sw00036usabys-16.mar.sonnets.5of25

5 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (61-77)

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March: Year-day 61

Lionizing the lamb, making a lamb
of the lion, stuffing the groundhog back
into his hole, March can spring an attack
of apoplexy on who I am, was, wish
I were, with the way it dumps the full dish
of yesterday or fills the empty one
of, say, today, greeting me with grayed sun,
then blistering with sharp snow I damn, dam.

However, I have decided to stay
inside, not because I'm afraid, but rather
because I've no need to face such a spate
of meanness to feel it, and disarray,
to deal with it.  I know its guises gather
praise, and where; I will not capitulate.

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March: Year-day 62

Say the worlds we face are as black and hard
as anthracite, as promotive of fear
and chaos as a soon-to-explode star,
that nature and artifact and those weird
transcendors, spirit and mind, cannot be made
to fully demystify themselves, we,
as minute as we are, ought we not weigh
our actions still, determine what is meed?

Brontosauruses trapped in tar: dead ends,
of whatever kind--even if, we, too,
should fail to be diverse enough to hold
our own, or being diverse, still lose friends,
enemies, selves/ let us more than chop through
the laminations of wind, wet, and cold.

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March: Year-day 63

West Bend, the prison arrived at through years
of foolishness.  Like most, I too have bumbled
seriously, bent, broken off, split under
the freezing rains of desire/ as the trees,
so many of the trees, here have/ this Ash
Wednesday.  Had I not sought what I have I
would not have had to suffer as I right
now do, though my suffering invites laughs.

West Bend, insipid necessary prison,
gained through my constant buying of new cars,
my failure to use enough healthy reasons
for doing whatever sharpens my hours.
Denial by denial heals now this run
impresario's too familiar powers.

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March: Year-day 64

Little White Lady, the Alloy's cat, found
this morning beneath their bed with three kittens,
so carried Cindy to her happy wits' ends
she phoned the inn to tell me that, and drown
indetails my tiredness before the rains
and the sorrowing ice return, our hearts
withering as power lines snap, writhe, spark,
basements fill, graces crack, death comes again.

Crouched here in a county of isolation;
saved from cold by the nature of my work,
linemen in transparent desolation
leave barely a word to this poet clerk
waiting days for a day's inspiration
to mix meows with a wet weather's quirk.

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March: Year-day 65

Can't think, my lights going brown and brown, black,
the toll of the ice storms mounting past thought
while hands reach anxiously for candles brought
from a storeroom somewhere, a dead bee's sac,
fires for each hall providing us a track
of vision, a sanctuary charm, caught
as we are without electric, distraught
yet giggly, so suddenly peeled years back.

First I, then Mark, turned the register's crank:
room charge, tax--the x read of zeeing out,
then the z read, and the x read again,
zero after zero, proving the bank,
the mechanical day, was full about,
balanced to nothings by the hands of men.

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March: Year-day 66

Determination wins the day for sure
but, more importantly, enchants the night.
That's why we favor our invented light;
that's why tomorrow it will be more pure.

So, whenever you think it's too obscure,
just wait, it soon enough may be too bright,
may even for a moment blind your sight,
this shielded fire that can rupture and cure.

A seed that germinates under a rock
may, in its struggles, split that rock to three.

We, at a door, continuing to knock,
may at last be greeted, by someone dead.

So the splitting greetings of land by sea,
the human waters of romance and dread.

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March: Year-day 67

So, now, electricians/ swarm through the house,
their antennae, live wires; their wings, hard wood;
their nerve centers, transformers; and I, mouse,
my gestures soft static, guess where I should
escape to, but don't, knowing I must run
the columns of figures as rapidly
as circumstance allows as one and one
and another employee assists me.

Audit.  Audit.  No time to fret about
small out-of-balances.  No time to finish
each day's report, imagine each day's sonnet,
the early-morning / late-night crush of stout
linemen more than enough to quite diminish
my energy for the torn land's . . . beyond it.

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March: Year-day 68

Coming as rain, the beasts, layer on layer
clung to what they could, e.g., grasses, trees,
telephone poles and wires until each mayor
in his little town cried in his head, "Please,
your heavy, brilliant bodies have destroyed
already too much, branchesof trees popped--
I hear them yet, poles splintered, unemployed;
flames arcing from bare lines; work patterns stopped."

This morning, in the fair and cold, the sun
(glinting what it kisses onswallowed fields
and bushes and trees--trunks, limbs, branches, twigs
too often spiking their pale insides up
through the careless winds where the hard beasts' needs
have bit them off with themselves) cringes, licks.

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March: Year-day 69

I have never had his experience,
nor am likely to, this lineman who dares
to bring us power, chancing his; who stares
the shocks of death heart to heart for the sense
of comfort we have come to demand, dense
though most of us are to the hard repairs
he must make after a storm, and the cares
that move him both to drink and maintenance.

Oh, each of us lives his own kind of life
somewhere between circumstance and desire
more or less dangerously, pain and joy
as in the pregnant womb of a good wife
or the eyes of a birthday gal his fire
or his climbing of poles/ to keep the boy.

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March: Year-day 70

Hi, Thatcher Lane Gearhart, born yesterday!
Welcome aboard!  I can't say you'll like this
decidedly stuffed with injustices
domain floating along the Milky Way
Galaxy's edge, spun in a universe
we may never know the ends of; but be
strong and healthy in the heat of the curse,
the blessing; and become, through land, air, sea

more than you or anyone might expect,
however situations, heritage,
and nurtured abilities to make new
limit you who (from a had-to-be checked
civilization) will learn to please, nudge,
help see another: through more sacred hues.

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March: Year-day 71

Happy birthday, sister and brother.  I'm
sorry you cannot watch my scribblings here
but--with intelligence men about--time
is of the essence, as they say; a fear-
toned man, anti-abortion, anti-Ford,
must be quietly careful these nights, these
days: especially me: poet ignored,
shadow in waiting, sun in a wombed breeze.

Yet, the gates of time will part for me, hie
me a mountain throne--thirty-five now, I
mind much less being a rejected thing
by those of current importance--the sky
I grow toward will not pass, and I will sing,
influences and all, and be a king.

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March: Year-day 72

Still, sister and brother, each in your frames,
I here, alone, sadly meandering,
depart from glory a while, dreaming names,
stories, for my condition, reduced thing
I have / by my desires & dares become,
feeling the need to cover what thechild
in me would leave exposed because I've some /
inhibitions against the pure, the wild.

To walk where I walk I decline to ask
anyone to do, though I'd like each to follow
now and then, while Istep from/ change to change;
just as for a lineman, each given task
left by a storm or accident in hollow,
on height, deepens me as/ I rearrange.

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March: Year-day 73

Today the power men woke up to leave
and, sister, brother, the old airs relaxed
in this hard-pressed inn; for few of us grieve
when warm lights rescind what has overtaxed
as the ice of double-shifting had done;
so we and the linemen, not being sure
we'd last another day--despite the fun
easing it, though forced to--welcomed the cure.

Enough is enough, as you sometimes hear,
and we all concurred; and so the men went
rolling home from their interrupted year,
the long hours gone; and the rest of us bent
toward cleaning up.  The torn trees wept.  While near,
sad, not two weeks lived, one flagellant Lent.

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March: Year-day 74

Starships to Andromeda.  Warps of time.
Wherever there is emptiness, we fill
and fill.  Even black holes will learn the chill
of our intrusions.  Creatures/ so sublime,
we suck a planet dead with such deft tongues,
swarming through its airs, it's hardly awake
by the hour we've swallowed enough to slake
the top of our thirst, collapsing its lungs.

"Bless us" we ask an eternalized God
to bolster our mad insecurity,
the fuel of our power, the reason no
sensible reason is needed to prod
our devastations of this deep orbed sea,
this Eden of the fish of fiery snow.

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March: Year-day 75

Now the storm is over, the linemen gone,
and poems I meant to write still somewhere hid
beneath my consciousness, I now go on,
determined to fill the blanks, seal the lid,
even if it does take till fall, or next
year.  When faith weakens, hang to hope:  The trees--
though so many by the vile ice were hexed--
did, frozen to earth, spent, trunks split to knees.

And so, when what is sought is found, and shown,
budding all over with flowers and leaves
despite their wounds, which cannot/ be removed,
I and you will be happy we had known
the man who struggles rules the man who grieves,
raising in sunlight what persistence proved.

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March: Year-day 76

Knowledge is the hemlock of innocence,
and that is why old Socrates was killed.
Innocents of Athens who heard hissense
ought not--thought those in power--be so filled.

"Keep innocencealive" they whispered round,
"else knowledge will destroy what we have won.
We mustn't let a manwhose thinking's sound
ask questions that will leave our frauds undone."

Through the alleys moves a shadow of peace,
nodding to the winds and wandering cats,
adding to the enchantment that is Greece,
ducking/ a wife's flexed yells/ as if they're bats,
teaching as if teaching could never cease
nor human learning/ move slower than rats.

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March: Year-day 77
(#5 of 15 I removed earlier this year.)
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5 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert