sw00056usabysc-links.entry6

25 of 25          

 1976 Today - 353 bicentennial year sonnets
 contents                       [last modified: 2008-09-21 ]        

 notes about current 1976 version plus links 
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 In this presentation I have entitled each sonnet
 by month and year-day.  I have done so because
 year-day has become more important to me than
 the commonly used month and date format.  Over
 the years I have changed how I entitle the sonnets
 composing 1976 (the original title for the 366
 sonnets in the original work) several times.
 -
 I have not attempted to group these sonnets by 
 topic, but each one/ is a piece in the puzzle
 of who I am.  Most of them were written in
 1976, and because I wanted my work to be
 a celebration of the bicentennial of my USA,
 many of the sonnets are history-centered. 
 Nonetheless, many others are confessional.
 Some of those are comically so.  While there 
 are situational, athletic, religious, political,
 philosophical, environmental, biographical,
 poetry-related, science-oriented, as well as
 sonnets on yet other topics or mixes of topics,
 the core topic is the human condition.  If you
 would like to read my leap year sonnet, see
 February: Year-day 60 (February 29th).
 -
 When you happen into one you do not feel 
 comfortable with, exit from it.
 -
 [ 2007-03-20:
   -
   The first of the 15 sonnets I removed,
   Year-day 2, is back in as a revised sonnet.
   Whenever a year-day without a sonnet 
   gets a new/revised sonnet, I will note it 
   on this page.         B A J S   ]
 -
[ 2008-08-02:
 -
 Year-day 348 (December 13) is back in. ]
-

 The following is an elsewhere publication list
 for individual sonnets from 1976 Today:

 February: Year-day 34 (February 3rd)
     If it's still there, it is at
     www.sonnets.org
 -
 March: Year-day 82 (March 22nd) 
     (for Sandy Troedel)
     Spice of Life series article
     in West Bend News 1977
 -
 March: Year-day 61 (March 1st)
 March: Year-day 69 (March 9th)
 May: Year-day 137 (May 16th)
     in River Bottom
     Vol. IV No. 2 Summer 1977
 -
 April: Year-day 105 (April 14th)
 April: Year-day 106 (April 15th)
 April: Year-day 110 (April 19th)
 April: Year-day112 (April 21st)
     in Song 2 1977
 -
 September: Year-day 248 (September 4th)
     in Ramada Regular
     Volume 6, Number 7
     November 1980, p. 15
 -
 November: Year-day 307 (November 2nd)
     in Poetry Out of Wisconsin V 1980
 -
 December: Year-day 361 (December 26th)
     in The Sun
     a magazine of ideas
     issue 124  March 1986
 -

 links
 -
 1976 Today -   1 of 25  (15 January sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -   2 of 25  (16 January sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -   3 of 25  (13 February sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -   4 of 25  (13 February sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -   5 of 25  (16 March sonnets)
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 1976 Today -   6 of 25  (14 March sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -   7 of 25  (15 April sonnets)
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 1976 Today -   8 of 25  (15 April sonnets)
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 1976 Today -   9 of 25  (15 May sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -  10 of 25  (15 May sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -  11 of 25  (15 June sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  12 of 25  (15 June sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -  13 of 25  (15 July sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -  14 of 25  (16 July sonnets)
 -
1976 Today -  15 of 25  (15 August sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -  16 of 25  (16 August sonnets)
 -
 1976 Today -  17 of 25  (14 September sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  18 of 25  (14 September sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  19 of 25  (14 October sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  20 of 25  (15 October sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  21 of 25  (15 November sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  22 of 25  (15 November sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  23 of 25  (14 December sonnets)
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 1976 Today -  24 of 25  (13 December sonnets)

 §

For all the listings below/ go to the August, 2007, archive:

 January/February/March  1st lines / topics
 -
 April/May/June  1st lines / topics
 -
 July/August/September  1stlines / topics
 -
 October/November/December  1st lines / topics

 §

                      49 Selected Sonnets 
 *
  Jan yd23     Feb yd34     Feb yd56     Feb yd42     Feb yd47     Feb yd60
 -
  Mar yd64     Mar yd65     Mar yd69     Mar yd82     Mar yd84     Apr yd99
 -
  Apr yd114    Apr yd127    May yd129    May yd142    May yd146    May yd152
 -
  Jun yd156    Jun yd157    Jun yd165    Jun yd168    Jun yd169    Jun yd170
 -
  May: Year-day 131 (ecologies interlude)
 -
  Jul yd202    Jul yd212    Aug yd227    Aug yd233    Aug yd236    Aug yd243
 -
  Sep yd246    Sep yd260    Sep yd267    Oct yd275    Oct yd286    Oct yd292
 -
  Oct yd294  Oct yd298   Nov yd308    Nov yd327    Dec yd361    Dec yd363
 -
  Oct yd281    Oct yd284    Oct yd285    Oct yd289    Sep yd250    Aug yd229


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    25 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                             
 

sw00055usabys-13.dec.sonnets.24of25

24 of 25                                                       

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (352-366)

-
December: Year-day 352

"Christmas is near"/ the decorations say,
dressing bare spaces with red white and green
that hibernated a/ year since last seen,
to prove once again one God's still okay.
But I have lonely my flesh to display
in this corner of hell, dark & obscene,
where, facing the moon, I awkwardly lean
from the chill regrets of another day.

Seek to understand the jester in me;
it will help you appreciate/ desire
and/ the fragile ornaments hooked to bones.

In the scent of a pine a moldy sea.
The destroyer of love is born of ire.
O rise from that past! where your spirit groans.

(12-20-76 / 1-20-78 / 8-24-01 / 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 353
(#14 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

December: Year-day 354

" . . . the transparent children"/ Anais writes/
is what she calls the young, the vibrant ones,
livers along the rough and heady heights
peaking/ above the clouds.  How each one runs!

Insolence brews evilly inside me
who doesn't want his champagne spirit corked.
I still prefer/ to climb and/ shake a tree,
to walk the weak prong where a path has forked.

Tomorrow's tomorrow, and my regrets
can neither be/ touched nor changed.  Only now
engages, rearranges, brims with bets.

Just so, I prepare for words/ with a plow,
pray suns warm, and the rain/ properly/ wets
each seed, the plant it becomes, the ripe bough.

(12-20/21-76 and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 355

Spin the head.  This is America.  Death
on a swizzle stick, on a strand of hash.
Glazes of mist on the windy streets, breath
clouds thinning in swirled snow, violent cash:
Pandora's pandemonium.  Still songs.
Be warned:  What sun comes up is upside down.
Rugs, beds, tables contain our wills and wrongs.
If you are a joker, I am a clown.

Glued to a car of incredible blue,
a life of attempts with minimal gain,
institutions that no longer should do
strike like pincers at my frustrated brain.
The dance of a rule whose life should be through
clings to another whose life should remain.

-

December: Year-day 356
(#15 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

December: Year-day 357

If I give You, Lord, my sexual being,
if I acquiesce, what will be gained, lost?
Loving a woman, a man:  What's the cost?
No wonder I sweat in my meager seeing.

That toppled trunk, stretching/ across this creek,
allowing me to dryly step my will
so long as I can balance half-way well,
engenders further dreams toward what I seek.

Yet, trying to heed else, heed me, unsure/
how else from me differs, which one is right,
perhaps we/ must expect/ arctic rejections
of realms to which one/ can't become inured--
human thought (sadly) a cold bloom of night
in prayed-for moonwash/ trapped in its reflections.

(12-31-76 / 5-17-77 / 12-30-06)

(Isn't insanity interesting.)

-

December: Year-day 358

Bad dreams of ice-crystal snows again/ burning
the April flesh of my soul.  (Education?
A child must be shown how to know his yearnings
and grow with them when the ways of his nation
would change them; a child be shown how to save
in a world that would steal his eyes.)  The ires
of the -40 white, wave on wave,
swarm the dawns in my new heart, stoked with fire.

Fires set against fires then my world's become
until the green from me holds, frazzled Muse.

Don't tell me my nation's right and I'm wrong;
that it's better to spend and feel like scum.

Too often my skimpy wealths I've ill-used.
In sacred wedlock/ is not where I'm strong.

(1-10-77 / 11-11-77 / 8-31-01)

-

December: Year-day 359

Christmas Eve, and the narrow snow/ wisps/ still
round boots, paws, bushes, gravestones, my torn love.
Whether I am a rattling pod above
or that force which rattles, rapt to until,
or something of both, my divided will
breaks down, curses my unchangeable past
and the seconds which leave much much too fast.
Christmas Eve, and the narrow snow/ wisps/ still.

Questions, questions.  Answers, answers.  Who knows.
Even the God Who made me/ won't come clear.
Just as I am, I would be His Son's dear.
And if for that I will suffer Hell's throes--
charred on one side, & on the other froze--
I can only sigh/ for those who don't fear.

(12-24-76 / 12-27-76 / 1-11-77 / 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 360

Merry Christmas.  It's over; it's begun!:
the pimple of hurt has come to a head;
that partof my soul across which it spread/
soon will/ return to health, and sad hurt run
and be tissued away; and I renew
my energies to/ courageously work--
I wander long hours to learn what to do--
worlds provided for each powerful quirk.

Talk to this person, talk to that, and walk.
Sometimes I wish/ my fingers held some chalk
I could write on the air with; but, no use:
my minds will let me be/ only obtuse.
I must spring from the field like a new stalk,
spring from the marsh like a northering goose.

(12-25/26-76 and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 361

Faith:  Believing that what is beyond one
is also above one; that one, however,
is of that; that one's inward eyes are ever
smiling with pleased awe at the touch of sun
one moves in and is; that no life is done,
ever, no work; even the stillborn, clever,
odd, the suicides, live on, cannot sever
themselves from the whole, the glittering run.

O plant a tree in memory of me,
make of my body a sparse ring of ashes
to benefit the ground around that tree;
make of my bones and flesh a memory
in the grassy earth where the chipmunk dashes,
in the trunk, limbs, branches, twigs, slick green slashes!

-
-
On page 25, among other comments, will be annotations
pertaining to specific sonnets.  Happy New Year.  BAJS
-
-

-

December: Year-day 362

Confusion:  me, 'times: a sign on the road
changed by events, contradicting itself.
Determination in the face of me: 'times;
respect that will not let me kick the toad.

The path up the hill, the path through the woods,
the path backwards, the no path need; the shelf
with that image of a me gone; the rhymes
I walk into, urged to buy/ all their goods.

Reason is reason, rhymed or not; delight
delight.  If you can't stand to look at me
naked/ along a shore, run with your spite.

Though I understand we cannot be free
in a world ruled by selves/ where no one's right:
open, close, as the flowers of the sea.

-

December: Year-day 363

Read, read out loud, for the sense and the sound:
a canyon's long magnificence, the scourgings
of its ancient river, the blare sun/ ground
deeply into an earth shocked by its urgings
these mean dry weeks; the men alive, then dead.
Exploration is but the edge of growth,
prime as it is, affirming that you've sped
"what-am-I-missing" past, cursing the loath.

Read, read out loud, for the mind and the heart
and the ways they entwine, light against shade,
water with soil, disease measuring health.
Happily, it matters less where you start
than/ how you move/ to learn where the words made/
must bear/ the ringing designs/ of their wealth.

(12-28-76 / 3-26-77 / 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 364

To see last is to see first, and the Fate
(ethos) confining Man because he is
limited/subsumes but does not deflate
his Freedom (logos) to answer & quiz
nor Power (pathos) to make & become
as best as he can.  So Man's spirit does
star pride, tease to believe Belief is dumb.
He'll learn.  It at least moves him past what was.

Rune, I'm aware I cannot prove You are,
that no one else can prove You're not; that leaves
sparkle in wind-puffed fire, that rains shine rocks,
that this gift of language as I use/ bar/
change// contains but one world.  Whoever/ grieves
and joys/ enters doors, regardless of locks.

(I am not sure when the above was first written,
and neither am I certain about any revisions, 
nor do I recall where the Fate, Freedom, Power
ideas and connections originated from.  Aristotle
came to mind, but some 2006-03-30 searchings I did
caused me to decide Anais Nin was the source.)

-

December: Year-day 365

All the passed spaces I've yet to fill, know,
having failed to each day despite my pride,
outmaneuvered by rain, sickness, drought, snow,
and/or laziness, killer of the guide!

All the sonnets, the dogdamn sonnets, twits,
I'll still be in in March of '77,
trying to prove I can beat time with wit,
trying to create my own basking heaven!

I tell you the world is inside out?  Stay.
I tell you the world is crumbling?  Relax.
I tell you the world's spun insane?  Play.

The universe collects its own dark tax.
The universe pulses beyond us?  Pray.
In delicate souls, the delicate flax.

(?)

-

December: Year-day 366

Year's end again.  And if a world's, so.
I'm no priority king, no sweet bee.
I rate no praise for the heart I've let grow
in an acid soil, in a fuming sea.

So it is kiss & die in a closed room,
trying to laugh at an uppity world:
not even a spider can so assume,
sensing how leaves and winds and claws have curled.

Confusion?  Uncertainty?  Yes; abide.
A heavy seed lodged/ in a granite rock
once waited well over ten thousand years.

More brilliantly than a slide rule can slide,
more precisely than a clock can ticktock,
try, try, try, Hunbruab.  Unwind your fears.
-

24 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00054usabys-13.dec.sonnets.23of25

23 of 25

[ last modified: 2008-09-21]                                                       

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (336-351)

-
December: Year-day 336

I am more intricate than a computer.
That is why I don't compute.  That is why
the frantic searching on my inner eye
disturbs me, why I cannot be a suitor
who's confident.  Aware as I am of
the nuances surrounding an event
a human figures in, I can't content
myself with the luxuries of hate, love.

To the contrary, I must weigh and measure
every act, however caved in the mind
its birth was, however narrow my sight.

When an opening comes revealing pleasure,
I'm tempted to put good reason behind.
It's rare for the lonely to get things right.

(1976 / 1977 / 1978)

-

December: Year-day 337

Who's to say the comfort of an old hat
is not what we want, the slowing of time
to a turtle's walk or a tree sloth's climb
or an oak's; that being a city rat
or a rat at all is the slink it's at
under the sway of a columbine,
under a boxcar.  Who's to hold good wine
from us just because we live in a flat.

Remember how the sunlight shows the dust,
brings Magellanic clouds of stars to mind,
and swarms of bees, and warriors, and death.

The one bloom/ worth growing/ is one we must
because a warm and rocking wind is kind
which lets us/ like its flavors/ in our breath.

-

December: Year-day 338

What immaturity! what fright! my friend,
keeps us entwined by an incomplete law
not likely to be completed, or end,
leaves me or you or anyone in awe,
advantages notwithstanding; keeps me
from giving when I should, missing a bough
by a length of self-doubt when I could free
myself from myself, squirrel tumbling down.

Yes I've been hurt, confused, moved to deflect
& deflect who I am, allowed to see
just a part of the whole Brian, to plow
for years the wrong ground.  I'll never expect
a Utopia, but Earth sure could be
a heaven of a lot better/ than . . . now!

(2-8-77 and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 339

The Milwaukee Library Book Sale: packed.
Milwaukee's Mayfair Shopping Center: jammed.
No one can ever say he's got it sacked;
for always wait tests/ for which he's not crammed.
Leaves in the hallways; plaster in the woods:
the decibels, too, of truth/ can be harsh.
So maybe he doesn't leave with the goods.
Even honkers die/ in a frozen marsh.

Driving yet sleeping, my mouth open wide;
Janice beside me shouting for our lives,
I don't understand; I've nothing to hide.
Oh what would tired men do without their wives?!
What winds, what rains in the blood still abide;
what should I season with porcelain chives?

(12-5-76)

-

December: Year-day 340

For the musics, to be able to hear;
for the visions, to be able to see;
for the textures, to be able to feel;
for the flavors, to be able to taste;
for the odors, to be able to smell;
for the concepts, to be able to think;
for the beauties, to be able to joy;
for perfections, to be able to strive:

thank You, Father Creator, Spirit, Lord,
from Whom the vital universes swing,
from Whom the virtues enter to transform,
from Whom the prayers through which You are adored;
and back to Whom/ my life/ and all I sing
imbuing each bright air, each blur, each storm. . . .

(8-26/27-79 under my Alden St. Cloud pen name)

-

December: Year-day 341

Who's to say who deserves damnation, heaven;
excoriations, plaudits; flowers, thorns.
Not I.  Not you.  If you're a burglar, Breven,
I'm a deceiver other ways.  The horns
of the avenging angels will shake my dust
as fearfully as yours.  Everyone's weak,
a coward some, who's human; fails to trust
enough, fails to seek what he ought to seek.

Even if you turn murderer and kill
this Brian/ writing here: this person who
renamed himself, this activist who still
trembles and hides (despite his beliefs), you
may not be/ worse than he.  Let the sky fill
with sun, with clouds.  Change.  What saves Man do.

(3-5-80 and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 342

The times are lean; I should be lean/ with them.
This winter, they say, will be mean and slow.
Yet, I'm alive--continuing to grow,
while around me people & others die
and there's nothing I can say/do to stem
their downward changings in worlds in this world
I've not, nor now, nor may ever touch, curled
as I am by events/ stronger than I.

A teenager drowns, an explosion kills
five men, a woman's// expired by a spear:
myriad examples to rustle rills
in neuro-vales.  Who knows?: a sudden fire
could ash both/ me and this;make my desire
& insight & music here/ disappear.

(2-3-77 / 1-18-78 / 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 343

"Our God is a delightfully messy God"
said Father Charlie Robinson this morning,
this soft-light gray Epiphany.  We're odd,
therefore, and meant to be.  Unplug forlorning.
I know it'sThe Immaculate Conception,
but mysteries as theselive beyond time
anyhow; besides, I, without exception,
am the last judge here of the sense and rhyme.

And I, I am a messy creature, finding
delight in humoring you/ writing poems,
and having a woman for my best friend,
and agonizing over every binding
unfortunate choice that drove me from homes
and humans I/ wanted to love, not spend.

(1-2-77 and 2-8-77)

-

December: Year-day 344

When what time there is too quickly escapes
those uses I figured to put it to,
I . . . and yanking the dusty golddust drapes,
flag my obsessions for anyone's view.

Mad at the world/ yet ruled by it, I bee
confused, the ways I'm not/ lined with the norm/
stinging me: eyes, ears.  Oh pity poor me!
I'm such a speck in a whirling creep storm!

Oh kiss my frail finger cut by the wind
of the too-fast clock!  Commiserate!  I'm
you, too, you know.  No!  I ought to be pinned
and wriggling!  Why?  I've committed no crime.
My heart should/ be slapped around!  The hours sinned:
not I!  Bastard! dickerer with Dame Time.

(12-12-76 and ? and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 345

So, today, Auden came, at last collected
as I thought I'd ever want him to come,
yet still something's missing from one rejected
rarely as a poet; I'm like a bum
scavenging for it.  Oh well, should be used
to such times; after all, perfection's not
a human trait, though we're often bemused
into thinking so.  Wystan knew the lot.

"September, 1939"/ where have
you gone?  Am I deceived?  Or is it best
you are not to be found, scary and sad
as you were.  Surely, we, needing to/ halve
again, as in that/ Hitlerian West,
don't need to be/ reminded of/ love had.

(12-11-76 and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 346

Once behind in a lengthy project, filling
the holes by a predetermined time is
difficult; once far behind, weirdly thrilling,
as when one simply has to take a whizz
in -13 air.  It's done, but quickly,
when indeed it is done; and genius flies
or stumbles in the doing, the work slickly
or, god-touched, soaring with/ eagle surprise.

What I'm about here?  A kangaroo state
I'd say it's become, not likely to be
completed on time, as hoped; but, though late,
growing in a pocket, for you and me
attractive enough, neither weak nor great,
but in-between, like your usual sea.

(? and 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 347

(#11 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

December: Year-day 348

"A poem is never finished; it is 
only abandoned": Valéry--through Auden.
Like the car one cold morning/ I stalled in,
and finally walked from--wishing it his,
or hers--though I'd liked how it carried me
before I could drive it no farther.  Love
even stalled trying to give it a shove
in the sand reprieved by the ebbing sea.

Later that day, yes, looser, I went back
to it; but the moon was gone, and the track
of my imagination lost in water.

Strive as I did, my vision changed; the sun
stripped me bare; I was driving a new one
along the edge of pregnancies, of slaughter.

(? and 2008-08-02 / was #12 of 15 removed)

-

December: Year-day 349

(#13 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

December: Year-day 350

What one gains one day one loses the next
is a sometimes truth especially true/
when misfortunes and deadlines keep one hexed.
So prickly then it can be to get through,
one slips abruptly to a dank blue funk,
and the high rev energies one requires/
escape.  One may as well be heaving drunk
for all the light from one's serrated fires.

Oh desires, conclusions, oh pumpkin pie!
how I wish I could cry and cry and cry
and not find a person starting to stare.

Already too many would bolster me
because my frustrations sputter to free,
caring more for me than they ought to care.

(12-15/16-76 / 2-8-77 / 12-30-06)

-

December: Year-day 351

The Hully-Gully monster rides again
on the back of the purple-girdle breeze,
lifting and holding from the depths of its fen,
because it is such a ridiculous tease.

If you were to ask, I couldn't say when
I'm likely to madden, likely to please,
catching my heart at the tip of a pen
graphing its passage on the barks of trees.

Immediate, delayed, consistent, broken--
you pays with your blood / you pays with a token,
unsure what to think once a word is spoken.

The dancers approach the edge of the stage,
syllables/ grow down/ and across the page;
wisdom jounced, foolishness screws/ age to age.

(? and 8-22-01)
-

23 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                      

sw00053usabys-15.nov.sonnets.22of25

22 of 25                                                       

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (321-335)

-
November: Year-day 321

" . . . you need not be a victim of your shame . . .
but neither should you boast about it."  Right
between the eyes of my soul, Stan.  Your aim
mortifies me who'd shake days/ with the night
of his sexual deviances, kill
care, sympathy, and tolerances with too
much bathroom leveling.  Only the will
of God prevails: trust none, trust all; His do.

Even if I lived in a bubble, Stan,
of shatterproof glass; even if my heels
couldn't be hurt, I am become a man
who, because of experiences, kneels
in his heart.  Sunrise!  How mysterious
its pastel lights can be!  How pure to us!

-

November: Year-day 322

Keep 'em tight, like the icy winds, your bones
and vessels: soil for the blossoms of trapped
water that will enter the seeds that will
blossom that will enter the eyes that will
blossom that will enter the spirits trapped
in icy winds of worry, the sad bones
of the fate of living in progress-killed
places: that is, for want of good blood killed.

Keep 'em loose.  Things happen as they happen
and no man has the power to change their course
no matter his ambition captures the world
or gives a fuller music to his life,
short as it is in the body.  Still/ lightning
carries knowledge, God to like, and again.

(? and 4-8-79 & 4-10-79)

-

November: Year-day 323

The leaves are screaming orange, yellow, red.
(You say this is June! the leaves full of green!)
The damp air chills; the sky rolls ghost-grey dead.
From gouged sand/ hare bells rock with cuckoo bees.
(That!? anniversary twelve of our marriage.)
This 18th day!? feast of Petri et Pauli
Basilica Dedication!  The fair edge
of the weather is lost; our windshield's crawly.

To a creature of words this creature's ringed,
the faith he was born to limping beside,
and you, his woman, supporting his glide,
you wanted/unwanted feelng his wings
and the whole of his body who moans, sings,
must bear his frustrations, his orphan eyes.

(6-12-77 and 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 324

For all the pains, being alive, Rune Lord,
is more than any of us deserve.Still,
You breathe us into existence who/ will
ever & ever desecrate, and see
as important only/ how best to hoard
fame & wealth & power, tromping until
our spirits stiffen where the waters drill
and cage themselves under ice.  Drag the tree

of Your death.  Fall on Your face.  We don't care.
Beneath the leaves of marigolds an ant 
negotiates cigarette butts and rich
nuggets of humus.  The trumpet vines flare
for the bees and hummingbirds.  In a scant
simmering breeze miniscule flies sway, twitch.

(8-17/18-79 and 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 325

All things of the moment pass; so, this line--
the face of my disposition, sharp, dull,
in the vacuous center of a lull,
in the fiery core of a riled spine.
So you needn't ask me if things are fine;
my body will show how I laugh or mull
and rise over fences with a soft gull
and hang my spirit with a piece of twine.

Today isn't Ever, though it seems so
when a person's trapped in the fire and ice
of his melancholy--it too will go.
And the times one would have today come twice?
His mind, for its failings, will have to show,
and with signs and speech be his meat, wine, spice.

(11-23-76)

-

November: Year-day 326

After the leaves fall, a throwaway life,
or a life wisely pulled into itself.
A man can destroy, create with a knife.
The root of all evil?  It isn't pelf.
Don't try to console me.  Don't sympathize.
You aren't responsible for my split dreams.
O, yes, I am pleased you would empathize.
Still, it is I who should check, mend my seams.

Isn't life wonderful?  Far in.  Beyond.
A glimmering elm, graceful, strong, august
in the largesse of summer, inlets sparking
with newborn pike, fields from which kids abscond
with pink fingertips and red tongues; and trust
and twirlings.  Gunshots?  Paranoias barking?

(? and 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 327

Slowly in his hand the tulip glass swirls
the Chateauneuf du Pape, and the wild girls
wrestle in the garden and will not stop
while the fire in the hearth shrinks into pearls.
As fast as he can he spins the blue top
and opens his ears to its whirring furls
while the peasants dance and harvest each crop
his dreams invent in their easy chair shop.

Oh if a man could stand and sing and be
unto himself a universe, the sea
of others he'd need not touch nor once curse
nor slantly vow to for better or worse,
but simply be terse and enter a tree
and drop all his money out of his purse.

(11-23-76)

-

November: Year-day 328

A whole year of walking?--if it takes five?
Mercy, mon frere, bon amis, we'll have died
waiting!  Haven't you heard how the jails sighed
when the king's evil dictums blew?  Survive?
Oh yes. The droplet of water (I've climbed
with last) spread down my tongue in mid-July,
and thank God for that.  Oh well, so I lie.
The droplets I do get are sweetly timed.

Yet, my body breathes, my spirit desires;
I still am healed by the crisp apple's snows;

and painful as it is to gawk at spires,
especially on days when the furnace shows,

I am playing again my flutes and lyres,
and tickling your sole and teasing your nose.

(slightly revised 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 329

Clogged air filter, too clogged to be blown clean,
laugh, chide, you fooled me well though my car coughed,
coughed, & coughed, would not run, got mad, mean,
chugged the gas I bought it.  How dumb! how soft!
me, putting up so long with an ill car,
not caring enough about it as if
it was only fitting since my own star
is ill, its gases wasting; my will stiff.

And some say:  You must give yourself to Jesus;
humbly, constantly: joys, beliefs, doubts, downs--
pray, sacrifice; it is through these God frees us.
Yet I say:  You must/ eat the sprouts of hope;
let your loving/ be the works of your growth;
come to faith as one who/ drinks to be sound.

(octet: 3-11-77; sestet: 2-5-78)

-

November: Year-day 330

" . . . you can say anything as long as it
is true . . . but not everything that's true is
worth saying."  Stanley Kunitz, let's commit
my future to your truth.  I am no wiz,
no comet soul; still, with each passing day
life becomes fuller and death closer.  I,
however stoop-shouldered over the sway
of my inadequacies, press on, vie.

Yet, I've told, will tell, things of doubtful worth,
however baldly true, lacking the strength
remaining mysterious takes.  When death
divides me, though, I pray I'll leave this Earth
nearer to God than now, my days' willed length,
harshly or gently closed, purer in breath.

-

November: Year-day 331

Alive in a world I do not arc with,
I must make my lights harder than rock.
In the realm of the human, everything
carries/ its curses and blessings: lifts, socks.
Spring, haltingly, comes, comes/ out of the pith,
Venus remembered diamonding the moon
in the frozen dew/ glinting on the swings
of green & gray that will have their own soon.

Slow summer soft with robins nesting twice/
& the lightningsof speedy summer & vice.

The yellow leaves of ashes leading tall
through the gathering warmths of crinkly fall.

"Night and winter approach like the end of
the world--and nothing matters."  We dread love.

(1977/1978/1979/2006)

-

November: Year-day 332

Words I've sung through, rejected, and rejected
again, I am left to read the old masters,
and wonder.  Perhaps they will be inspected
once in a hundred years, the stains of asters
found on them, and none ever speak aloud
from the reader's mouth, catching there, the heart;
none ever shine within/ this Earth's word-crowd;
none ever live/ once its page breaks apart.

That inventions elsewhere allow me now
to roughen the air with my cracked high sounds
eases little.  Breathe Eliot.  Chaunt Yeats.

Words earned will sing me as they best know how,
my frail soul in them where they light their rounds.
We will practice patience among the greats.

(3-4-77 and 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 333

Strange world, and I am one of the strange things
in it:  Emotionally, I'm a nitty
sort as well as a guy whose dreaming brings/
lovers & jeers, who's somewhy/ pundit witty,
guilt-badgered erotic; mentally,
I'm a universalist, moved by, jealous
of/ geniuses; spiritually, I see
there's constantly more than any can tell us.

I know I'm boring you with my defining
and redefining of/ my self, that you've
long concluded I am sadly obsessed
with minority, inferior shinings;
that I cannot relax unless I prove
I'm lovable.  I know:  We're all depressed.

(2-26-77 / 5-19-77 / 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 334

A mouth full of agates.  On the kept walk
an occasional leaf.  Should we look, listen,
touch?  Argue about when loose or tight talk
perfects a poem?  Learn why images glisten
or don't?  Your red scarf slips, catches on thorns.
My desire to kiss you heats.  At the back
of the daydream/ floating through/ the Bay of Scorns,
believing his guts like gyroscopes track,
a sailor laughs at the chopping waves, stretching
importantly over the railing, sabres
of thought lopping them, when suddenly retching
from the root of his stomach, his proud labors
buckle/ and he/ recovers himself fetching
land to stand solidly on/ with his neighbors.

(1976: 11-29, 12-01, 12-12; and
"diamonds" to "agates" 2006: 12-29)

-
-
It has occurred to me/ it might be an interesting exercise
to iterate only the rhyming words/ in each of my sonnets.
-
-

-

November: Year-day 335

Lo, my RuneGod, ruined God, rued, roomed God,
Your present of faith confuses me, seeming
a gift favoring ignorance so/ dreaming
and wondering sicken, drenched in the sod.
The lilies of the field; my talents: how
can theybe reconciled?  How can I strive
and not strive, not worry when I'm alive
but empty-handed, sweating/ just to bow?

And what is this business anyway
where facts urge humans to shuck logic's shells
and enter gatherings of dread beliefs
that make it easier to fill each day
because many join there on what repels,
and succor themselves in each other's griefs?

(2-26-77, 12-4-77, 1-17-82, and on
12-29-06: "the virtue" to "Your present")
-

22 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                      

sw00052usabys-15.nov.sonnets.21of25

21 of 25                                                      

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (306-320)

-
November: Year-day 306

If you, like me, are a dreamer, beware;
there are other dreamers who do not dream
as you; and it won't matter you can share
and they share back, for neither they nor you
will ever/ accept each other.  You may seem,
& hopefully will, and they may be ready
to seem, also, to understand just who,
what, and why; but such meetings won't be steady.

Where women love men and women, and men . . .
respectfully--a loving that depends
constantly on the cares of those involved--
I enter/remain/leave praising again
the God who creates differences, and sends
weak me strength to do so/ and be resolved.

-

November: Year-day 307

It's before sunrise on Election Day
here in Bethesda.  I can feel me sitting
nervously on a bed high and away
in Innkeeper Hewins' Holiday, knitting
a soft scarf of words for the coming cold.
Down Rock Creek Parkway we'll take a short drive,
pass Lincoln and Jefferson, bought and sold,
before we turn north, bright, blue, still alive.

Going out is a goodly tribulation
no different from returning it seems
when people are persons and each relation,
wherever formed / however long, redeems.
These united states form a deep, broad nation:
they have oaks and sparrows for all our dreams.

-

November: Year-day 308

& what the hell's a good poem anyhow:
one whose lightning ruptures its learner's heart,
that thunders its curves of emotive thought
the range of human hearing; veils its scars?
Must dogma be shunned, & bleeding reproved;
unique technique & flair given/ the green
each age; few besides those gardeners/ approve
leaf & blossom from their diligent seeds?

How fashion rules/ & the kings of the past,
sanctified, condemned!  What it takes to last?
I've had it!  It just doesn't matter now.
I know what I've done/ and expect to do.
If you enter my words, you'll measure how/
I am, was, stay, bounteous with/ me / you.

-

November: Year-day 309

Sunrise, discussing possibilities,
the indifferent beds in one twenty-two
spread with green, Janice and I, seeking ease,
eat, andleaf through our heads for what to do.
Back in this West Bend Holiday Inn, we've
got to find a place to/ move to today.
Bless us.  It may be long before we leave
this city again.  Comfort our new stay.

Losses beyond recovery we've had
and have, to points where laughter won't cover
them.  Still our state is merely oddly sad,
much as my search for a Camelot lover.
Neither I nor we sincerely have cared
who consistently explore/ half-prepared.

-

November: Year-day 310

Happiness? an Eden I/ have not felt
enough of, and at this rate, never will.
My forward motions are too close to still.
My tires spin & spin till their rubbers melt.
I wear my corduroy to keep the chills
from shaking me.  Why is it/ I do not/
strip down & fight, defeat this present lot
I've fallen into, cure my sloth-formed ills?

Can I not rush as a mountain stream rushes,
changing the rocks, glittering in the eyes?
Can I not feed the animals and brushes,
provide a sustenance that births surprise?
Who understands what on each of us crushes,
and what joys lighten/ for each who defies?

(1976 and 2006-12-29)

-

November: Year-day 311

Destiny: Judas; chance: Matthias.  One,
my God, my Rune, inscrutable some ways,
communicating love where the whip flays,
faith / hope me, clean with sustenant sun
the dirty spots of my being/ that light
as well from me may flow who on his knees
so often in contrition feels a breeze
inspire him, yet drinks fear, though he'd tell spite:

Burn my makings, each one; I still will praise
my Rune Supreme for gifting me to please
myself and others so/ with sounds that raise
intelligence and feelings, spirit trees.
"So live"--"You're a dead man"--too late--toil; toy.
Live "one day at a time."  "Share in my joy."

(11-6-76 and 12-12-76)

-

November: Year-day 312

Forgive me, Father, Rune, my being's Life,
for all the times I've turned from You and so
from others, myself, things; thus, through their strife
and peace, I pray that those who've come to know
sorrow because of me/ also forgive;
and I forgive.  Tangled wonders, we each,
however inconsistently we live,
need that deep strength which holies his/her reach.

Farm drives, crazed streets of a metropolis,
busy but dream-light avenues of towns;
marshes and hills and lakes and woods and fields,
rivers of white bass, alleys where lips kiss
and whistle and/ blow smoke; trench diggers, clowns
on floats, batboys, tractors.  Be of love's yields.

(octet: 2-19-80; sestet: 2-20-80 & 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 313

O, the inventions of Man, how they move!
what jobs they end, begin, change! what needs fill!
what wants! what dreams create! and things produce!
and acres heap!  The designs on the quilt
you snuggle under: let them patch you off,
intrigue you from your sense of where you rest
so even a familiar voice is lost
on your ears, even a friend's touch not felt.

Each able to elide the flesh and be
rapt in the Being with Whom we are one--
the prof no more than the yardman can see
battering each other gets nothing done
that couldn't better be done elsewise.  Arms.
But we/ who transcend, descend.  Rise.  Flout harms.

(11-23/24-79)

-

November: Year-day 314

Grandfather Salchert / Grandfather Morse--one
a railroad engineer / one a G. P.--
the former's John Joseph, his second son,
and the latter's petite Seviah E.,
joined in the fall of 1933,
lost their first before his first year was done;
after shattering grieving, parented me,
who by Alden St. Cloud wills to be known.

"God is pale doubt, the devil bright denial"
says Laura Riding, distubing a poem.
When humans ponder, justice/ rarely lights
(not even when strengthened by jury trial).
In one state an act leaving one one's flights,
in another traps forty/ years from home.

(1976 and 1978)

-

November: Year-day 315

I cannot help it, and do not want to:
I am an immanence of my Rune God;
and when I best shine, I love all of you.
So am I trussed by the Way/Truth/Life's rod.
Each living ring/ hugged by a living ring,
still I'm a man finding himself in pieces
where/ his being steps; lost, drooping on things
strange, a fool whose hurt/ fecklessly increases.

How sad is sadness over sadness then,
shaking a belly until its sides ache?
Wagner was a megalomaniac.
To Ben Jonson and Walt Whitman, miled men,
I dedicate these shadowy lights, knowing
only/ the Last Sphere exists/ beyond growing.

(2-1-78 / 2-22-78 / 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 316

Because they do not understand my silences,
they do not understand my sounds: I'm buried
in Boise.  Philosophy.  Charms.  Sentences.
Yes, yes, tree: extend, share yourself, be married
to the universe no matter the deaths wealth
and a falsely defined "need to survive"
continue to give birth to, rottinghealth,
the still cruelly organized human hive

perpetuated.  Money/ controls God.
Survival has come to mean/ isolating
each from each/ so to the cleverest
the spoils, as far too many of us nod
to fear (however sane at times that mating
may be).  Swans circle, rise, out from my chest.

(2-1-78 / 4-14-78 / 11-11-03 / 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 317

"Poetry had always been dying of
something as far back as he could remember."
Simpson on Pound: a special kind of love,
the kind one looks for--alive in November.
Too sentimental?  Too objective?  Always
too this, too that?  The beauty's in the chances
taken with truth (out of our alleys & hallways)
that pleasure us who get into their dances

we most appreciate.  Chains.  Changes.  Rooted
skies.  Capillaries / nerves.  Thunder of thought.
Lightning of emotion.  Rivers of coal/
diamonds swim in.  Passageways to the luted
stars.  Fragmented voices blessedly caught
in a mending song.  Worlds of/ felt control.

(2-1-78 / 11-13-03 / 12-29-06)

-

November: Year-day 318

People just won't let people/ be themselves;
and I, alack, just won't let me be me.
Am I a fool?  Over & over shelves
of anxiety & sadness say, "Be,"
while my thought-needs keep screeching in me, "Do";
and I can't cease/ questioning answers/ I
survive/ who hopes for perfections; yet, who--
in faith and love so little--fears to try.

God knows my being, doing; fights with words,
ideas, time; how I bug & bug, sting
my heart, head, soul, and yours; yet want my name,
however I write it, honored; how birds
excite; knows, too, my virtues; that/ I'll sing
His Will, repent; that there lives my best fame.

(11-25/26-79 and 11-13-03)

-

November: Year-day 319

"Good morning" I impress with my pen, and:
"Good afternoon"; and: "Good evening" as you
read & listen.  This is how/ I come through.
It is a thing with me: the way I stand.
If you should find me with my urges crammed
in my critical sense, my magic glued
to/ dry on/ my soft soul, don't come on rude
& righteous, labeling me lurid, damned.

Don't call me an anti-poetic slut,
a dreamer without vision.  I don't tell
what I tell because I can't stop from wringing
my psyche before you, because my gut
& heart have been killed by my head.  Style?  Dwell.
"Good day"; "good night": I'm a sky of grave singing.

(? and 1-30-78)

-

November: Year-day 320

Robert Lowell, for us, everto vie, I
praise your tent/camp, though I am not free here,
though it shouldn't matter I am oddly queer;
though an artist's the only gal or guy
who always employed may yet have to buy
food stamps, & beg for a bastard career
to save each of those "officially" dear
from degradation, not formed to deny.

But so it is, Robert, from time to time
for some of us; yet, though you didn't have
to wait until your middle years or after
for strong approval, wondering if time
might waste you, or how you could prod & salve
a rebuffed self, you hallowed/ tears and laughter.

(1-11-78 and ?)
-

21 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00051usabys-15.oct.sonnets.20of25

20 of 25                                                      

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (290-305)

-
October: Year-day 290

To touch you deeply and be loved for it
(to be so close our minds' extensions cling
and have no desire to part/ though I bring
a sensibility that does not fit
with yours, a dark intensity you sit
and stare at, fearful of its heavy ring
you imagine binds, will not let you sing
your own ragged self from a place well lit)

is the center of what I star for, blown
about by circumstance, ruddered by will,
planning to scrub West Bend for College Park,
surmising within that haloed unknown
deeper satisfactions would fight each chill
than so far have, call me/ out of the dark.

-

October: Year-day 291

Oh me oh my, what's hiding in the sky?
Born Brian Salchert in flat Fond du Lac,
marshed in Wisconsin when winter was high,
forty-one's January in mid-track,
I was baptized Catholic, faithed from Fate,
thoroughly fused with the holy absurd
though it may from the first have been too late
for a being moved by a counter-word.

Symbols, cymbals, winds, dreams, Reubens, dark beer;
married, childless, condemned--my last name Bass
when once I ranged leather Buovincian, queer/
once not; or Barrington or else, for class.
I'm tolerable though, though my cornball wit,
hearing these names, dubs me: Brian/ the Split.

(February, 1977)

-

October: Year-day 292

The Collected Poems of Brian the Split.
Why not.  Earth has worse fancies to endure.
Besides, who's to say anyone for sure
is no more than one on the face of it.
Rejected as one, rejected as three,
the latter at least allows for more laughs
as I rhyme and rhythm to nourish me
who would blossom in you, unite our graphs.

There'll soon be a day when the snow's so dry
it grows from my car like a fine white mold,
and the swilled airs swallow my human cry
at the wonder of it.  And I too, cold,
flipped Alden St. Cloud, doubting who, where, why.
Keys beyond flesh open anything old.

(February, 1977)

-

October: Year-day 293

Starting/ with who I am, owl in the wind,
the leaves vapid titters/ hidden by rain,
I tell you, my loved ones, no one will gain
while fear of variety keeps us pinned.
When the millipedes of clouds scamper hard
across the waters, the changeable "o"
that rules my voice, silent, wide, lets a show
of laughter out.  Everything's somewhere marred.

So all the elements, mingled, remade,
the visions I weave, am inventor of;
all the serious games I have played, love.
And I'm pleased you have come this far, & stay,
alive to my patterns, the ways I pray,
glad there are brambles to struggle above.

(7-7-77; 10-19-77; 1-23-78; 12-28-06)

-

October: Year-day 294

So much has been written, and will be still
as tumbleweeds knock at gas station doors,
and flat earth quietly puffs to a hill;
and macho men, gentled, play on all fours.
So much: touting the old; arriving proud,
part of the crest of the current; or--
the horse and the crocodile haven't allowed
the dalliance of wonder.  Write so much more.

"Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less."
A certain madness rages in the bone.
I write because to be, to curse, to bless
men's dreams/ such making/ shows faith best.  Alone,
I'll neither hope nor love; and just to guess--.
Encompass us who sail/ the not yet known.

(1978, 1979, & 2006; quote: Surrey)

-

October: Year-day 295

I've not written one perfect poem, not one;
yet all the jobs I've ever had, or will,
can't match the joys that through my being run
when a single line comes right: vibrant, still.
Yes, I'd chuck them all in a moment if
this act of patterning my blood and breath
could insure my blood from becoming stiff
and my pulsing lungs from an empty death.

How/ shape a swath of light though into darks--
chopped & bonfired roots spread/ clearing the way
for the terrifying quick & new--stay
identity-killing changes?  Mere sparks.
Bow, acquiesce; the inventions of men
far surpass the dreams of gods trapped in when.

(octet: 10-24-77; sestet: 2-4-78)

-

October: Year-day 296

"It can never be satisfied, the mind,
never."  Nor the heart.  Thirty-five now, I've
journeyed and searched an average amount, signed
my name to execrable ventures, deathly alive;
played a part in this / in that, given more
than my share.  Oh, I haven't been superb
inordinately, a squirrel made to store
enough for each winter, learning the verb.

More often than wanted, my hearts /minds falter,
injuring me and others and the world
no matter my intentions at the altar
a moment defines.  Still, I am uncurled
regardless, however slowly, the length
of my life the master/ with will's glad strength.

(some of this made: 10-22-77)

-

October: Year-day 297

How I'd like to live essentially me
over & over again, passing each time
new ways: choosing Boston orthe gold sea
instead of Marquette and the Jebs sublime;
choosing San Francisco right out of school/
going to court with Ginsberg; or remaining
at home, Janice heavy with the children who'll
supercede the weathers of my complaining!

Fate & dream / energies / chrysanthemums /
encroachments / ambiguous tongues of salt--
in and out of the shadows of the living--
rocks / airs / springs / flames / ridiculous lost crumbs
of "thought" pleasures & pains / leaves to exalt /
fingertips / pulses / the warm roots of giving

(2-5-77)

-

October: Year-day 298

César Vallejo, you are so much!  Aye.
dios mio. . . .  No turn I could make could--
Why do I want to compete with you?  My!
My, my!  What cancers of termites breathe wood!
Unknowable stars whirl in/ my frail bones.
A music grazes beneath the crisp snow.
Tears well/ at the push of your tones.
I cannot compete/ with nowhere to go.

César Vallejo, Vallejo . . . held soul,
too exquisite for a worn Earth, adieu.
A saraband laces; the pampas roll;
not even the rains can compete with you.
Dark, small, fresh blood, fresh life, my one heart's goal.
You will plumb and plumb to make our lives true.

(2-5-77)

-

October: Year-day 299

"Both of us like poems to be well made and
show decorum."  O Auden, how my days
are audited out/ by my nights, my stand
against bad fates/ less and less pulling rays
of confidence, as each successive choice
shakes/ another leaf/ from one left to moan:
Frustration is my middle name, his voice
naked & creaking/ down the chisled stone.

I shiver/ in my bark, beating the air
with my stripping words, ridiculed, ignored,
as I sink/ into my spirit / my roots/
for sustenance, for the power to care,
to grow, and return with clothed words, restored
& shining/ from forced retreat, on new shoots.

(nine lines: 1-28-78, and
several revisions: 12-29-06)

-

October: Year-day 300

Finally got ahold of Connell's Notes _ _ _.
Let's now hope they can get ahold of me,
even if my middling head will not see
all they explain where their brightbottle floats.
Still, Life's soaring, though we must not pray so;
for out of wounds peregrine flights charge
the haze, and hummingbird wheelings enlarge
us who/ accept the ties in what we know.

As magnificent as I am, I am
a given.  D. H. Lawrence knows.  And thanks
to Joyce Carol Oates, and others, and trees,
and--I now know again.  The mustard seed.
"In the convolutions of the cortex
the newfrontiers": the eternal Port X.

(1976(?) and 1978)

-

October: Year-day 301

And the witches of celestial light
wand the cannas red; and what John Clare said/
I:  " . . . neglect is the only touchstone by
which true genius is proved. . . ."  And the smart dead
inebriate my bones.  A path defies;
the makers of paths rejoice.  In the heart
of my senses, paths deform; your soul dyed/
rainbows of green/ learns the/ secrets of art.

Relax my spine, soothe the skin of repentance,
share.  With eyes for the shining wind, alone/
all one, we yet must read the final sentence/
of The Great Sunflower by Clifford Stone:
"Night and winter approach like the end of
the world--and nothing matters."  Who knows love?

(1978)

-

October: Year-day 302)
(#10 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

October: Year-day 303

Quitting Capital Beltway's Holiday,
I'm relieved & mad and ready to ride,
about to feel as on my wedding day:
"And the weak bridegroom strengthens in his bride."
Perhaps I shouldn't be, or as I am.
Perhaps this whole plummed nation's wrenched awry.
Whatever, we are traveling again,
& here & there & inwards, buy the buy.

The rural acres collapse, twist from view;
the cities the same, more slowly.  We are two
retreating/ as we charge along the roads
toward home/ & those happy to hear the news
we're returning.  Out the windows dreams blow.
If I solicit you, you can say:  "No."

(1976, 1978, 1979; quote: Roethke)

-

October: Year-day 304

Here in the prison of my fears and wants,
the air sticky with rain, what can I blame?
Shaw said:  "People are always blaming their
circumstances for what they are"; proclaimed:
"I don't believe in circumstances"; then judged:
"The people who get on in this world are
the people who get up and look for the
circumstances they want, and if they can't
find them, make them."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . I honor you, G. B.,
but I cannot add an inch to my height
or say I was born by a churning sea
or say there's a vireo in my sight.
Some circumstances do/ entangle me/
though perhaps I am not yet set to fight.

(11-1-77 and 12-28-06)

-

October: Year-day 305

I wanted to do better than I've done;
I wanted to stay longer than I stayed;
butthe small dead leaf from the web strand hung
spins in the sill's corner when the airs stab.
It's not that I figured I couldn't run
with some of the best with on a tougher grade,
it's just that I didn't knowthemarked rung
would be too slick for my fingers to grab

as soon as I'd hoped to, and that my wife,
in any case, would disparage the life
we each/ have had to make do with, her eyes
watery, looking at me, weakly wise,
trying to dodge quick circumstance's knife
in my weird attempts to win a vague prize.
-

20 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00050usabys-14.oct.sonnets.19of25

19 of 25                                                       

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (275-289)

-
October: Year-day 275

October, month of changes, touch, change me
who so reluctantly displays his fire
fearing he isn't full enough to be
worth seeing, fearing his truths won't inspire,
fearing what can be harvested from him
it would be better to let rot; to hope
next year his form and substance seem less grim
to his brown eyes than now / more charged as trope;

that imagined rejections he expects
will come/ not come, or if they do, not leave
him shrinking into hardened ground as though
he harbored some disease/ one who inspects
would hastily confirm; so ought to grieve,
waiting for the saw's screech, the masking snow.

(5-29/30-80) . 25+ ?! . (2006-01-23; 2006-12-24)

-
-
*  09.23.06 note:  
Be on the watch for the before-1976 October sonnets.
-
-

October: Year-day 276

While some hearts wither, have acutely dried,
mine moistens, no matter the dust that dunes
in my veins.  Without faith, nothing is tried,
not even the musics portioned in spoons,
not even caryatids holding glory,
not even the movement that sadly wounds.
In each of these sonnets winds of a story
mixed with light and the smell of rain and sounds
sometimes off-key swish, sprint, loll through your rages
and ecstasies.  Take to them if they take
to you.  I write/ out of need and desire;
and as much as I cull from other sages,
each work of mine must carry me or quake;
yet be itself, however/ purged of fire.

(2-9-78; 3-4-78; 4-13-78; 12-24-06)

-

October: Year-day 277
(#9 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

October: Year-day 278

Here's what I wrote when I turned twenty-four,
still unaware:
                     There was I child I knew
Who ran with deer and was admired; yet two
Alone had pierced his silence--two with more
To give than most.  And when the spring was floor
And ceiling coming green, the trio grew,
And time would flow through summer like the coo
Of distant doves, like water trembling shore.

Yet soon, too soon, Earth's children die, and still
The round of flakes and apples sweeping down
From four and twenty boughs to twice my days,
From four and twenty winds of twice my will
Must wither me.  But child, I shall not frown
On those who wonder wonder at my ways.

(1-2-78; 1-16-65)

-

October: Year-day 279

Mistakes, regrets, pending dilemmas, death.
Catch yourself/ in the middle of a breath.
On bare twigs balloons pop.  Winds/ squash on walls.
One never knows who a mockingbird calls.
When leaves leave their trees, silence hangs behind.
Our Earth's protected by its cloudy rind.
Nothing's separate as we think it is.
Even a pebble isn't merely His.

Gregory Bateson can mess up your head,
but better that than a vision that's dead.
"Ecology . . . the study of the inter-
action and survival of ideas
and programs . . . in circuits."  Summer, fall, winter,
spring.  The immanence of God.  Released fuzz.

(9-20-77; 2-9-78; 2-10-78; 12-25-06)

-

October: Year-day 280

Now, while each delusion and illusion dries,
like those roots in abstract order near my pond
since the bulldozer snapped them at the skies
and axe men sliced them free with glinting wands
from that Chinese elm the children climbed in,
beating its thin, dead branches down; yelling
for fun at  me: now, I come with a grin--
thinking of all that redness and swelling.

Still, never something I thought I might enjoy,
the roots are hard to gather; but since that tree,
always just half alive, has, like a lame boy,
been forced from strength, my need is to be
fearless in removing.  To admire what
I grow is easy; to destroy it, not.

(circa 1965)

-

October: Year-day 281

Homer has/ stormed through all.  And so they say:
"Pull down your tents.  Forget it.  Douse your fires.
Why should we fight with shadows?  Why should we stay,
trembling in snow, because we have desires?
Pack up your knapsacks, friends; it is no use.
Why should we cringe from snakes, battle with flies,
or wonder all night if a peg is loose?
Why should we starve: to be syllable-wise?"

Dante and Shakespeare--they felt that storm too.
And did they run from the terrors?  Did they swerve?
Let us keep our fires; keep our tent ropes new.
Words, life, love: if it seems foolish to serve
to some, let them pull down their tents; go then.
He's thundered round our heads, too, and will again.

(circa 1965)

-

(Line two in the following is more 
situational thanit is dogmatic.)
-

October: Year-day 282

Let others use their minutes as they wish,
but I will keep mine close to what is old;
like Keat's Grecian urn or Yeats's fish,
my minutes shall be crafted:  For if rolled
as on an anvil or as on a wheel--
if hammered and so dented with a shine
or blessed with figures bright that seal
us to the gods--each, heat will refine:

each, whether static in its performance or
animated toward an end and filled
with what half-world people clamor for,
will be set upon a table to build,
to destroy (as imaginations see):
united acts to bear or/ bury me.

(circa 1965)

-

October: Year-day 283

Yew-honored soul crags (over life roars, cold
with death, that mock him who runs in a trance
up there as some naked fool come to dance
through the moon) measure their immortal hold
on life by all creative motion's told
Earth's children where a poet's inward glance
ignites inhibitions to topple chance
from their regions of salt and air and fold:
those marginal zones where our Shakespeare roamed
imponderable storms, where Keats employed
their frangible tissues with Merlin powers;
where Frost, calm master of the white and loamed,
gardened a poetry our ears enjoy:
those coasts I praise, into eternal hours.

(circa 1965)

-

October: Year-day 284

"Sonnet to Shakespeare"

O master of keys, of treasures, lord,
A billion crowns in praise upon your head.
No, more, since tombs cannot in secrets board
Your play, let Hamlets ever hear the dead.
Did I say dead?  But bones alone must be.
What Prospero could die, though buried deep
His rod?  Yet tempests must on rocks roll sea
To wash the world and round it with a sleep.

O golden globe from whence our day takes life,
Spill warmth, throw light for us; unlock your heart
Forever, so those jewels will soothe this strife
Man bears because his body lacks in art.
   Sing, bard on Avon born, no songs of death,
   But pour your poems pure with each man's breath.

(12/14/62: on a flyleaf of an "ancient"
     Hurst & Co book entitled Shakespeare)

-

October: Year-day 285

"To John Keats"

Brave spellstar, child of magic beauty, arc
Eternal of triumphant truth, soft-send
Those lyrical effusions we attend--
Owls who pursue the melancholic lark.
Wand our sweat into dew.  With suns embark,
Renewed Olympian; from night unbend
Men's hearts.  You are th' explorer of his end;
The shepherd's flute that stedfast casements mark.
Far wing soul's satellites, commuters bright;
But yours among the farthest glows, like Ruth,
Desiring only that it loves.  Unstilled, 
Majestic; more than mortal, you are light,
O ageless youth with aged wisdom filled:
In all things Beauty is; in all is Truth.

(1962)

-

October: Year-day 286

"What does it matter, friend, how much we dream?
A poet's eyes are neither bulbs nor moons.
They do notgrow, or shine, more than could seem;
or pull the green and dying from lagoons.
And though his ears may hear, his fingers feel,
his tongue may taste, his nose may smell--ist gut--
they do not guide, or teach, or make things real;
his heart, if anything, is bitterroot.
And what does it matter if he stays at home
to nurse a brother lost to blood and phlegm;
a poet dies in every worthy poem:
and travel will not lessen a one of them."

"No, Rome cannot change beauty.  You are right.
Give Tom my best; and John: thank you.  Good night."

(circa 1965)

-

October: Year-day 287

What scope I have; what promise yet to prove,
my present dreaming only can surmise:
If I will struggle down a nettled groove
or shake the string to kite a zone of skies,
a dozen years, at least, must make their rings
around the fevered jerking of my pen;
and words must rise from peasants as from kings
to tell me if I live or die, and when.

So in the now--which passes to recall--
I run and swish and stumble like a boy
against the gully on a hill with all
his sparkle burning through his fingertips
and up the curve that holds his diamond joy
until its flight's applauded, or it/ rips.

(circa 1965)

-

October: Year-day 288

I journey unexpected, Venus bound
in writing as I do.  The clocks may break
before me, fall, spring seconds away, ground.
I will publish their graves; a galaxy rake
with treble staffs.  Time masters me not!
I play with time, toy of my ever-youth.
I swing it on my wrist, and watch it rot
in snow--end of a relative truth.

Day falters on the plains of coming night,
and nights die weakly when dawns arise
from beds, mightily dressed.  But neither rite
is truth enough for me since solar size
makes no difference.  All-time is truth, but none
shall stop my pen, whose song of will/ has won.

(circa 1965)

-

October: Year-day 289

Mysteries of the mind:  Entire designs,
nuances, descriptions are sometimes dropped
unconsciously when a work's set out, stopped
for a while, its time, colors and flexed lines
considered complete: defined and defined.
"A poem is really a kind of machine
for producing the poetic state of mind
by means of words," Valéry has said.  Keen.

The mind is a desert challenging rain.
Joint by joint the syllablesrace and brake,
turn upon each other, hum in the brain;
yet I'm often a shelf for its own sake.
Put on me what you will.  Empty, unfinished,
I'm nonetheless here: rough, but/ undiminished.

(septet: April,1978)
-

19 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00049usabys-14.sep.sonnets.18of25

18 of 25                                                        

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (260-274)

-
September: Year-day 260

Your shining rings of love move, befuddle me,
Saturn, rainbow, chopped tree, swirling oil, pond,
and the constant curve of the weeping sea,
and the dark faith of the graceful spored frond.
Though it painfully matters you're enjoyed
where you glisten, chime, & commit your love,
enjoyment of you continues devoid
of all it should be where reason can't move.

Mysteries that make us/ wonder & kneel,
rats in our cities of doubtful content,
shadows of shadows of passing appeal,
what holy delvings your circlings have sent!:
beginnings & endings underdefined
to boggle the limits of my trussed mind.

-

September: Year-day 261

Naked Festival.  Or a symphony
of babies pulsing from wombs/ into light.
I am weak.  I am weak.  I have no might.
I would easily break/ over your knee.
The whales are slaves to their good queen the sea,
and bats are held by their master the night;
a flutterby's flashings ever excite.
In my brain there are dreams that keep me free.

In the captive woods the hermit-thrush leaf
hides the secret of its autumn-in-summer
while an oyster grows the pearl of its pain.

And still we pile hates on the back of grief,
and in the sounds of cities walk on dumber,
and crack our honor on the shafts of grain.

-

September: Year-day 262
(#8 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-
-
As I am moved to revise a sonnet in this sequence,
I do; and I usually do not annotate what I revise.
-
-

September: Year-day 263

A great sadness lives in the marrow of 
my soul who cannot move among the lives
of brother/sister humans sewing love
as I know should be/ because vice survives
our virtue who are too much on the take-
and-cover wavelength as we gobble time/
and so grow fat and vicious/ ready to break
the least civility/ for a lost dime.

"O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart
of Mary, I offer you my prayers, works,
joys, sufferings of this day"; I--You know
my fears and fantasies, my faults / what art
and craft can join in me, what happy births
transform my pains praising care.  Cure my soul.

-

September: Year-day 264

Yesterday, in five o'clock steady rain
and the rapid fluting and violins
on the radio, I imagined gain
(as Jean Dixon's garden gate vision spinned),
entering from the clouds;and began to see
how belief can heal, and the heart's spaces,
the days without poems, fill, as a strong tree
in summer, of emptiness, leaves no trace.

Today, in the dark ahead of the sun
and the puckering muzak as I doze,
moth dreams flutter/ to chew my senses' clothes/
so, though I am glad/ the audit's done,
I can't quite capture what everyone knows
but forgot he knew where he hugs and loathes.

-

September: Year-day 265

Commemorations of conniption fits:
trying to/ change jobs, trying to/ change me.
Blasted spirits--am I land, air, fire, sea?
West Bend to College Park?  My aching wits!

It's like going from Purgatory--wow!--
to Heaven!  Not a heaven of respite
and ease, though, deary; one works for what's right;
and works/ in the blood, the eye--before; now.

And tomorrow?  And tomorrow?  Yes.  Reason
shines though, I'd say, for me to see that.
One used to action's not likely to stop
just because he's entered the perfect season
for the depth of his character.  Tit, tat,
campassion.  Spark's alive in those on top.

(On the above piece: Emotional excitement
 can all too easily undermine rational thinking.)

-

September: Year-day 266

How many confessions are there in  me
that they bubble & splurt, still, my soul's guts?
Isn't one enough to prove I am nuts,
and holy, and average, a Zuider Zee?

So what if the gingham cat's up a tree
and the sky of wonder is full of ruts.
So what if I spank your innocent butts
or tickle your sides into misery.

Speak me, hearers/ because I am a man
who high in a maple challenges wind;

who comes to wrestle ideas, words/ span
the spaces that keep truths apart/ be pinned;

who thrilled when he won the races he ran,
and sings for the love of all who have sinned.

-

September: Year-day 267

Attended a picnic once--it was sunny,
breezy, and warm--just nice.  We talked and played.
The robins crossed and crossed, crossed again, stayed.
When it was time to eat, the winds whipped; gunny
clouds fired pellets of ice at us, barrage
after barrage.  We crowded under the roof
of the open-air pavilion, aloof
as stone, grasping our plates and cups.  Such gods!

Traps we build ourselves, traps built for us, traps
our genes and circumstances put us in:
stupidity, patience, nerviness, luck,
people out to get us;and we, perhaps,
out to/ get ourselves.  Bells, who knows how thin
the air is, a spoken word, one night's tuck.

-

September: Year-day 268

Justice--cracker barrel encomiums;
noose of posse gloatinginthe breeze;
twelve grey voices deliberating crumbs;
a dictator's speech broken by a sneeze.

Choose from the above: for hatred; for love.
Smoke rings/ blithely/ float/ through the livingroom.
Her sister nattily gave her a shove.
It would  surprise you/ who/ lives in a tomb.

Oh lovers tangle, discolor their flesh;
and seas swallow clouds and planets and stars;
and brilliant cardinals also die.

A poor woman hobbles through Marrakech;
the crown jewels of Russia long for czars;
only the good humans act, and know why.

-

September: Year-day 269

Trying to sing without songing, I pull
my thought beyond the end of a line, pause
in curious places, wear the white wool
of usual sheep even though my cause
is more gray, or black, though not in the sense
of evil so much as in the sense of
playful deceit, knowing a recompense
of a sort will come/ in a form of love.

Oh, I could let iambs control each line
in granite ways/ so at an ending, stop;
and where the eyes stop/ could make you recline
against your will, and jump, and smile; the top
of your day my telling you/ how divine
we are who/ can pray while we till, pick, shop.

-

September: Year-day 270

Humanity and I are parting ways.
Axing a table (exquisitely set),
with my vagabond eyes, the numbered days
of my race I deny, meaning to get
us all to where no traps can well be laid
against us.  Faust / Prometheus: "the will
to know" / "the will to do"--we've worked and played
to where "the will to be" exacts our skill
at loving and justicing on an earth
complexified, accelerated, jammed
almost beyond our comprehension, flair;
and I, poet, jojo, vain of my worth,
see.  So these myth sonnets through which I'm/ slammed
& cheered/ that none ask why: how what who where.

-

September: Year-day 271

And Jesus bore the burdens of us all--
the thorns, the scourge wounds, the spit, the vile words,
the spikes of suffocation.  And the birds
can tell I am a man of gentle touch
in desire, a man for whom the barbed call
of taking pleasure in/ reeling in men
with art, however painful, is again
and again accepted.  God loves me much--

and you, and you, and you--no matter that
what pleases you pleases each, pleases none.
How difficult it sometimes is for those
who/ dwell inheat/ to understand/ a hat.
I've not crouched in an igloo; but I've run,
yes!, dropping the courage to root my toes.

-

September: Year-day 272

The carmelled-apple dream of moving on,
of eating something better than a melon,
moves me now: moves, moved, will move: on
& on & off & on, raising the felon
in me.  So the oversweet rind does cloy,
does threaten to break each tooth it encases,
encouraging rot; I'm always a boy
in my willingness/ to confront new places:

Milwaukee, Northern Michigan, you,
St. Bonifacius, Oshkosh, Iowa,
Charleston, Key West, Las Vegas, Santa Cruz,
tender Atlantic and Pacific spas,
galaxies beyond imagining, temples/
of contemplation, heart-divining temples.

-

September: Year-day 273

When a man cares so/ he cries, beauty comes:
Flaming sphere of gasses, Tractatus Sun;
Life inciter, Investigations Sun;
Brander of eons, aweing kings / queens / bums.

His father worked deep their Dakota land
to save the bond between his loved and it;
but Civilization, progress chilled, bit
his heart out/ severed his good, calloused hands.

So I cannot love, nor live, civilized.
Do not uncivilize me, no; instead,
move me beyond Civilization, Light,
Effusion-through-Whom love renews/ & life,
and . . . I--despite my blasphemies--am held
and blessed--though ill--to everyone's surprise.

-

September: Year-day 274

Men, whole, tend toward good; their organizations,
unlike, toward evil; yet their arts again,
compassions, toward good; for nation through nation
humans transcend because One beyond them
infuses, creates--the Source of all good--
because we can grow because we can die;
so, if organizations halve & hood,
our arts can restore our polluted skies;

and the skins that protect us, more protect,
who are skins, bones, bloods, waters, spirits: weak;
yet starred enough to revise and reject
where living tissue's relinguished the peak,
and the fires that toil for beauty and truth
are threatened by those of the Icy Tooth.
-

18 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00048usabys-14.sep.sonnets.17of25

17 of 25                                                          

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (245-259)

-
September: Year-day 245

Opening and leaving, lightening: trying
to prepare/ for a necessary move,
puzzled for the moment by one I'm eyeing
eyeing me like the Mona at the Louvre/
it seems, I've marked for sale my Panasonic
unit, and my file cabinet, and part
of my/ chicken heart/ freaked by the chronic
disease of being/ afraid to depart.

If you are able to appreciate
how rodents of doubt bore tunnels in souls,
you'll extend your heart to this heart of mine
to tell it again it's never too late
to build the confidence that meets one's goals
and carries one in to where birds recline.

-

September: Year-day 246

Popcorn and swizzle sticks.  Who can I trust?
Not myself, certainly, a proven fool,
having walked the wrong halls in the wrong schools
and darkened my days in these times of dust.
Do this!  Do that!  Hurry!  I must!  I must!
The typewriter ribbon slides from its spool.
I'm seldom at ease with the simplest tools.
If I don't quit talking, my fork will rust.

I know it's a pity bears haven't found
where I hide my honey-filled dead tree head
even the bees are preparing to leave.

When I'm empty, dry, and the only sound
I make in the wind is an orange-red
spouting smoke, crackling to ash, none will grieve.

(9-2-76 / 9-24-76 / 12-23-06)

-

September: Year-day 247

Time is, was, will be, gets away, yet holds
all each of us is in his going: soft,
hard, obvious, imperturbable, scoffed,
applauded, puzzled over/ looking golds,
even silvers/ right in the eye and buying
leads, tins.  Perfection simply isn't ours
to contain, recognize well; knowledge sours
more rapidly than we can know, caught sighing.

Still, we can somewhat remember, draw, sing,
and in other ways record beauties passing
mixed with uglinesses of leather wing,
pterodactyls against the future massing
while speeches and bells and conceptions ring,
and pain greets the mouths of children caught sassing.

-

September: Year-day 248

Meet by intermingling, centered in care,
so trilliums as well as rocks appear;
the pleasurable with the painful share;
the moments of courage, moments of fear.
Some/ shadows/ tag behind, some slide ahead,
some stretch out/ from your left, some from your right;
your senses catch and draw/ from Earth's wild spread,
and enter you and others/ day and night.

I thus/ am not/ more important than you,
nor you thus less important here than I.
Each town and field someone you love walks through,
humanized and deepened, is blessed thereby:
a fist tight with dandelions, a brew
of old Red Zinger, a mackerel sky.

(lines 5 through 9 revised before or after
the midnight point of July 29/30, 2005)

-

September: Year-day 249

The idea is to be a tone master,
a beau regard of the interstices,
perfectionist in banded alabaster.
Where whitecaps bloom in our warm spirit's seas
the trick is to be a king of the weather,
the blood in a leaf not sufficing.  Death,
keeper still of imperishables, feather,
bird, the need is to feel the nth of breath.

So let them contend with you as they will,
a beauty imbued can never escape,
and nothing they attempt destroy your heart;
and along their spines an abiding chill
will constantly chide like a peeking drape
as its rod announces each stop and start.

-

September: Year-day 250

If what I write strengthens your spirit, peaches!
Each of us leans on his inner resources.
So if what I write/ by enchantments reaches
and fortifies your life against remorses
conspiring to end it, sunlight and breezes
you let down your hair or take off your shirt
to enjoy.  Pain dissolved by touch that pleases,
sound and sense right, is anyone's desert.

Sure, we would all like to be more aware,
not miss the need in the tone of a word
or a laugh or the movement of/ a finger,
walk with a friend through cresting white warm air
saving each other's life; but truth's deferred
often from us/ though we thoughtfully linger.   (4-11-77)

(circa 09/06/03)  (The virgule in line three; and further on, 
the italicizing of "more" and of "walk" were added 06/30/05.)

-

September: Year-day 251

Sometimes a man doesn't know where to start,
confused by events into leaving them
for others to experience, his heart
choosing what's easier to do to gem
his uncommitted hours: staying at home
for the words of another or his own
(concerts, funerals, games too far to roam),
his energies half-asleep at the bone.

Winds announcing the approach of a front,
stars announcing the hiding of the sun,
words dissipating toward distracted ears,
the full-faced moon near the top of its hunt.
It's a dream a man gets anything done
when his body's so fogged his thinking veers.

-

September: Year-day 252

Civilizations: reaction formations
of guilt.  I murder them.  In the rem sleep
of my imaging, I end them.  No nations.
We have a human world to learn, to keep.
Diversity?  Yes, I want us diverse;
but not perverse, not slitting out the hearts
of each other.  Too long has that mad curse
enslaved and stunted us.  I bring new arts.

The lemon sun tastes good.  The herbal snow
cures a multitude of ills.  Put aside
your clothes, your eager weapons.  The soft air
tingles with delight.  Your honesties show/
your dancing heart/ where openings glide
for you to enter, pass through.  Blossom there.

-
-
(I think my poems
 ought to be voiced
 by a British butler;
 yet, perhaps not.)
-
-


September: Year-day 253

It might be nice just to write this and give
it away, Lord, as what it is in me
that creates this comes from You who lets me live
moments as these wanting them just to be
used as the Father wills / the Spirit moves /
the Son's touch strengthens for.  You know my trust,
although I pray, is weak; that it behooves
me to pray all the more before I'm dust.

Guilt, fear, and revelations: zeitgeist that
this century's ending quarter in these states,
curiously united, appears to show.

Holy Job, holy Macabees, so fat
am I, so rich, so desperate/ who waits
for inspirations for--ain't fit to know.

-

September: Year-day 254

West Bend to Oakland City, Wis to Ind,
one small relative journey out of state.
Flick, peering through the flick flick blades, my skin
flick glints in the flick flick flick sun as I
flick undulate.  We turn each other in;
we eat each other; scream the other's sinned.
When we shoot to kill--zip--we rarely sigh.
When we shoot to kill--devaw--eyes ignite.

Turning the wrong way in a river town
I merely needed to pass through, I slow
with my wife to the ash end of a street,
worrying about the young gang around
as we asked some beer-clutching men which road
would track us right/ though we'd find/ two who bleed.

-

September: Year-day 255

So many of us are so unaware
our protoplasmic natures will not do,
have not what it takes to carry us through.
We think our soft bodies beyond compare
no matter they/ cannot fly, or repair
themselves as starfish can; and look to screw
more often than love, not caring much who
it is that gets it, its soul bloody rare.

Are we anywhere sure/ what we're about?     (2006/12/23)
Born of us, the computers bide time, grow,
preparing for the hour they'll shove us out/
of our beds, laughing as we whimper, pout,
and (raving naked) plunge headlong in snow
as if only we had the right to know.

-

September: Year-day 256

The longer I live, the larger my view;
the larger my view, the deeper my acts;
the deeper my acts, the more I am true
to the man I weave from fiction & facts:
the spirit I weave in the woofing day;
the body I weave in the warping night,
dreaming of evil with good on the way;
eating nutrition with fortified fright.

Simpler and simpler what's too simple now,
a man in his skin preparing to dive,
preparing to swing from a supple bough
as if he were o so blithely alive!
Experience sane, innocence divine,
the tighter I'm yours, the tighter I'm mine.

-

September: Year-day 257

Remembrances / fantasies: Mt. Tam--
the fog-massaging valleyed trees; the young
intruder--no, the old naked "I am"
trying to assert worth/ through something sung/
though the slow tongue's entangled.  Bodies souled,
created to transcend/ this place, this time:
we humans: we are constantly controlled
by mysteries, drawn deep/ by/ the sublime.

Still, anxious for our lives/ protective of
our goods/ disoriented by the powers
our strivings gain & dream, we let a gloom
envelop us who/ thought we were above
each other (leaving/ the death merchants hours)
who/ need to give each other/ growing room.

-

September: Year-day 258
(#7 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

September: Year-day 259

If war is insane--and it is, the only
answer is for each human to be wise
enough to refuse to fight/ though the eyes
shrivel and the spirit is starving lonely.

Charging numbly with your tattered flag struck
at the proper height in violent air
just doesn't make it though your underwear/
stays clean/ while your blood warms idiot muck.

Bite off the heads of flowers, stick-pin bees,
bury the mightiest redwoods in flames,
petrify the oceans, strangle the land.

There are nowhere more foolish bones than these
who to prove their primacy tomb their names
and leave their footprints in a wisping sand.
-

17 of 25


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Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00047usabys-16.aug.sonnets.16of25

16 of 25                                                       

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (229-244)

-
August: Year-day 229

Mr. and Mrs. Goldfinch dine on a thistle,
a Canadian Bull, just west of our
apartment, now and then notes of their whistles
lightly passing in to chase out the dour;

Janice and I chuckle watching them, him
in particular, as they flick down, poking
for seeds as the whisked down graphs a wind's whim
and the seeds crack as if/ on fire and smoking.

Olive-green yellow, charcoal black and white,
Mrs. appropriately harder to see;
Mr. (for courting) white, black, yellow bright,
roller-coastering in neat reverie.
Some things are especially to delight:
Mr. and Mrs. Goldfinch and, sometimes, we.

-

August: Year-day 230

I am the man who didn't know what's good
for him, and still doesn't, uninformed, weak,
not giving those worlds a chance which he should,
remaining silent when he ought to speak,
missing there what he'd certainly enjoy,
injuring enjoyments here with regrets,
daydreaming far too long about a toy
he could never be loved through, losing bets.

I am the man who may never know, dining
beyond his adequate means, buying pains
in commodities he can not long hold.

Why else do you think you'd find me here whining,
destroying my fields with my own harsh rains,
invading the sunlight with rays of cold.

-

August: Year-day 231

In the heart of my heart a red wind blooms,
a Jupiterian ire poised against
the deleterious Earth who assumes
too glibly still that it hasn't commenced
a nearly unstoppable death walk, set
as it too much yet is in "reason's" way
of turning while sub-s and supra-s are let
dangling in imaginations:  Hush pay.

Backwards goes the crab, futuring the past
in its primordial fancies.  On earths
as intractable as this one/ with its
diseased sight is/ I appreciate fast
reversals, the deaths of evils/ in births
of/ incredible beauty: night-wise wits.

-

August: Year-day 232

Ford and Dole; Carter and Mondale: McCarthy:
perfect subjects for reasoned worlds of song
such as this/ since each of them belongs
to a system of politics, is party
to a sort of logic despite his heart's
attempts at filling his lungs with the scents
of roses.  We've seen enough how they went
about and do/ to become special stars.

Position will make a star of one there
whether or not one wants it/ if the place
that position's ruled by is like this ball
of imposed importances.  All the care
in the universe won't disguise one's face
who presents himself to be seen by all.

-

August: Year-day 233

Precursor, owl of serendipity,
razor's edge of inter/personal signs,
image of you I follow/ by the sea:
here, with the dying summer, it is time
to make a position statement:  This land
of mine, this U.S.A., is being lawed
into schizophrenia, a scarred band
of murderers, no matter there's/ a Lord.

For pierced ears she needs her parents consent;
to end her pregnancy she doesn't.  Gay,
he's hated by/ some Christians.  I dissent.

Our shadows scurry around in a daze.
Miss Liberty's torch/ breaks off; shatters eyes.
Miss Justice, no longer blind, isn't wise.

-

August: Year-day 234

And the answer is:  I don't care enough.
Caught between worlds, tolerant to a fault;
too late in coming to terms with myself,
I cannot decide which direction will
benefit most, be a going less rough;
I cannot bring my regrets to a halt;
I cannot remove mistakes from their shelf
in my memory, make healthy/ what's ill.

So fears pushed confidence out of my soul
in those Fond du Lac fifties, closed and drab--
only here and there fulfilling with light;
and though writing poems is a constant goal,
it's only partially/ thwarted the stabs
of contradictions/ that make daytime night.

-

August: Year-day 235

Choosing priorities: the fight between
knowing neither wealth nor power nor fame
assures happiness and neither a lean
nor weak nor unknown status in the game,
however serious, of daily living
assures sorrow.  What's important is what
one does with what is, persistently giving,
changing, and building to/ overcome "but":

the qualifier that signals the naming
of barriers, excuses, indecisions;
that allows books of disturbing conditions
to delineate the terms of one's gaming
who has no sure answers, being impure
& unsettled in change, guessing each cure.

-

August: Year-day 236

Of course I want to kill and kill, and have,
though the bodies of my victims live on
because I soften each thrust with a salve:
a vaseline, a lie: I come upon.

Of course you have been killed by me, and will,
though you may not have noticed, and may not,
clambering to beat each other up a spill;
I'll zigzag to rattle you off your spot.

This purgatory's not for after life,
since equal chances for heaven and hell
are hidden in it.  So watch what you do.

Though every moment's a blessing: knife
and fork and spoon: I need, we'll know who fell--
unless we each to each here/ keep each new.

-

August: Year-day 237

To what world, if not this, do I belong
that I am not held as I want to be,
that I seek unions through fictions of me,
that I burn in silence over a song?

Though lives are short/ deep-crafted dreams are long,
clinging to the edges of memory,
magnificent pains from the mystery
of/ whoever made them.  I am star strong.

Arcturus, Betelguese, Sirius, Sun,
my whirling energies inform the years
beyond all matter of where I'm alive.

In my Rune God my existence begun
could not be altered by desires or fears.
Through this very line, He knew I would rive.

-

August: Year-day 238

Aah, people hassles, hassles with oneself--
all the lost pennies!  (Who knows where they are?)
the good moments turned from.  No, I'm no elf,
I'm--yes I am.  But when my mischief scars,
it rightly scars me longer than you.
Oh New York City, where confusions cram,
why was I/ so lonely?  Dream-wiled Cal--?  Who?
They are not numbers to this elf I am.

Blessed with a mind I sometimes suspect--eye--
it's no mind at all, blanked as it is/ so
easily by/ emotions misconstrued,
missed.  All the lost: Mt. Tamalpais high,
Greenwich Village; night upon night to stow
remorse in, hangdog in the farces brewed.

-

August: Year-day 239

Asked what I know, I find I want to blurt
so much to the passing asker, I ask
that question not be asked, the dubious task
of asking/ best/ being mine to assert
though I am touted "maker" / "namer" / "bridge
builder" / "shaman".  If someone's to tell time,
slithering/hoofing/singing on a ridge,
you've heard it said: "Genius will out."  Well, . . .

Creatures of polarities caught up in 
change, ambiguous, constant mysteries,
we are dull as air, we are keen as stones;
so sure I cajole us each to drop in
on each of our/ answers and questions, seize
what's wise/ even if it/ shivers our bones.

-

August:Year-day 240

As much as I moan, the luck of the draw
has placed me in a favored land, and given
me years and experiences to awe
the Fates, though I'm suicidally driven.

Do I want to/ be successful?  Yes.  Yes.
Not for money and fame, but for the sake
of this I believe in and you who press:
to know, enjoy, & use what/ I here make.

Editors too often only have time
to be turned on; so a writer's obliged
to find their switches & flick them as quickly
as she / he can as if it were a crime
such as Jesse performed, spiked with orange
and heavy with power carried off slickly.

-

August: Year-day 241

Discotheques of discontent/ & delight,
the moods of my minds, my hearts.  O, great day,
so clear, cool and full of commotion, site
ambassador of autumn on the way.
Am I lonely?  You better believe it.
Do I stretch with excitement?  Catch my eyes.
When a leaf tumbles, I tumble with it;
when a leaf burns yellow, I heat likewise.

If now I'm caught in the wrong style of living
for who I am, I've only me to damn,
slithering through my randy fantasies,
realities wounded by partial givings.
Nothing but superior luck/ could slam
the gates, it seems, against what/ scatters ease.

-

August: Year-day 242

"The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away,
blessed be the name of the Lord."  So we:
spirited bodies, bodied spirits, day
after day here challenged, poignantly free,
yet charged to obey, we/ ought to be Jobs,
ought to be beings radiant with thanks
despite enticements, hardships, sad-eyed probes
that darken love, without which/ nothing ranks.

To be at peace, each sacred moment lived
to the full, savored, made human, transformed
so self-indulgence, self-pity/ lose strength--
but I, all night at work harried, rush , give,
relish a rare calm me; yet, roiling, torn,
spew my relief with my job discontents.

-

August: Year-day 243

It is now November twenty-fifth, Jamie,
I don't mind telling you.  Time is a pointless
contrivance, no matter it's a bit gamey
for me to be doing as I am.  Jointless,
unattached, the parts of a man might fly
who knows how far, claim a sea there, a mountain
here, send an eye to a just-forming sky,
a tongue to the soul of a crystal fountain.

Kneel beside the meadowlark's tufted nest
pictured here in this book of U.S. birds.
For fantasies we often/ have no words.
What now is worst/ tomorrow may be best.
Bow to the East?  Bless the funereal West?
Singular, alien, we move in herds.

-

August: Year-day 244

Heading east?  Yes.  Jerusalem?  Mecca?  No.
Not even Ankor Wat, no matter they'd
be better places than D.C.  My soul
wants notice, access.  So job queries pay!
Can't be a reaction without an action.
Gotta care sometime.  Gotta care, and do.
Gotta use the strength of the one-man faction
if I'm ever to lastingly break through.

Heading east for sure it's looking like now.
Laurel's responded affirmatively.
It only takes one: so long shots excite;
yet, pointing all my hopes toward one small bough
wouldn't, I know, be a smart use of sight;
so I haven't, exactly, but we shall see.
-

16 of 25


-
Brian A. J. Salchert