sw00049usabys-14.sep.sonnets.18of25

18 of 25                                                        

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (260-274)

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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18 of 25


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Brian A. J. Salchert