Gary Silva

Gary Silva, Poet Laureate of Napa County from 2008-2010, has had a lifelong passion for poetry and has published in dozens of literary magazines across the United States along with three anthologies. His verse captures the beauty of the Wine Country scenery in ways photographs and reportage simply cannot. Listen here to his readings, and find yourself walking the vineyards, catching the scent of ripening grapes and the sounds of the Napa River.

Poetry is music, and painting and words
and wine is painting and music and metaphor.
The legs splash up at the swirl and make their own rhythm, their waves up the side of the glass like images of hills.
And on the tongue it is metaphor “Loam and herb roots
high-pitched floral notes above cherry dried black berry.”
“Tart raspberry and lemon zest.” “Slight herb and chive blossom notes
over strawberry and passion fruit
aromas.” “Lean, fresh palate with plum
cherry, and mineral nuance.” The wine writers are poets
or literalists of the esters those mysterious organic
compounds, molecules linked like strings of pearls. Titian would be proud
of the purples like bruises the whites like peridots.
The gems of wine and poetry and music and painting
like holding a handful of tanzanites
and rubies
and love, small fragments of compassion
little pills we could all stand a prescription.

The river is a pride of lions running along the savannas sometimes leaping the banks, sometimes crouching still in the riverbed. The river is a serpent
that loops and turns in an oxbow. The river is clairvoyant; it knows the sea and it knows the moon,
and as the moon turns and pulls the earth with its moonbeam ropes, the sea rises with the moon and the river arches its back to the sun.
This River Walk is defined by cement paths and steel railings, a trail that will soon connect North Napa and South Napa for hovering hikers, as the neck of the swan connects its skull to its body as the river weaves us into the Bay and knits us to each other. This trail makes us wish for peripheral vision, the geese and the ducks and the seabirds rioting when someone tosses day old bread while white wings and feathers dazzle us, with the green hills behind and below slow river water.
At the corners of Main and Third, and Main and First there’s an enigmatic ghost bar and Downtown Joe's and NVCRC, and Peking Palace, and Tacqueria Rosarita, and Annalien's and Pizza Azzuro, and the Firefighter's Museum and Neela's, and the Playful Garden.
This once somnambulant town now has wine bars pouring purple and white wine, red as rhodochrosite, white like antique glass and the Oxbow Public Market, and the Hatt Building, Silo’s, the General Store, Sweetie Pies, and Angéle.
And cradling it all together like a cauldron, the hip-like hills gripped by green all summer with vineyards, and yellow in winter with mustard in rows, like Quixote’s old windmills, guarding our precious earth,
28and the river draining one way, then the other, looping in a knot, a giant dragon with a belly full of silt and promise and hope.

Gary Silva was born in the East Bay and has lived in California most of his life. He completed his M.A. in literature and poetry writing at California State University, Fresno, and his M.F.A. in poetry writing at University of California, Irvine. He taught at Napa Valley College since 1990 and retired in 2008. He has written three poetry anthologies: Ceramics, The Back-up Cafe, and Portrait of a Nude. The two poems appearing here are from his Ceramics collection.

Gary Silva’s books can be purchased through Copperfield’s Books in Napa www.copperfieldsbooks.com in chapbook format, $5.00 per copy. The entire book, Ceramics, is also available at the Arts Council of Napa Valley, website: http://www.artscouncilnapavalley.org/programs/poet_laureate.shtml

Gary Silva can be contacted at: garys@napanet.net

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