Roaming Charges

By Antony di Nardo

A turbulent, celebratory flight from an accomplished witness and journeyman.

Antony Di Nardo's third collection of poems occupies the air between Canada and Lebanon, viewer and painting, victim and triggerman, reader and page. Blending a bohemian ebullience with a reporter's obligation to witness, the poems in Roaming Charges are a heady and celebratory bouquet of jet fuel, camaraderie and muezzin music. They look long and hard at their subjects, but also speak of the trails those subjects leave across the skies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771313490

Book preview

ROAMING CHARGES

  ROAMING CHARGES

Antony Di Nardo

Brick Books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Di Nardo, Antony 1976-




Roaming charges / Antony Di Nardo.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77131-349-0

I. Title.

PS8607.I535R63 2015     C811'6     C2014-907844-7

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Ann Nadin.

Cover image by René Mansi.

Print design and layout by Marijke Friesen.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A turbulent, celebratory flight from an accomplished witness and journeyman.

Antony Di Nardo’s third collection of poems occupies the air between Canada and Lebanon, viewer and painting, victim and triggerman, reader and page. Blending a bohemian ebullience with a reporter’s obligation to witness, the poems in Roaming Charges are a heady and celebratory bouquet of jet fuel, camaraderie and muezzin music. They look long and hard at their subjects, but also speak of the trails those subjects leave across the skies.

for

Callie, Isaac, and Lucas

CONTENTS

Auto-Bouquet

I

Roaming Charges—Big Deal, Beirut

The Lilies of an Arab Spring

Hamra

Let Heaven and Nature Sing

Sunday in a Square in Aleppo

Satisfaction

The Terrible Fires of Retribution Burned and Burned, but Beirut Held Up

Like No Other Place

Ignite

The Next Big War

Ballad from the Back of the Bus

No Reason

Gunflowers

Card Sharps

Naval Patrol

Dead Pigeon Poem

Etherized

I Can’t Live Here

Probe

The Good Song

II

Roaming Charges—Digs

Don’t Look Back

The Hat

Twitterpated

Museum Pieces: Galleria Borghese

Desktop

The Writing Life

Manhattan Flattened: After the Sack of Rome

A Look Inside Cy Twombly’s Second Voyage to Italy

Woman Declining Stairs (Suicide Bomber #2)

Daphne and Apollo: A Study Typed in Sentences

PAINTER, Painter

Rosa Rosa Vagabonda

Remus, the Forgotten One

(Witness)

The Disquieting Muses

Byron’s Missing Fingers: Lessons from the Imagists

III

Roaming Charges—Land Over Landings

Echo Lake

Can’t Complain (Just Look at Detroit)

Coming in Friday to Windsor on Wednesday

Envoy

The Tower

Toying with the Above

In and Out of Chatham

The Air in the Bus

London 2012

Pax Canadensis

The National Pantry

Three Balconies

Poets on a Plane

August Kleinzahler

Michael Ondaatje

Mary Oliver

Erin Mouré

Carmine Starnino

Ken Babstock

James Tate

North of Cochin

Notes and Acknowledgments

Biographical Note

But people change, they grow up, they fly around.

—James Tate

Auto-Bouquet

I was never born in Italy. Not even once.

Where I landed, sidewalks bore my name stamped in concrete taken from the borders between heaven and earth. I made light of hell, bent brooms for the blind to sweep away the dark. Like my father and his father before him.

I collected blood samples for the church divinity. The bread we broke was not