sw00033usabys-16.jan.sonnets.2of25

2 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (16-31)

-
January: Year-day 16

Today I begin my thirty-sixth year,
expecting I'd know how I want to say
I am looking forward, happy I'm here,
and can think and write for another day,
hoping with the pull of the weird full moon
our creativities will rise and clean
our soiled small emotions and reasons soon
so we won't be burnt or blown from the scene.

Humans we've been; humans we shall remain,
if we finally see/ these are the times
of "Mankind at the Turning Point", of breath,
or corpses, or the wise machine, the sane
among us/ knowing that/ of all our crimes/
greed--compassionless--best promotes/ our death.

-

January: Year-day 17

Everbody likes me.  Haa.  Sure seems strange!
I'm no one special.  Just try to be fair.
Still, much of my person is out of range
for most.  Something's hot in the West Bend air?!

"Can you call the fire department?"  "What's wrong?"
"Gail's car is on fire!"  "Where is it?"  "Out front!"
"Okay."  Was only warming up.  Too long?
Red-hot manifold.  Shouldn't.  Civic punt.

Everybody likes me.  I have/ a way
with words.  Sometimes words/ have a way with me.
Sometimes my image-maker gets the runs.

I'm no one special.  Follow me a day.
I'm a lot of specials.  I told you.  See.
You didn't ring?  Didn't pay a cent?  Sons!

-

January: Year-day 18

Veils.  Veils.  What we see, we see but in part.
From the beginnings of vision/ this truth
has stood before us.  Each thing has its heart,
even the airs, in their moods, mean and couth.

As closely as we inspect a brown leaf,
as perfect as our eyes and other senses
may be, we'll never end that humbling grief
imposed by our natures' walls and fences.

Walk with me to the back of the house, sit.
The apple trees will moon with apples soon.
If rightly we can't know the half of it,
come row with me through the padded lagoon.
So what if neither of us sings in tune:
our creations will, if we have the wit.

-

January: Year-day 19

Out of "the mouths of babes" come--tinker toys?
Yah!  Pieces themselves they have tried to swallow
or, other, to the wonder of our poise
we thought so solid turned suddenly hollow
by wisdoms beyond what we'd realize
in a thousand trips, of whatever kind,
tangled as we are in winning the prize,
each of us nastily out of his mind.

Thus those born before us, chidren with time,
being younger than time and we are now
(though still quite young as a planet's age goes),
destroy and delight us with their sublime
imaginings, words which/ venerate how
only he who's humble/ transumes and grows.

-

January: Year-day 20

Sometimes living is spiny hard, all hooks
and concrete, no empathy, no June grass,
and with nothing that I do does time pass
equitably.  Act at act (that is/ the crux
of it) like beasts clawing each other's throats,
or circumstance at act: so that I die
a little but don't grow--what, where, how, why,
and all else jammed together, damned & choked.

Scraping snow from my van's windows, I found
a "Hi!" in some, & softly chuckled.  Still,
I'd wanted to cruise Milwaukee/ the night
before; but the drifting winds kept me bound,
furious, and out of care, trying to fill
a dead time--writing, reading--in a poor light.

-

January: Year-day 21

It can take so long to create a poem
as this one, so image-connecting long,
the maker's nearly wizened by the song/
he finally sings, he gives a small home.

One watching him might think he'd rather roam
through cities and countrysides, beat a gong,
or jingle a tambourine for a throng
of dopes than wrestle words that slip & foam.

How odd a decent place of residence
for words/ must come through a kind of defeat
of them, that only as the user pins/
each/ for those moments when it most makes sense,
when its powers and his/ properly meet,
does he quicken a lodging/ where spirit wins.

-

January: Year-day 22

   (The next sonnet is another in this sequence
    that is politically charged.  I make no apology
    for it, but it does remind me of a position I
    have long held:  The separation of church and
    state/ is a fantasy.  Still, I am simply presenting
    what I believe, and I am not attempting to test
    my right to speak freely.  Besides, I could easily
    write more harshly/ about myself, and have.)

This is a banner for the Red Rose Sect,
for this is their day, the day the White House
will be blessed with red roses that reject
our allowing unborn humans to blouse
in the air: bloody, mutilated ghosts
damning us, that reject our stark presumption
which treats these as/ mereparasitic hosts
to kill as we please in our gross consumption.

This is a banner.  Wave it, wave it high,
that it may crack the coldness in your eye
which preserves your right as woman to choose
when your body may abruptly deny
lives as sacred as yours, pushing them by
as if they are trash you can't wait to lose.

-

January: Year-day 23

There should be no end to the thanks I show
for being born and allowed to remain
long enough in my ragged flesh/ to glow
in this world/ and beyond, a sunshine rain.

Flowers climbing, rising/ from a mountainside;
waters slowly entering Earth's thick sieve;
rhythms of wind carrying melodies pied.
There should be no end to the thanks I live.

Could there seem no beginning, middle, end
to my gratitude, my freedom to be,
you would note a kind of balance in me
you would smile toward/ as a friend to a friend
who is glad the other is near to spend
a spectral moment with, or two, or three.

-

January: Year-day 24

And the delicate powdered-sugar snow,
sifted by the winds, floats like memories,
full of haze and distance; pulses like trees
on a hot afternoon; forms what I know:

In a three o'clock music, soft and slow,
I am a long-wintering hive of bees;
and the gossamer swallows at their ease
sparkle in the waves on my radio.

If I were to tell you again today
that tomorrow I would be leaving here,
what light would it gift you, though miles apart.
I had left you in a similar way
before, and later come back: pleased, tired, queer,
as curiously as: I do in my art.

-

January: Year-day 25

Before, the past was presented as myth;
now, it is presented as human.  Feel.
Before, the past was for the few, the "pith";
now, it is explored for the many; real.
Being so, it's no longer kept alive
but deftly uprooted, denied/ at last/
until what was once extolled jungle jive
becomes, as it's Plumbed, The Death of the Past.
Hooray in the streets!  Hoorah in the halls!
Now the past is dead, history can live,
and there be no ending to what we give
to each and each as each fabricant falls
that will be in our lives gifts well worth giving
and gratefully plied by the future living.

-

January: Year-day 26

Yesterday, heavy snow, to bring us wonder,
seeds that will blossom into water, and--
words you may think ought to tear me asunder
who lives not by logic but sleights of hand.

Yet, though I'm no Whitman, seeing the best,
nor a Jeffers from his Tor, seeing the worst,
but an Englanded Salchert, of cooled zest,
for both fine reason and magic I thirst.

If apples fatten against me, and birds
tremble my confidence, the game of math
at its rough frontiers makes my nerve-ends dance;
and the game of myth unbuttons me.  Path,
trail, highway, street, certainty, and chance:
synthesis,the direction of/ my words.

-

January: Year-day 27

Too much to think on, and with Shelley dead,
Percy, stormed under in the gulf, the strength,
madness, genius we need seems somehow fled;
and with Paine and others gone, lost at length.

And with our technic capabilities
postindustrializing us at rates
that presage clarity but form clouds, these
moments passing, passed, strange, feel ancient dates.

Composing here a linear thing when life
about is circular, I would conclude
the answer's there I darken as I do
with a lashed world, a gulf in storm to ride,
were I not of those adventurers whose
flattest confrontations/ breed fending styles.

-

January: Year-day 28

Don't question the insanities of writers
thoughtlessly.  You may plummet, clutching spaces;
from the claws of words you may dangle.  These lighters
of the caves of our ignorance turn faces--
in their inkings that ooze and build--to charm/
worlds/ in the air.  Let them also charm yours.
Then castigate these shamans courting harm.
Without them you could never win your wars.

Poor self-poisoned Chatterton, genius thief,
and Mayakovsky, slit by politics,
and haunting, humorous Poe, worn and guttered,
and Plath, who ovened/ her head out of grief,
and Hemingway, letting a bullet fix:
these--muft, & all--through truths/ beautifully uttered.

-

January: Year-day 29

If you still think you can flippantly spawn
a fishhole of arguments, you had better
close your mind.  It's too late, friend.  The light's gone
that would praise your opinions.  In the fetter
of darknesses formed by tyrannies, one
of which has chased the good from your once needed
union, carpenter, those warm days won
freeze, and threaten those/ differently seeded.

A free man's only free when he can move
with comfort in his necessary jails
while letting others likewise move in theirs.

Sure, moguls kill; sure, governments lose love;
but aren't there times when other spirits fail?
We pass each other dimly/ on the stairs.

-

January: Year-day 30

Spirit is a music no one can hear
but can often see the results of: hands
mending a gown, dervishes of dust, lands
in the shapes of knolls tranquilizing fear,
strawberries dyeing fingers.  If a man
wails at The Wall, or a woman; or looks
an arabesque through; somehow out of books
changes; more easily charms his life's span,

nothing in the spheres is heard, in the heart
seen; only elsewhere.  Castles: reachings for
the ultimate.  Malachi Martin's art
ofinsight.  Yours.  Mine.  Worlds from which we start;
stretch toward.  Peering in/ or out of/ a door.
Still/ on a mountain.  Waiting/ on a shore.

-

January: Year-day 31

The year of the dragon supplants the hare's,
or forty-six seventy-four by 'five.
The one by its wits avoided Time's snares;
the other by meanness will live and thrive.

So I, friendly Westerner, lightly see
what brings those of Chinese culture long joy;
yet honor, knowing a loved mystery,
secular, sacred, gives weight to its voice.

For I in my culture, too, celebrate
one year's dying with another year's birth
in ways happy meetings gently accrued,
unwilling, unable, to explicate
how customs so formed are of special worth
to me and mine who are through them renewed.
-

2 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert