sw00053usabys-15.nov.sonnets.22of25

22 of 25                                                       

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (321-335)

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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!

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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It has occurred to me/ it might be an interesting exercise
to iterate only the rhyming words/ in each of my sonnets.
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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")
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Brian A. J. Salchert