William O'Daly: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

William O'Daly

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

William O'Daly

Five Poems

To My Grandfather, In New York

I

Sixteen and with little English, you

wave goodbye to two older brothers

returning home to Reggio Calabria to fight

beside cousins who still play in the hills

overlooking the warm Tyrrhenian Sea.

In the unfurnished attic with a view

of Long Island, loud American voices

and a confusion of bottles sift up

through the floor you sleep on.

Water freezes in the glass.

Your even breath clouds in dreams

that camouflage the Sicilian coast

where Taormina’s lighthouse no longer

sings. Outside your frosted window

blue and red lights blink the words—

strange lives breathe meaning

into glass tubes filled with neon.

Above one woman’s metallic torch

the bellies of clouds burn bright

as those flares that would burst

over Verdun, mute first gunner,

your body gasping with the bodies

of your American patrol, all of you

speaking the same language that night

in the wake of mustard gas.

II

Now I stand before the family tomb

on this twilit Calabrese hilltop.

Almost the man you wanted me to be,

I run a finger over your mother’s name,

Morabito, knowing it must be ours.

Did you hesitate on the stone steps

in your return, her only son to survive

that war? Did her blood-colored eyes

greet you in a code you remembered,

in one I’ve not learned to speak?

The ancient lighthouse spills

cold fire across the sea. Cosimo,

your grandnephew, who will soon go

to his station at Vicenza tells me

a lighthouse is called faro,

fuoco al monte, fuoco al mare,

all that we Italians follow

is il faro, faro e faro.

Epithalamion, Part I

for Nick and Shannon

Reaching out with patient hearts,

listening, you have grown together,

have learned what it means to love,

and now, possibility becomes you.

You have embraced change

and trusted in the wilderness—

you care about the small things

and what you make of the earth.

What you imagine, you taste and see—

in winter you may dream of artichokes

softening in their armor, in summer you let fly

the bright red tomatoes, the bread and the wine.

White, imperfect doves are like expectations

because no dove will ever be perfect—

it would not be a dove—and so you blow

on the dandelion and scatter seeds of hope.

Let fly with your prayer of celebration,

of stars, of ocean waves—you grow and grow.

Together you transform fear into water, grief into air,

confusion into earth, and with them build a lasting world.

Today, you would ask for nothing but each other’s hand,

receive with grace, seek the angels of compassion

in happiness, in memory, in wonder, in the other

and the one. You inspire, and are so ready!

Daughter and son, bride and groom, your souls

have chosen to bloom with what comes, like high desert

flowers, the take and the give, and you

return to the root, to a radical trust.

You are deep song. As it rises

between you, you hold close

the wild and shivering moon.

You love, love all the more.

The Physics of Beauty: Becoming

“The physics of beauty requires math.”

– Sharman Apt Russell

for Kyra

I

From here, you spot Quetzal’s eyes

flashing red among the tall oaks

at the far edge of the meadow and want us

to fly like dragons over the venerable branches

and beyond the small airport, Rollins Lake, the rising foothills,

to glide among snowy granite peaks of the Sierra, all time

present and the spring night delirious with stars. Earlier,

hiking in the shade of the oak grove, you and I

come upon a tattered couch, a busted chair, a pair

of torn and faded jeans, rusted bedsprings. As we head

home, you break the unsettled silence to declare

it would be a summer of swimming with hobos.

With a sinister giggle, you insist we dream

of chickens jiggling in the moonlight, for in your restless

sleep you need only mystical monkey power to sail

over Hanga Roa and Paris, to buzz our old Irish homestead

and land in Kathmandu, to dance with sweaty Venus

and chorus among lunar cows.

II

With open eyes, you navigate the conchoid of becoming

even as the tangled world fills with strings of questions,

its light woven by colliding galaxies and cosmos, that flower

of your birth, the harbinger of my death, both so

necessary that with every breath our bodies

say thank-you in the dance of discovery,

the math of music, the grace of the electron.

Why do I feel so helpless and so reassured

when you tell me that you want no one left

to loneliness, no one abandoned to the whims of the sun

or the dark secrets of the moon? Maybe because we are alone

in our return, fighting to sustain our rightful names,

turning our pain to purpose and never leave:

we depart only when we make our place in

the weave of things, when we stop trying

to become who we will be, who we are.

III

My beautiful daughter, you hide and seek

and grow in plain sight, and I, a “demented lemon”

hanging from the winter tree, ask what love is anymore.

No longer knowing I watch from a distance as your caring

expands with the universe, your suffering sharing in everyone’s,

theirs become your own. For that you are not alone

and fly over the spilled blood of Isreal, Gaza, Ukraine,

the strange magnification of imploding days, the dawn

you make of the hours that give way, inclined with the force

of a single soul and the one, like Gandhi climbing

the world’s hunger. Even numbers fail to calculate

the difficult beauty of your shadow, of sweet memory

and lingering loss, of these syllables as they eddy

and ease toward oblivion, their truth and love.

IV

From here, I feel you compose each of your days

by seeking a world that converges in absolute best,

engaging as faith the known and the unknowable —

caring for and hitting the trails with your small dog

in a pack on your back, rolling from your center

like a bicycle wheel. You go on becoming

even as light, having traveled so long,

so far, finds a home in your eyes.

In the Forest of Unknowing

I

All love is vulnerable —

were it not, what

would it mean?

Why is it so hard

to hold pronouns

in our empty hands?

Why is time measured

by the forgetting

of old wounds?

Why, in their souls,

are boats the blue of water?

All nets uncaring?

II

When must a seat at the table

be earned with blood?

With unrequited love?

For how long must a friend

be a friend

before they’re a friend to the end?

To how many must I reveal

my weaknesses before

they become my strengths?

Is it cruel

to name a flower

after its own extinction?

Marooned

What of the sea within me

erupts as a shifting tide

within you, our want

a full sail that prevails

on the imaginary wind,

energy not forecast but felt

in head and heart, as we tack

and roll with the fear of intention,

as we surge toward an undiscovered shore —

our Galapagos of dream colliding with habit,

with what we forestall as an article of faith,

with what we enact as our chosen fact?

How did we think ourselves immune?