sw00032usabys-15.jan.sonnets.1of25

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 [ last modified: 2009-03-29 ]

 1976 Today is this opus's permanent name
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (1-15)

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1976: in 2006 was the current version of my opus 
of 366 sonnets and 12 reflections: 1976, which was
first published in the cassette medium in 1980 under
my Thinking Lizard imprint and the Alden St. Cloud
pen name I was using at that time.  It was a set of
six cassettes/ for which there are ISBNs as well as
Library of Congress registrations.  
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January: Year-day 1

With eyes for the shining wind to begin,
I measure this language challenging me:
earth, heaven, purgatory, hell; love, sin:
for we who deepen into mystery

up boulevards, by hairline meadow trails;
from mountaintops, on journeys to the stars;
through humid summer heats, rancid in jails;
near razor fires & ice, past blue that scars:

art first, craft second: vision, resonance:
images of the heart, games of the mind:
enchantments ordered to chase time & power
growing dark gusty in my trenchant dance,
in this hard snow, in my doctrinal spine:
grief: joy: where I learn to mend, to scrub, scour.

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January: Year-day 2

I am a roamin' Cath'lic.  Nowhere calls
me.  Barnes & Noble does not call.  I cry
in corners, stutter, fall.  So what.  Your shawl's
askew.  Try to forget who I am.  I
am not your friend.  My love for you exceeds
all knowing.  Feathers tango/ in the gale
I/ wander through.  Gather now your needs.
Together/ maybe we . . . a place to sail.

And a great white bird eases through the wind,
wingtip to wingtip the size of a man,
so sleek, so limned, against the sun-filled grey
I jump from our couch as if I had sinned,
entreating my loves with my voice and hand
until that gaunt mer rogue/ ghosts into day.

(octet: 12-24-06; sestet: 1976, & 2007)

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January: Year-day 3

Having started stiffly, loosened, then flown,
I am anxious to work deeply, to last/
in whatever liquid, solid, or gas
my imaging powers assign to a poem

created to praise in this house, this home,
of this special year of days as they pass--
my United States two-hundredth blast--
for the starved, the ill, the rich, the alone.

That my Jeffersonian duties lie
too often slumbering, I--I know why;
that a tough keen Shelleyan madness stays
lost in the clouds, in the wind, in a lark
while I continue my flickery ways--
Thoreau, Emerson, Melville: Make me arc.

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January: Year-day 4

You who are bloated with comforts, are held
creatures, whose habits so inflame your sense
you cannot cure yourselves; who have dwelled
and shall continue to dwell in the dense
enclosures you have fashioned, overgrown
and sickly; who, convinced it is all right
to trample other beings just to own,
have made the sun a darkness bringing night:

listen, understand: There've been times, are times,
and will be times, and there've been hearts, are hearts,
and will be hearts within those times your hate
not only will not overcome, your crimes
not only not destroy, but which will chart
acts in those times/ your greed perceives too late.

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January: Year-day 5

Views of America: to be a guide
for us.  Views of America: for thought.
Views of America: for joy, for pride,
humility, sorrows: to test what's taught,
to see if what then was/ and now is/ sought
agree; and how to live with what we hide,
once found; and whether what we can we ought
or not/ for our tomorrows, deep, and wide.

Of the first steps was one upon a rock,
a step which left no mark but in the minds
of those who saw it and of those since told.

Of the latest, a bolder mythic shock,
is one which shows its passing, and defines,
perhaps forever on Earth's moon, our soul.

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January: Year-day 6

Sleep (before continuance, before speech):
the planting, protecting and harvesting
of energy, as, when pulled from a beach,
powerful waters rest before they spring
their boiling looks again from the royal beds
of their conceptions, bursting from their hair
amazing diamonds, because their primed heads
know/ just exactly/ how to/ crack despair.

Sleep.  And I will teach you in your dreams.
For there is much to learn, and there is much
I can give.  Sleep.  There is far more than seems.
Sleep.  And, when you waken, you will touch
the air with strength and light.  I am your Ra,
I, The United States of America.

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January: Year-day 7

Wake.  The neon night flicks rainbows.  Wake.  Wake.
If your constitution's slight, weak, your rights
crippled, stretch, exercise, or the false lights
will more and more distract you into lakes
of/ slick illusions/ where your spirits break,
frantic, and your drugged, favored flesh, those nights,
drowns.  Wake, for there are mysteries, ah, sights
of nature which alone can thwart mistakes.

However, no.  So neon isn't true,
and does give an improper shade to you;
is a captured element, twisted by craft
for purposes often easy to view
with jaundiced minds.  That's really nothing new.
By men or not, all, seen and unseen, can.

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January: Year-day 8

We are slipping into summer.  I may never
finish this poem.  The eyes of dogs inhabit
the leaves.  Nowhere is the sky so clever
as on clear cold days in winter.  The rabbits
shake in their holes.  A scoop of darkness rounds
the crescent bowl of the moon.  Clutch yr nerves.
We're sliding into the rain.  The guard rail bounds
from the woods.  Open, close.  My vision swerves.

If peonies of ice bloom before us,
it is only because the ants of fiction
crawl.  Nothing usual has a place to go.

The consternation of fetuses thrust
to unjust deaths.  The isobars of diction.
And the wind chill's more// than fifty below.

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January: Year-day 9

All the sad remembrances, yours/ and mine.
"The past is past", they say.  Why then can't we--?
Or if you think you can, why then can't I--?
They never pass, though hidden by the screen
of their occurrences; they just become
harder to see: all those sad remembrances,
the further time takes one, the further some
new passion elevates one from where one was.

And yet if they were not, and did not . . . times
stab us, the possibilities of growth
would be more sorrowfully the less, would
maybe never be.  Swallows ring the chimes
at Capistrano.  Memories bring both
highs and lows.  How we'd change some, if we could!

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January: Year-day 10

They don't like me out there.  I don't know why.
Oh, they'll be sure to use me though.  They'll make
their errors and--tough, if I hit the sky--
I'll just have to somehow fix them, and take
it all as I can, though I'd like to cry,
like to grab the winds & the clouds/ and quake
them, terrorize with my bloody right eye
those pasty faces that made my skull ache.

Am I America?  Certainly.  No.
A little of this; a little of that:
bone of dinosaur, wing feather of crow,
corona of daffodil, tooth of rat.
If you want me, I'll be raking the leaves:
a man with nothing but arms up his/ sleeves.

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January: Year-day 11

So here I am: in prison, on an isle,
or a satellite circling a dead moon;
and I'm likely not to leave, late or soon,
likely to only seldom enjoy a smile.

It's not because of lives lost in the trial
of a wrong war/ or being out of tune
with nature, man and/ that Person, my Rune,
by most called "God", a name I'd hedge/ awhile.

What touches others touches me of course,
but circumstance and beings close at heart
and my own wants/ have more imprisoned me,
drawn me back upon myself, made remorse
I don't know how to stave/ the somber barque
I drift in; made my cowardice/ the sea.

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January: Year-day 12

"Most men lead lives of quiet desparation",
dictating to their secretaries, bending
over their unborn children, skipping stations
on an evening express, earning, spending,
male, female--I and you pitched among them
as if we were horseshoes still in the air,
the changing air, arcing toward a steel stem,
hoping our pitchers' powers more than fair.

For days moaned whistles have rushed from the spaces
between the windows in our livingroom's
west wall.  For years we/ have lived with each other,
thinly/ hiding faces/ behind our faces,
unable to halt the gathering tombs
that barely let us be sisters, brothers.

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January: Year-day 13

No, I never have quite/ learned how to swim,
although I have learned again how to float,
to stroke the length of the pool at the inn
and better than halfway back.  Would a coat
of oil improve that?  What a thing to think!
I'm not going to swim a channel.  God!
Just to get fifty yards before I sink
would be accomplishment enough.  I'll plod.

What else can I do, if I do at all:
I definitely am no natural.
Oh well, I may not get the chance to drown
anyway.  If I don't try, I won't fall
through water; need to gasp a saving call;
but--make of my ashes a laurel crown.

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January: Year-day 14

Happiness?  Sort of an Eden within,
you could say.  A place without clothes or tools
or shelters or weapons or "dis-ease".  Myth in
its glory, like a country of wise fools.
Hmmm!  Almost makes me feel I'm there!  Perhaps
I am!  The monarchs hid in Mexico
are; not the coral, though, reefing whitecaps,
the starfish on them.  Happiness?  Blue snow.

Remember--remember only good times,
exploring their crevices, their soft heights;
and dream those dreams that make you smile inside
as a poet does when he tees his rhymes
to zero them for vicarious sights
he rarely governs, hoping/ they abide.

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January: Year-day 15

 remembering Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Somewhere I heard the voice of a man charge
the world; somewhere I heard a voice of might.
Somewhere I heard the voice of a man large
and deep; somewhere I heard a voice of light.

Somewhere I heard the voice of a man word
on word well up in me; somewhere I learned
how the right words can turn the one who's heard
inside out.  Somewhere I heard; somewhere yearned.

Somewhere, too, a Robert Lee Perry, black
and big, companioned me; chided my moods
of self-disgust.  Somewhere, a Brother Grant
counseled me, listened; and, somewhere, Sam.  Back
at Oshkosh I somewhere, helped Blacks love, bruise,
through words.  Yet yours, Reverend . . . so meek my stance.
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Brian A. J. Salchert