Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

It is our last night in Positano

                         -for my wife

Come out to the balcony.
The light is ebbing,
draining all color from the cakebread houses
that climb the mountain to the north,
scatter-stacked so that we cannot count the rows,
white, red, pink and Creamsicle orange, they rise 
above the cupola of the little church so near
it can hear our whispers.

Come feel night's cool as it flows 
from the horizon, as the sound of the surf
drowns Andrea Bocelli from the stereo.
I am making a photograph of this moment.

The sea is sixty shades of blue, it is
all seas. Each wave is every wave that ever
touched the dark sand.
Those children playing on the beach 
are all the children who ever played on the beach
and you and I, we are all the lovers.

Out in the bay, the empty island looks
like a woman on her side, absorbed in sleep.
Soon the night will swallow her solitude 
and her boundaries will melt into the darkness.

The Truth

            -for Helen Blackshear

The dying year its time will take,
like leaves within a frozen lake
that flutter down in ceaseless fall,
we see them there, but not at all

in their true light, as frame by frame
the cinema plays a Ponzi game:
a thousand snapshots come and go
as seconds in a seamless flow.

All joy and pain and love and strife
we meld into a rich, full life
of faces, lights and moments past
though most we lose, the best ones last.

Like words we form into our art,
each crafted line plays double parts
and as it passes, will relate
to rhythms we anticipate.

She was here, who now is gone.
A moment past, now moving on.
How else can poets play at rhyme?
How else can mortals measure time?

Barry Marks was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1952. He is now a Birmingham, Alabama corporate lawyer with Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC, where he specializes in equipment leasing and specialized financing. He attended Emory University where he obtained his B.A. in 1974 and in 1976, his J.D., from the University of Florida. In 1985 he returned to Emory University where he obtained an L.L.M. in Taxation. His poetry has appeared in The Lyric, Folio, WordWrights, Black River, Poetry Motel, Jewish Spectator, Calliope and other literary journals. He recently served as President of the Alabama State Poetry Society.