sw00052usabys-15.nov.sonnets.21of25

21 of 25                                                      

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (306-320)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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 ?)
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21 of 25


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Brian A. J. Salchert