Three Sonnets

                           I

My idle prospects are an open wold
Where, in the sun, the dews of morning burn
Naked and pale, in fields of ripe lucerne,
Fragrant lucerne, azure and smoking gold
(Incense more pleasing if the truth be told              
To the gods’ nostrils than the soot’s return
As acid rain—tribute the heavens spurn
As sickly—to this miserable pinfold).
Industrious youth! The high gods laugh to scorn
Your picked fruits pilfered in the hopeful morn.
You are the abundance.  Your soft flesh, O youth,
Divesting to the noontide’s amorous tooth
Its shroud of mortal snow will stain the sky
With gold and turquoise filaments, burn and die.

9/13/2011


                               II


(Faust, Zweiter Teil, Fünfter Akt, v. 11581-11586)

Though my intended task is still undone,
My stone-pale blood reduced and untoward
My backward youth could wish its maiden sword
Were fleshed with deeds and sated with the sun.
To wrest by force of art from the million-
Marvelled fortress of language the bright hoard
Of silver words, by dragon-avarice stored
Against all strength, is hardship scarce begun.
But all that I in animal fury durst
In one proud heartbeat meeting strength with strength
Is animal fury scorned and wasted breath
Until time like a ruptured artery burst
And saturate the sky throughout its length
With poetry, hypoxia and death.

5/4/2012


                           III

The wind is fair, and tides of sunlit foam
Engage, immesh, retreat and flash again
In liquid foray, like embattled men.
This pulse of spray, this dance of tides, this dome
Of sweet and sea bright air, I call my home;
An exiled slave, till fortune, fate or pen
Secure release, and once more rapt, I ken
My salt and crystal sea, my spirit’s Rome.
The rape of Aphrodite: a child’s flesh
Polluted by excited sea foam. Dragon
Semen milked from the all-inseminating
Seahorses yoked to Oceanus’ wagon
Coating her calves and ankles with the fresh
Spittle roused by the wrath of the God’s mating.

3/16/2012

Hudson River, George Washington Bridge

Unravelled from its rain spool, the mist-spun
River a smeared jewel in the noonday sun
Under a feast of aether. Fair clouds pass
Locked enthralled in their high tower of glass

Like parsley flowers strewn on a hillside’s crest;
Spars or ribs in Jupiter’s mighty chest;
Florentine tresses plaited with wildflowers;
Worlds on a dial of planetary hours

Enamelled with celestial animals—
Flora and fauna that a light wind mauls.
Crushed like unwrinkled water I fall too
Prostrate under this avalanche of blue.

Thus the hours of day dream on the water,
Night-scales and day-scales of the ocean’s daughter
And as time creeps toward his lightless deep
Under her steel-gray dragon mantle sleep.



2/5/2012

The Sphenoid

A sonnet written upon looking at the illustration of a skull in a medical dictionary.


Concealed by muscle, powder, bone and hair
In duplex from the corners of her eyes
The twin lobes of her shapely sphenoid flare
Like wing-tips of a bird of paradise.

The cranium, bound with words: a veil of skin
Obscures its features, like a lady’s fan
Stretched on a frame that—blue, translucent, thin—
Is moist and flaky, like a sticky flan.

Suffused and dripping with the sauce of blood
That irrigates the temple of the flesh
It will endure until the purple flood
Subsides, the sutures of the bone unmesh

And the bare urn lies vanquished—jumbled sherds
Abandoned by the weak cement of words.



1982-1986?

All Points Bulletin

Felicia Foster. Eyes: green.
Hair: russet (when last seen
In a fashion magazine).

Limbs: graceful. Skin: creamy.
Lips: soft. Figure: dreamy.
(She makes your glasses steamy.)

Be on the lookout. Likes books.
Glances more lethal than a crook’s
Heater. Notorious in looks.



1982-86?

Happy Slaves

Every Bulkan farmer glaives
Fieldcorn with a toothsome scythe
In the land of happy slaves
Where the cutlery is blithe.

Oily shingles, pungent lights,
Walls piled high with well-fed bricks—
Institutional delights—
Winsome axes full of nicks.

Here, like stillborn eggs of thought,
Warm glass bulbs containing small
Writhing embryos of hot
Wormlight sprout from post and wall.

I salute you, happy slaves!
Every evening, one by one,
Mother earth expertly shaves
Bleeding slabs from Father sun.



Written 1982-86? (sometime in the early 1980's)

The Beryl Sea

The beryl sea, a tube of molten glass
Rolled like sheet music.
Like tumblers of a lock, sea-foam hammers
Dip and soar, paw the air.
Watch the mincing surf glide on piano wire feet.
A key turns in a sun-scoured cylinder,
A secret drawer opens on bubbling sand
And the sea swallows its glossy tongue.

Grendel

I was still reeling from Sandy’s punch when the Sandy Hook left hook shook. Like the Double Monster in the famous Beowulf saga: Grendel-and-his-Mother. (Ancient sagas are the only true histories and they seem to be coming true true lately with alarming frequency–like Noah’s Fludde in “Moonrise Kingdom.”) The “ Grendel-and-his-Mother” monster attacked a school and ate 20 children and 6 adults. It swallowed them in the tips of close to a thousand rounds of hollow point military ammunition (expensive little suckers but luckily he was a rich kid and could afford the “best”) purchased by the doting mother for her son “to bring him out of his shell” (out of his Grendel-cave in the dark basement where he dithered with computers). When it comes time for every young man to make his impression on the world isn't it his mother who supplies the ammunition?

The AR-15 assault rifle: America’s technical solution to the problem of the “other.”