Sonnets



Sonnets

Horse

Around her vistas, hills and trees, she moves
To see the horse who's waited longing for
The company and sweet things that he loves;
And sees the golden image coming toward
His pen, delighted in his instinct, ears
Anticipate the rythm from the earth
That's soft stacatto. Every beat appears
To clip the ground precisely as if worth
The weighted measure of consideration.
He smells familiar carrots, waits to be
Unique again, sympatico. And then
He takes the offered sweet things, tasting. She
Just smiles, while her mind turns far away,
Imagination and memory play.


Another

Another one rejected so the sum
Is climbing to the infinite of limit
And I have dedicated the run
To recreation of the number in it
It isn't far to go if just the eye
Will hold the distance equipoised with time
Provided there's no understated why
Abstractions hold the question in line
A stage that's warm enough to mist a glass
And actor holding memory and breath
And me who with the audience will pass
A life among our lives awaiting death
And doesn't take it wrong to see the rest
Accepted when there's no one met the test


She's Lonely

She's lonely see the eyes among the rest
Of those who did not read the book she read
Who do not understand she seeks the best
Of thoughts to think about among the dead;
Because she sacrificed herself this way
They understand her as she seems to float
On air around them, no one wants to say
How pointless it all is, no one will gloat
To find in human flesh a pause before
The rush to meer oblivion, the smile
That tells another we are all so poor
There is no time for being better, while
We all pretend it's ever death will wait
Despite our love and ignorant of hate.

I leave

I leave a dream of her inside of waves
So that she's gone inside the weave its voice
And stays in the pause of breath when breath stays
I know she's there now, somewhere, and rejoice
For her: Myself, letting it go is fine.
It was a simple thing, love, all it means
Was where the sea surge water makes a line
With sky or sand, to the eye limit seen
Through word and mind and both are gone well soon.
No no no; it is too late now to stay;
It really has gone the way of the moon.
Or more simply, disappeared like the day
Goes into night, the going of a song
Of sorrow for everything that’s all gone.

Magic

There’s magic in the numbers in the sky
As blood is spilling, staining city streets.
There’s miracle in trading eye for eye,
Salvation in the profit priests will see.
Religions bear plump babies heaven forged,
Their parent soldiers hymning on the sands
Of deserts with a different God, though gorged
On prayer too, a different ear understands.
Stock markets parley while the tribes below
The fleeting jagged lines, like plumes of jets,
 Are waiting for a date set long ago
Upon a calendar our day forgets;
But all the sun had hidden from our minds
Returns, the wheel comes round, the spring unwinds.


Forever

She waits forever.  Time it seems extends
Beyond the steam and hiss the kettle makes.
Invisible lines reaching limits, hands
Secured on chair arms, slowly she embarks
To rescue yet another stray.  She rises
As every joint of wood and bone are breathed
Together in a sigh the urgent siren
Drowns out, as if the boil needs release
More than the thoughts now sifting further out,
Invisible as vapor. Silenced by
The circumstance, while water fills the cup,
The kitchen pauses like a reader’s eye
Anticipating. Can she stitch the thread
In time?  Before it goes?  So that it’s read?


Someone

You look at someone acting on TV
As the cat next to the one sleeping gazes
At glowing shifting leaves through mesh and screen
Before she drifts to sleep.  Living our days
Like so we’re intersected by the lines
Emerging out of past and future. This
You can’t call terrible, my love, I’m
Not happy until you are. If you miss
Before or long for after overmuch
There is a lot of truth to that damned saw,
The here and now.  No, never mind.  It’s just
Our marriage’s lasted many years and all
To be alone with us;  and all this time
By clocks, not knowing right from wrong, yours, mine. 


Still See

I still can see the tree, remember bark
And branches, sitting at the teacher’s desk.
There are no screens, where windows open are
Seen student groups of two or more, I check
To see my class is still “on task” or bored
Beyond resisting anymore, I turn
To look outside, so as not to see or
Be seen by them, guilty, sorry, I’d learned
To only follow teacher’s notes to me
And so her lousy VCR is on.                                                           
The wind through drifts of rain and leaves I see
 Is moving to the mountain side. Upon
The thrust of yellow wings, two butterflies
 Against the wind, under the open sky.

Colonus

A cat cries and the cry is not the same
As pleas for food that kittens make to mother,
Behavior cats have which humans call tame,
Not fighting the way they do with each other:
This cry was unlike anything I’d heard.
I had to think of poems, again, I’d read;
But none compare this sound to just a word.
Williams said that neither hope nor dread
Attends a dying animal; this crying
Was dread, and awe, and eerie, calling out
Of nature to the moonlit night, a dying
As when Christ called to Eloi his doubt:
But did the garden groan the death of earth,
And could it be the pangs of some weird birth?   


Makemake

Woke up from dreaming of another place
And found myself still dreaming here among
The things that need be done or said, erase
The yard of all the wild things that throng
Like mobs of plant life bounded by each other,
And in the clearing stood statue of stone
Engraved in bas relief, image of mother
Although, as I was waking, she was gone
But I call her Makemake, my wife,
Who sleeps beside me, and now I can see
As the afternoon approaches, my life
Is nothing but the love she’s had for me:
Hawaiian woman, wronged but wise as sky,
Now has the honor that none, nor I, deny.


Eyes

Her eyes that glanced just once at me were eyes
So beautiful they shouted in that crowd
Of diners who celebrated a life
Who’d got the upper hand on cancer - loud.
I read Keats poem not long after this - Ode
On a Grecian Urn - where beauty is truth,
Truth beauty, that’s all one needs to know.
The urn and glance, though one ancient, one new,
Were beyond memory and time’s decay;
His poem, her eyes, surviving both despite
The all absorbing trample of the day,
The disappearing footfall in the night;
Sustaining if ignored, if understood,
If just to have just once been been, is good.


The Night

I drank myself to death, was gone some time
You'd call infinite or nothing, for me
It didn't mean anything and words, rhyme
Or not, they go their own way - finally
They find another reference.  Slow
The night feels, as my wife is off doing
With friends; not doing anything, I go
A long way, like when I was up and going
Down wobbly to the place her friends made games
Of words and others; and later that night,
My wife drove us to where they played. Life's aim
Is simple when you see it up in lights
And death is dark, like a story not told.
Now night, this calm and gentle one, unfolds.

Split

You the dream that lasts like a river sunned
On a clear day when you smile and tell me
What we have to do, go, see, what become
As the river runs its course, to the sea.
It would be nice to believe in it but
I know better, this is the dream, the worst
Would be to tell you and you not to shut
The door right away on this, and get hurt
The way the lost are, who can't get past it
And move on and go on, with someone who
Is golden in light which no longer splits
Real from not real, still, here, I do
What is more important than living well
I guard the providence of life though hell.

Here

Here it is,  I am alone with tendrils
Leading to solutions out of the dark
And patterns of afflictions; with the frills
Of overcoming the idea this stark
Impeded life is what it seems, because
It's just what it seems and it's what's not seen,
It is is not, won't be, and never was.
Here it is, I am alone. What I mean
Is, we all. I'm tired. A cat sleeps. It rains.
Each distinct thing. Waking. Sleeping. Come, go.
Priests they annoy me with their money pains
And teachers pester me, doctors don't know
What ails me is not disease but cure:
To bide the waiting without being sure.

Deletion

The stuck delete key streams words to the sea,
And paragraphs jumble like mirror shards;
Then the mirror no longer looks at me
When the cursor takes away all the words.
I lose myself in the ocean where all
The voices are discordant and afraid:
The waves are relentless, and every one falls
On the shore, passing from living to dead;
Afraid of losing though all has been lost,
Of finding out that it all disappears,
That it's never anything but light tossed
Stuff on surface after surface of mirrors.
And stuck the key deleted what I said
But it returns, and goes when it is read.

At the Art Museum

With a shovel I killed a centipede
That lived close to where visitors park
But I could have saved it, I did not need
To hack to pieces this dweller of dark
Seclusion. When I think about it now
After nearly twenty years in this home
I wonder why I did; I wonder how
To make out the point of it in a poem
And sense for rhythm and feel for sound,
Then with frontal backward-pointing legs, hold
And stun into fitting what word I found.
If killing it was sacrifice, I'm told
Through different myths, the centipede could be
A death returned to life if seeing sees.

Abandoned

Here all has been abandoned: Every drop
Of drink the drunkard needs is downed. Each tear
The sad must weep is wept. Bullies stop
Aggression and their victims lose their fear.
The soldier's rifle on his shoulder seems
Impossible to carry anymore.
Supplicants find God. Dreamers find their dreams.
The prating politicians ask "What for?"
Instead of making speeches for self gain.
The lonely find each other. Dying live.
Love finds love. The suffering have no pain.
The poor have money that the wealthy give.
All this and more if wishing things away
Were just as possible to do as say.

Door

In through the porch screen cold air comes to play
On the hairs of his legs and arms; his tank
Of oxygen is next to him, the day
Is still far off. The creditors, the bank,
The committee and the lawyers, all these,
Can wait til morning comes. Wait for the day.
Wheels crunch gravel. He unbends his knees,
Unlocks several locks, to see if they say
Any more about it in the news he scans
Like a stage actor looking for reviews.
He wants to tell his mother of his plans
And laughs at her empty bed. Next he screws
His courage to the sticking point. He's found
Dead the next day when they break the door down.

Morning Rays

I close my eyes and think; and think upon
A sunrise: in La Jolla: “Morning Rays” -
As then as now, the sun sets. Then the dawn -
Epiphany and repentance. Ah days
Since beauty, truth, and hell, when simply seeing
Meant everything. The mind and body dies
And what we thought of once as simply being
Becomes a mess of complicated lies.
Once everything the world could say or do
Our young unbridled tongues and heart could sway;
We had the blind untalking sun to woo
Before the ending of our life long day.
But now, you know, it is all seconds just
Before sun sets, the settling of the dust.

Leaf

There wind tossed up, there wind tossed down, up, down,
The cat goes there, then there, then there, and leaps
The leaf is caught, released, leaf's caught, he's found
Another so he twists around, then sees
Far off are other leaves that dance and spin
And he's a cat now doing, being cat,
Wind wind, the leaf wind made enchantment,wind
There, there, the cat, the cat, leaf that, and that
The cat is here and here, the ti leaf hides
The leaf, the waiting cat waits, being waiting,
The wind then, then the wind, the biding bides
Then wind, in wind the leaf, the cat stays, staying
The cat is staying, the cat cat-leaps, leaps
To take, in taking, paw on leaf, the leaf.

Ant-lion

About two inches deep, three inches wide,
Dug heaping on its head then tossing sand,
Crawling backwards, until reposed inside
An inverted purgatorio; grand
Master of a hole, whose slippery walls
Are stages and poetry publication.
Insecure footholds, but the promise calls
Of recognition, reward, adulation;
So would be actors and poets are caught
In sicklelike jaws, soon gone and replaced.
All's relative, deconstructed, and nought,
The ageless intellect has been replaced
By larvae. Adults, they can barely fly
But soon mate each other and so get by.