nibbling at a squeak toy.
He gives himself as fiercely as one person to the other,

​Though his time is shorter.
He is going places lying still.
Too fast, too soon.

The globe that is ancient
With USSR and other curios
Once spun for a honeymoon.
Of the thousand artefacts
That propelled us to these places,
It alone survives.

Gaze upon this scene.
These people, this dog,
This miniature prelapsarian world.
This kinship that weathers
Any lapse in conversation.
You may see everything you could ask for
And how precarious it is.

Soon the young man boards the plane to everywhere.
The man has become old.
The woman impossibly young.
A terrible empty place yawns under the table.
All that remains of what you may ever want
Is a hazy watercolor of words.
And this globe that speaks
How sacrosanct lines have blurred.


Craig Constantine is an editor-at-large at Poetries in English Magazine. His poetry has appeared internationally. Constantine lives in California.


​​SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026