The Church teaches
its recalcitrant flock
that
Ordinary Time spaces
singly
but
to testify
to the eternity of forty years or forty days
Lent is spent
in accumulated abstinence:
a refracted desert
peopled by distractions
tempting us to forget
Gilbert L. Gigliotti, a professor of English and Latin at Central Connecticut State University, is the editor of two anthologies, Sinatra: But Buddy I’m a Kind of Poem and Ava Gardner: Touches of Venus. He is the host of CCSU’s book talk television program “Central Authors” and of “Frank, Gil, and Friends” on WCS 107.7 FM New Britain. If pushed, he’d say his two poetic heroes are Horace and Sammy Cahn.
