sw00046usabys-15.aug.sonnets.15of25

15 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (214-228)

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August: Year-day 214

The prosaic and poetic truth is:
a world-class athlete should not be controlled
by the government of her or of his
flag country, or else world games ought to fold.

Money and power ruin everything
even as they build everything anew.
In the waves of starlight the life sperm swing
wending orbs (circling their stars) green and blue.

To be of and compete against the best
in one's class is a hardship filled with joys
no human force has the right to curtail
I repeat/ because of my soul's high zest
for the women from the girls, men from boys
who so grow, regardless which win, which fail.

-

August: Year-day 215

Censorship?  Feed 'em hell, the brilliant little
things, mother, father, who in your God-fearing
ignorance/ fuel hate.  Let 'em toss your brittle
responsibilities against rocks, sneering.

So what if empathy withers, compassion
and understanding drop, and respect never
grows as each body grows.  What deaths we fashion
because we're insecure!  What heavens sever!

O complicated creature, answer chaser,
who needs the solace of a place of honor;
who cringes at his faults, extinction's arms!
pray for discernment, that sacred eraser
of generalizations that cast on her
or him brute spites.  Heal.  Spread each/ other's charms.

-
-
Note:  Just after typing the above, I said to myself:
       "You're not to be believed."  And then:
       "Don't believe me.  You fall in hole."
       Take this for what to you it's worth.
       For myself: I am not quite sure what it means.
-
-


August: Year-day 216

What's remembered last is remembered worst
may not be as true as at first it seems;
as everyone's blest, so everyone's cursed
no matter the tints of actualized dreams.

My body refuses to give and give;
my spirit likewise implores me to sleep
who/ with his allergies and else/ must live
as . . . the athletes who jump and hug and weep.

So I mark this page with signs you may read
if you know the language I'm using here;
I plant this garden with rows of good seed
you may name and eat from/ to help kill fear;
I touch prayer.  Happy birthday, sister two.
Strong grace for each soul, however dark, cruel.

-

August: Year-day 217

Noises in the park, nighthawks screeching peace,
the Great Bear watches from an open field
as corn, wheat, alfalfa crackle to yield.
I'll give you a spirit shorn of its fleece
that yours may be warm while pleasingly dressed.
The rivers flow backwards to lay their eggs.
The stiff teetotaler's in his kegs.
When your eyes are closed, your vision is blessed.

Handsome as the grasses and trees may be,
as the flicked clouds and invisible gales,
the night makes ghouls of the movable world.
Mirrors invert what of me I may see.
At the height of its beauty, a rose fails.
In our hearts' caves/ who knows/ what awes lie purled.

-
-
Note:  A hiatus is upon me.  I have been spending 
       much of this day readying for it.  Saturday
       I expect to be moving.  Tomorrow I will be
       dismantling and packing my computer system.
       Am not sure how soon it will be back up.
PM 10:05 Thursday 2006-11-30 - Brian A J Salchert
-
-
It is Friday morning.
-
-

August: Year-day 218

Being Supreme, Rune, thank You for my life;
as harried as it is, it is much blessed
in the mind I have, in my special wife,
in the lands my emotions/ pop/ redressed.

Maybe some choices I have made were wrong;
maybe some choices I am making now
are not the right ones for that or this song;
still, here, I can make them, can even bow.

Ha ha!  Ha!  Ha.  Ha-ha, ha, ha!  What fools
prance the towns and countrysides of my heart!
What wise men ride my spirit beyond schools!
Sometimes where we finish is where we start.
Whether or not I hold the/ proper tools,
I hew and play contritely/ each learned part.

-

August: Year-day 219

Lord, let your great ones/ rise up from the poor,
for their numbers are greater and more true,
striving or waiting, depending on You,
fronds light & airy, fronds bouncing with spores.

Lord, let the triumphs that/ render men whole
march through the humble and seemingly weak
so the tongues of waters constantly speak
peace and strength to the source, the ragged soul.

Lord, let violence built by the false prides
in a man, whatever his color, bury
him, though I, certainly no matter my
strivings, my victories, my grand asides,
won't believe I'm holy enough to tarry
with the saints.  Precision, Lord, each man's eye.

-

August: Year-day 220

The end has come; the end willcome again.
And always I will find a way to go.
It does not matter how, or where, or when,
or even why, or what I do not know.

Down paths erasing in a shifting snow
or7nbsp;trails of blood dancing/ from murdered men
or into spaces where whipping rains blow,
I prepare fordeath, and was, now, and then.

Though entire worlds can pass without a trace
or suddenly appear as from no source,
apocalypses wander through your face
with unremitting pride and long remorse,
another time we'll enter at this place,
welcomed; another, reached/ only by force.

-
-
Note: I am back up.  It is Sunday, 2006-12-17.
-
-
It is Thursday, 2006-12-21.  A belated note follows:
-
2006-12-06  (after 3:33 AM)
- - -
   Before I go on, there is a field of concern I must write about.
That field of concern is sexuality.  This is what I believe.
- - -
Sexual persuasions (sensitivities) are innate (are inborn).
They reside in one's psyche (in one's spirit).  As one matures,
one comes--by means of reflection (of self-examination)--
to recognize them, at which junctures one can either deny
or accept them.  Any attempt to change one's sexual persuasions
is a form of denial.
- - -
Sexual expressions (activities) are the results of choices
 (of the use of free will).  They reside in one's neural-
muscular constitution (in one's body).  Any thing can
be a source of sexual arousal.  Examples are: the trunk
of a tree, the smell of a flower, the wink of an eye.
Wisdom is the monitor of free will.  
- - -
One's sexual nature is highly complex.  However,
one's sexual persuasions may seem quite simple.
Nonetheless, to say that one must adhere to a
specific vision of the human condition is blatantly
irrational, and can never be more than a matter
of faith.  Note: I do not mean to imply here that
faith is silly, is without value.
- - -
   Getting to me:  Due to my low sex drive, I am
essentially nonsexual, afterwhich I am primarily
an autoerotic, and secondarily a homoerotic, 
and tertiarily a heteroerotic in both my sexual
pesuasions and expressions.  As it is, I am my own
monastery.
AM 4:22 - Brian A. J. Salchert
-
-

August: Year-day 221

The weary traveler rests his bones.  Oh yah?
The weary traveler lets his ashes blow.
No--the weary traveler leaves ma with pa
and trundles out/ to catch the bounds of flow.

When one dreams alone, one's dreams remain dreams;
when with others, reality begins:
to paraphrase a priest.  Leaving, it seems,
requires returning.  Nature/ correctssins.

The BigThompson, a part of its course/ changed,
churned insidiously past the swank homes
raised on the landfill it blithely had owned;
the buried bed (from which it was estranged),
insidiously also--waiting with its gnomes
for the night now done/ when the canyon groaned.

-

August: Year-day 222

Hurricane Belle is ringing up the coast,
whirling toward Long Island, my sister says.
So what if/she's not one/ likely to boast.
I'm not one likely to put on a fez,
at least not today, happy as I am
my ears won't be hearing Hurricane Belle,
my meek bones feeling her toppled trees slam,
even if she hasn't surged up from hell.

There are certainly better things to flee
and face/ though often we/ can't pick and choose
the encounters we want/ or where they'll be/
or when or why or how.  None want to lose.
It's a rare spirit that keeps itself free,
though violated by merely soft screws.

-

August: Year-day 223

"Still to this world its wondering beginner"
o Howard, I too trim, elide my reason,
endless desire to supercede the sinner;
rejoice in those changes that shape each season.
Tutelary poets, abstractionists,
desperate at times, faced with mysteries,
it does do us good to learn of & list
rocks, minerals; flowers, insects, birds, trees:

butter-and-eggs, snapdragons, foxglove, phlox;
monarchs, even cabbage moths, sugar ants;
barn swallows, robins, goldfinch, meadowlarks;
elms, willows, birches, cedars, maples, oaks;
myriad other others in our camps
who whiff skunk, savor bass, feel dawn winds lap.

-

August: Year-day 224

Wladymir Cieszynski: deep poet, seed,
whose V-bug veering into a parked truck
sheared the growth of his enchantments, struck
a fortune that froze the fires of his need:
read.  Death, I should appreciate you well,
often enough beside you in a nod;
left wondering why I was kept by God
from Atropos' scissors within that spell:

To live to die; to die; to die to live,
exploring, so/ one's words will smile and cry
and laugh and sing and hold; that where they give
no one will have to seek the reasons why;
no one will mind/ much flows/ through reason's sieve,
the rooted man below/ leafing our sky

-

August: Year-day 225

"Hell is other people" said Jean-Paul Sartre;
and the young and old in Lebanon weeping,
and I, and perhaps you, forced to depart
from who we are because of the hate leaping
from the spirits of others, feeling, know.
We aren't even sure Antarctica's free
of the grime ofour conflicts, the soiled blow
after blow by which we raise misery.

Yet heaven is other people, too, hands
sincere with food and clothes and comfort, lives
willing to give even themselves for us.

How dark are men's attachments to their lands,
how glorious!  Each of us, where he strives,
should learn:  "We are all Bozos on this bus."

- - -
(Regarding the words in quotes in line 14 above:
 see FiresignTheatre.)
- - -

-

August: Year-day 226

Conflicts of the spirit.  Life against life.
Whether it is holier one's own breath
remain, or be sacrificed: for a wife,
a child, a friend, a stranger nudging death.
Rock candy, sugarless gum, soybean oil.
Somehow in a garden an aster strikes
its white pose at a leafy breeze, the soil
stands up for rain, enemies/ set their spikes.

The life I've lived against the life I missed:
Have no regrets I'm told, for regrets kill,
but I do: people who asked me to stay,
people I maligned, left, but might have kissed;
the high school I attended on the hill,
the high school I didn't, my dreams astray.

-

August: Year-day 227

Many of these sonnets many may say
are but fair rhymed prose, sing-songs for a nose
to snub; will not see here any repose
of light or wall-shattering, sharp foray
or honest, caring touch; will mark the day
each was written for/ among the lost.  Those,
however right they are, let us suppose
these sonnets will outlive, as thoughts we pray.

How fervently I dream a perfect love
is entering my life, not just a wisp
of beauty I'm barely/ able to see;
how darkly I likewise dream/ others shove
me into death/ with poetries more crisp.
When I tell you I'm insane, believe me.

-

August: Year-day 228

America, you crawl, walk, run, leap, fly,
fall down.  In Idaho they ride past groves
of apples, tomato fields . . . dream of stoves
hot with crackling pine, slopes numbing the eyes
with the sweet smoke of snow.  Wisconsin, I
extinguish you, light you again, the droves
of Chicago / New York not yours, the coves
of Maine, the grains of Kansas not; yet my

our beings thrive in each other: your lakes
refreshing, shimmering my blood / my nerves;
my images ghosting your waves and weeds;
the streets of West Bend / Fond du Lac, the takes
and shots they spawn, cutting us/ as they serve.
Always/ work to grow/ regardless the needs.
-

15 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00045usabys-16.jul.sonnets.14of25

14 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (198-213)

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July: Year-day 198

Spritely in the gust an US flag flaps
its happy hellos and happy good-byes
as if it knows its republic will rise
from where it's been taking extended naps;
and maybe, just maybe, from there perhaps
no longer lapse in its reach to be wise,
welling tears I resist/ into my eyes
because people care in their hearts and maps,
because people care in their thoughts and stands,
because people care in their souls and keys.
Jordan, Dellums, Kovic, King, Mondale, Carter.
There's no denying the strengths in/ this land's
resources; that the right use of them/ frees
green for hope / white for honor, as we charter.

(2007-01-06:  As I have elsewhere said,
whenever I read something I have written,
there's a chance I will re-vision it.)

-

July: Year-day 199

Perfection is the human dream, the flame
the runners carry, the fantasy land,
a sound we thought we heard once from a band,
shiverings when we think/ a certain name;
and no persistence of extravagance
will cloud, expel, erase it from our wills
no matter how it crams our senses' tills
and pulses our hearts in a frenzied dance.

Nadia Commeneci: remember her,
as Matthew Arnold in his "Dover Beach".
Not even tornadoes can cause a stir
as powerful as is in the will of each
who arcs the stamina to so prefer,
jumping for galaxies beyond her reach.

-

July: Year-day 200

If I can love you more than you love me,
what's it mean the end of the world's at hand;
what's it mean the ocean nibbles the land;
what's it mean your spirit is/ up a tree?

Maybe we should congratulate the wind
for not listening to the sounds it carries,
and past here/ tears apart, and past there/ marries,
thickened by closures; by openings, thinned.

Answer me, lover, or answer me not:
I am passing known; I am passing strange.
Sometimes you can touch me; sometimes you can't.

You must either handle or leave the lot
being together forms.  To rearrange
me/ might take too long/ to be worth the chance.

-

July: Year-day 201

The wind today is that exciting kind
which brings to me rolling images of
long journeys/ & loosens my bowels as love
difficult to speak does/ so that in my mind
traveling to the far away is all
there is/ with the sounds of that wind; my senses
are almost closed--angels of recompenses
replacing them.  I'm horizontally tall.

The deserts dream of inundating the seas;
the mountains dream of titillating the skies.
Sometimes I want my verses to be trees;
Sometimes I want my verses to surprise.
Sometimes I drop my body to its knees.
Maybe tomorrow we will find real eyes.

-

July: Year-day 202

And unimaginably far away
galaxies of burnt-out stars litter space
and the ripened blossom of our small race
shocks fruition with its naivete.
Yet future's future, still, we scheme, project.
And what sweet bloom/ doesn't want to/ die proud?
Soon Machina sapiens, crying loud,
may demand more praise than we now expect.

But if what I am is a preparation
for the beginnings of a deeper nation,
so be it, so be it, so let it be.
This work and my others will then ascend
as bodies of love between friend and friend,
and my race blessed/ for how well it can see.

-

July: Year-day 203

Some days when time is short I wish I could
inhabit/ one of these/ adroit designs
as easily as I can speak, for pines
would freshen my lungs then and sunlight would
bring strength renewed to my bones, my rude heart.
I might receive more wealth than I could spend
as if I'd been given a rainbow's end,
a pot of gold virtues from which to start.

Today, like so many others though, will
fails to produce, to thaw the soil; and all
I'd raise stays seed.  Harvest devoured by rats
couldn't irk me more.  I am hot to kill,
yet can't, for such killing would fall a fall,
twice end me.  I must be/ patient as cats.

(1976 and September, 2007)

-

July: Year-day 204

I write: for myself, for others, for you.
And the sky is light, and the trees full.  Share.
Let what spirits communicate be care.
Dolphins protect.  Godlfinches accent.  Do.

I write: for myself, for others, for none.
When the sky is yellow, the sun is blue.
I'm the black in a leaf, the green in a flue.
There are many forms/ from which joys are spun.

The current rises, the current descends.
The mouth of the poet jabbers and jabs.
You'd be surprised by what a sneak thief grabs.

Nothing's pursued to its absolute ends
by any other than the god who blends.
"Be various yet one" command my slabs.

-

July: Year-day 205

Since AM 4 I have been/ stupid tired,
unable to finish by 7 what
I could have/ by 5:30.  Such a nut
I've been, though now knowing much I've desired
was fated by/ the events of my birth.
Maybe hypnosis/ would help my life too.
Still, I like to think I alone, can hew
my way to wakefulness, improve my worth.

One-color rocks/ don't begrudge and complain
because petrified rainbows are not theirs
to hold the deep eyes of a complex brain
and tease it away from its daily cares/
though their one color brightens some/ in rain.
I don't have to dull myself/ with my stares.

-

July: Year-day 206

Extra hours at work/ because it is summer,
and because the Olympics is on, hours
lost at home watching TV--it's a bummer
in a way, not giving my writing powers
the time and quiet they need to complete
the daily sonnet I'd determined to--
my pen holding, my eyes ahead, my seat
trying to tell my head/ to carry through.

I've got to admit, though, however much
I enjoy writing these, I like to please
my being in/ other ways too; so, such
as/ I am doing: letting divers/ seize
me from this, weight lifters and boxers/ touch
my nerves, and bicyclists/ give me the breeze.

-

July: Year-day 207

Long end-of-the-period night again,
checking in guests, balancing the accounts:
my punishment for wanting/ too much when
I've lost the resources for such amounts,
having committed them to secondaries/
becoming the patriot I dislike;
the masochist in me/ exploiting the fairies;
the learned polymath/ out for a hike.

Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars, checks.
Debits, credits.  Tiring limbos of love.
Answers, mistakes--burning/ to find them out.
Frustrations can be such miniscule specks
and yet be giants in the ways they shove
a balancer prone to chastise and pout.

-

July: Year-day 208

After living on bananas for two
weeks, Idi Amin's army peered at him
darkly, or so I've heard, while on Mars, who
but Viking I recording the red--grim
and striking and chocked with intrigue; and there
in Montreal, Christov lifting the weights/
almost beyond the believable.  Flare.
Reagan chose Schweiker.  Listen.  Watch the Fates.

Spinning with a planet clinging to life,
mixed in its evil, its good; always trying
to keep wrong from overbalancing right,
sunlight slicing more sharply than a knife,
a man unknown, a little man defying
the delicate moon with its scoop of night.

-

July: Year-day 209

Moses, Babashoff, Wilkins, Cofin, Naber,
Haldeman, Chandler, Pace--Olympic stars
of these United States--bless them; the saber
diving of Greg Louganis--let the bars
of our anthem be played--the bright embrace
of Mike Shine.  How matters it if I agree
(in principle) there is (really)/ no place
in these games for nation boasting.  Let be.

Only, let honest competition reign--
an edict against insane politics;
from anything less this world cannot gain,
already in a Russian roulette fix;
from anything less each joy, sorrow, pain
cannot be/ haloed with worth.  Beauty/ sticks.

-

July: Year-day 210

Persistence is the kingdom of the wise
and those incessantly misunderstood
penning their symbols in mutated wood.
I am a mountain goat that tries and tries.
Mark Vonnegut of The Eden Express /
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of who knows what--
if I give you bibles, I give you smut.
I'm far too various for a set dress.

Even these sonnets with all they contain
can't tell you enough to hold who I am.
Even the faucet slides into its drain.

I'm down from my mountain kissing a ram.
A light from the future explores my brain.
More leaves wriggle their petioles/ & scram.

-

July: Year-day 211

Overstrained my constitution again,
blithering about extra work at work
so a small pain has entered this tired jerk
in his left shoulder/ only to leave when
I've gotten his being quiet again,
head and body down/ somewhere stretching/ for
the currents of rejuvenation, store
of continuance/ through field, range, wood, fen.

Learn, learn, my wife's reason constantly pounds;
but it's after three and I'm still awake,
hoping to defeat a time-prisoned world.
Of course I enjoy the sounds of my sounds!
Of course I perceive the visions at stake!
At the cliff's dead edge my sapped body's curled.

-

July: Year-day 212

In China last night many were told: take
to the streets: sleep there, the officials fearing
aftershocks from the tyrannous earthquake;
in Montreal, a bantam Russian, hearing
the judges decisioned against him, judges
immediately booed by the crowd, turned
from the ring/ crying, conceding why/ grudges
come/ when fate keeps the gold one's duly earned.

Misfortunes of nature and politics
will ever be with us I guess, I guess.
We'll never untangle the in/out mess
we humans stumble through/ where the burr pricks.
Yet our candles light because they have wicks,
and there's more than enough/ to praise, confess.

[ some revisions made in August, 2007 ]

-

July: Year-day 213

Let me nominate today Poland's day
of thistwenty-first Olympiad, they
having done so well on track, field, at bar,
even an EastGerman partly their star,
being a Cierpinski.  And the rain, grey
and slippery, seems to have helpedtheir play:
young Yacek, tall, slender, cute, above par
in the high jump; the silver relay four.

Oh, the soccer squad, favored to win, lost;
but the pole vaulter found gold in a rain
and the men's volley balls rained on the Russians.

One lives what he loves, whatever the cost.
There's always The Rose of Heaven to gain/
and the fun of slitting/ a devil's cushions.
-

14 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                      

sw00044usabys-15.jul.sonnets.13of25

13 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (183-197)

[ AM 9 Wednesday 2006-11-29 Note:  
Given that I often comment on my writings,
and given that I often revise what I have written,  
and given that sometimes I parody what I've written, 
I herein admit I have for some months been considering
using a Creative Commons License; but, until I can be
sure/ what I am writing is being read, why should I get 
such a license?  I know I am a maverick, but not a   
granite head.  I know an opinion I espouse today/  
I may on/ some tomorrow/ differently espouse.  I
understand that my intent to place online as much of   
what I in my soon-to-be 66 years have written 
(and continue to write) as I see is of value, even if   
others do not see it so, does suggest/ I wish/ to carry on   
an open conversation with/ others in the noosphere,  
a wish which a CCL would certainly make clear; 
however, I am not quite ready to make that move. 
Also, as I want to be sure you know the obvious: 
I find political correctness insidious.  So, if you  
want to call me turd, I grant you permission.  I do.    
My point here is:  Freedom of speech can only persist 
as freedom of speech when touting it is not undermined 
by subservience to/ opposing opinions.  I do not
advocate violence; but I do advocate tough love.
If you want a certain person, myself included, to grow in
knowledge and wisdom and whatever other goodly virtue, 
you must be willing to share, and not by saying: "Okay, 
we'll make it easier on you"; but rather by saying:
"Okay, you are able to do this.  Let's see how/ we 
together can enable you to do more."  Teachers must
always be willing to learn from whatever and whomever, 
but must at the same time be willing to lead forth, and not 
do so wimpily.  Have I been guilty of wimpy teaching?  Yes.  
I have been guilty of many reprehensible acts.  Pandering
is a vice.  Sometimes, this or that person considered me 
a genius.  I warrant you, I am no giant intellectually, or
any other way.  I am an INFP on the edge of becoming
an ENFP, for what that's worth.  Read what I write,
and if it makes you laugh, laugh.  Thank you.  Brian A. J. Salchert ]

-

July: Year-day 183

Today my doctor informed me the fluid
in my pleural space is solid, and long
been so, apparently.  Yet, what was wrong?
He'd like to see old X-rays.  There's a druid
quality in this wish, it seems, but I'm
as curious, too.  Positive responses
to TB skin tests don't just happen.  Nonces
that signal trouble mean something in time.

My various chest X-rays, it's true, were
negative, but I've been through periods
of respiratory hardship when I
didn't have X-rays taken, so a burr
of something other than TB the gods
could have stuck me with, though they won't say why.

-

July: Year-day 184

Poetic theories abound, as well as
styles: the animals, plants, and elements
of a part of a deepening realm.  Has
you not known?  Richard Kostelanetz, gents,
and I, have; and I am/ learning from him.
He'll guide you through beings and things that pop
your eyes and ears and sense of self.  You'll swim
walking, but walk on, and stop, stop, & stop.

So, Richard may not care for this old form
I've now for half a year worn and intend
to wear this coming half, declaring it's
the height of that reactionary storm
slashing at poetic beauty.  I'll wend
his way, though, too; for now, my sonnet fits.

-

July: Year-day 185

Not so sure about the efficacy 
of prayer as it's usually defined, I still
thank those who centered so much energy
on my weakened being, whose each strong will
was a health-giving pyramid these bones,
this flesh/ could rejuvenate in.  The ways
I move, love, may not harmonize with tones
they're used to; still, life bless their/ nights and days.

Slicing with teals up a laughing cool lake,
cocked toward each sound that trembles a/ slant room,
kissing rose petals then stomping a face,
my heart in my pocket for my head's sake,
my head underground to let my heart zoom,
my heart with my head/ to make whole this place.

-

July: Year-day 186

All the people out there cracking their fires,
I gotta crack mine too--clack! clack, clack. clack!
freedom for those who suffer the lack,
freedom for those in whom freedom inspires
repeated forays at the bricks and wires
of those inhuman laws/ penned to keep back
supposed inferiors: Female, Gay, Black,
Chicano, American Indian.  Pyres!

Pyres.  And a skin-and-bones child with a puffed
belly rests/ at the edge of a cay; airs,
waters, earths, roll with sins; judgments explode
in theeyes of/ decent sense; we are stuffed
wimps who need the thought Hubert Humphrey shares:
" . . . be stewards of the common trust.": care goaled.

-

July: Year-day 187

Population zero: that's where I'm at.
Can't say I'll stay there, though it seems I may,
in andout of thewoods of/ my odd day
on this frail planet of lust, love, and that
which furthers my inheritance and hers
if once, because we've decided to fuse--
whether out of care or the need to use--
the power within me within her stirs.

Oh, I know this may raise a horror in some,
foregoing communion so deep and good;
and yet it's our right to choose how to plumb
each other, and when--if we/ feel we should--
and where--neither of us seeing a bum
inside, or worse, because most/ couples would.

-

July: Year-day 188

And the tall ships glide up the bay, the river--
and I do not like you for what you are;
I like you for what you could be: a giver
of life in light, a planet-holding star.

And the drum and bugle corps perform.  Hear.
It's the bicentennial of our land.
And I do not curse you for what you fear,
but bless for how you extend your hand.

Sure you can fool yourself, fool me, with masks;
not answer fairly what a question asks;
look askance at the caring in my reach.

Sure you can pooh-pooh the difficult tasks
that burn dark holes in the dreams in a speech;
yet we harvest only as each serves each.

-

July: Year-day 189

Elizabeth the Second dines in state
this now starred evening in the Rose Garden,
the Queen of England come to celebrate
with a people George the Third would not pardon
the 200th birthday of their delight
Adamsed and Franklined and Jeffersoned and
by others begun who believed it right
to establish and govern their earned land.

Yet we ought not condemn old George straight out
who later with John exchanged pleasantries;
we ought not forget what we're now about
as great ones gather in the D. C. breeze.
Against our pollutions our blood cells shout:
"Survival's languages don't rhyme with ease."

-

July: Year-day 190
                         (opening quote from 
                   Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Compensation")

"Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected
ripens within the flower of the pleasure
which concealed it."  I, bumbling, learn the measure
of God's justice, the pains of grace rejected.
You, also, self-seeker, will learn, deflected
by "unbridled desires" from the true treasure,
the fruits of the false; see, taste, feel their/dead-sure
poisons until God's way is re-elected.

Samson slew with the jawbone of an ass
I forget how many men one keen night,
but didn't begin what he ended then.

A laddie sleeps with a fair willing lass,
and they oil and oil where she bulges tight,
and if sorrows come, they share them, amen.

-

July: Year-day 191

Ride on, troubadour, carrying to all
the songs your inspirations lead you to
of how quickly we humans rise and fall
as we love and hate, and are false and true;
for however lyrical your works are,
they yet will exhibit philosophies,
they yet will teach as they dance near and far
as we need them to/ who forget our knees.

In Kingstone Forest Angela and Todd
hide for their health's sake from their closest friends,
rediscovering themselves in the God
the Snowy Owls in snowy airs/ recommend/
forgetful their unnerved relatives send
each other to where/ worm with/ worm contends.

-

July: Year-day 192

Most of those starvation enslaves don't die
of starvation as such/ but some disease
such as measles or dysentery.  I--
ploppings of cow dung unsettle my ease.

Low on cash, I can still do more than dream
of a steak dinner.  Look at the position
of that American elm: how supreme!
I know like luck, though I scuttle contrition.

What is hunger?  Can't say I strictly know.
Oh, I have known dehydration, the hours
of waiting for the intravenous needle,
but hunger?  I have not seen my "fat" go,
have not felt my proteins burn up, with powers
inside me  lost I couldn't drill back, wheedle.

-

July: Year-day 193

It isn't easy to care about you,
finding it tough to care about myself,
forcing my sensitive body to do
things it maybe ought not: sleep on the shelf,
caution in the dump.  Walking away won't
pull an answer either out of some hole
in our lives we weren't onto; so, dear, don't
expect a jack of knowledge/ from my soul.

It's an amazingly gruff world for fools.
And the flag of wisdom's not nearly mine.
Suicide is suicide, whether done
quickly or nonchalantly.  No one drools
over idiocy who can decline
consistently from getting/ too much sun.

-

July: Year-day 194

Those politically exiled, by right,
can and ought to re-establish their place
among the nations of the world; no might
disallow the name they choose for their face,
nor the anthem or flag they sing and fly.
Oh let Taiwan be Taiwan, and the man
whose country snubs him fly what strikes his eye,
and singwhatpleases his ear!  Rip the ban.

This Earth's too small now for smallnesses tomake it
smaller.  Bodies, souls, open to the flow
of what's coming: the Trans/formation Age.

Bus, Bus Stop, twist and shout.  Attitude.  Shake it.
Kneel.  Increase your love.  Increase what you know.
Hate what's hateful.  Live--with sensitive rage.

-

July: Year-day 195

Dream state after dream state after dream state,
from before midnight until  beyond dawn,
and I can't remember all  that took place,
but I have never been dreamed-filled so long.
At times it seemed I was losing my mind.
I did lose my boots, my car, and my way,
but not the teeth I'd expected to.  Fine,
I'd just as soon keep them a few more days.

Some places I walked through, though, sure were strange,
buildings architecturally macabre,
people in dimensions I could not join.
It was summer outside: sharp, hot, no rain--
not even a sprinkle; but in the park,
also strange, crowds: suspiciously coy.

-

July: Year-day 196

And conventioneers tiptoe on the planks
of their platform as if they are afraid
of their own and each other's weight, dismayed
some that the planks don't crack, but keep in ranks.
And no one knows if he ought to give thanks,
being bothered, or start a new parade,
yanking planks which seem improperly laid/
replacing them.  Strengthen the river's banks.

Still, a platform's a platform, a small sign
that need not be followed as a decree;
and/ as politicians toast with their wine/
you can bet their minds will change what we see--
and it may be good, and it may be ein,
and the river kindly/ enter the sea.

-

July: Year-day 197

How often I stopped just short of that field
where the path quieted, or walked away
through a marsh or woods on a sunny day
where none else had gone, not sure/ when to yield,
not sure/ when to push on.  So I have felt
this summer, watching Jimmy Carter win
election after election.  All sin.
All freeze with doubt and, elsewhere, with doubt melt.

Cartermania, a voting disease,
I'd termed the rush/ to back the/ peanut man,
believing what/ he stood for/ could not please
sufficiently, could not properly span
the worlds of those lives whose freedoms my keys
demand, but now am willing to say: can.
-

13 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00043usabys-15.jun.sonnets.12of25

12 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (168-182)

-
June: Year-day 168

Today I found a core of reference
waiting on a shelf in Grolier's Book Shop.
It is an ocean of charmed recompence
that supports my being yet makes me stop
to see again what I've been seeing:  Life's
of a piece that changes and changes, growing
from no beginnings we can grasp, its strifes
and harmonies filled with/ wonders of knowing.

And squaws carry papooses so they see,
and chicks carry babies so they're kept blind.
The old die young; and the young, old.  To find
yourself, you must forget to look, just be;
be yourself, you must look ahead, behind.
This is America: A Prophecy.

-

June: Year-day 169

This is a song praising maintenance men,
who may holler, chew, spit, yet keep things clean;
and this is a song for construction men,
who build & rebuild and implant the scene
with structures we want and architects plan,
and this is a song for the architects;
and this is a song for the works of Man,
praying for beauties he often rejects.

The shunned barn, collapsed with its hay, sinks, sinks
into its own decay; the orange moon,
three-quarters bright, nests at a maple's edge;

and animals become the dreams each drinks
and the thoughts each accepts, midnight and noon;
and a man walks out, and hangs from a ledge.

-

June: Year-day 170

Long ride on a slow train.  There just ain't no
way I'm gonna git myself to where I'm
goin' on time.  Just have to forget time,
forget he's even around. Watch for snow
come hordin' in at the windows.  Let June go
like a fadin' dream as the colors climb
through the green leaves.  Not fret about time, crime,
jouncin' from Boston to lost--Chi-ca-gooo.

Com'on train you arumblin' on the track.
Com'on train you, need some oil in my back.
Com'on train you on your hazy tired rails,
we gotta git, gotta, out of your jails.
Com'on train you, old turtle in attack,
mean it when you hare, when your whistle wails.

-

June: Year-day 171

The trip is over; the trip has just begun.
Turn and turn and turn; and stop, sit, and turn.
My body wins the coffin, fills the urn;
my body dances naked in the sun.

Wheeling/ by in a chair, or on the run,
a hat to shade my eyes, lessen the burn,
considering what's given, what I earn,
I sense how a knife to the gut/ must stun.

The windows roll & shimmer/ in the leaves,
and faces mix & melt & fall apart;
my arms change to cotton beneath my sleeves.

If this is where we end and where we start--
and I don't know who it is/ what deceives,
somewhy a bird's made its nest with my heart.

-

June: Year-day 172

Death, my friend, is old news I'd like to say
I do not care to read; yet as its near
I read it anyhow, letting my fear
raise goosebumps on my soul/ trying to pray.

Am I foolish for not throwing away
such news, for not giving a deeper ear
to life, to what's to come, or calls out here
beside me, though its wearing a toupee?

Don't answer me.  It's enough the thread holding
these words together is ready to bust
at the least hint of my attempt to answer.

All the mornings/ those papers I'll be folding,
as all the afternoons/ turned to ash and dust,
as all the steps/ created by/ the dancer.

-

June: Year-day 173

And around me, like water, rushing sun;
and around me, like water, swirls of clover;
and when I feel, on one side, I am done,
I notice the cool below, and ease over;
and try to let the insects go their way,
the haze of the heat shimmer and expand
without my feeling hotter where I play
my unclothed flesh between the sky and land.

A sampan on the Yellow River rocks,
a blimp exalts two mountaintops in Spain,
a mongoose knocks a cobra off its blocks,
the fuzzed seeds of dandelions seem rain;
I dream I've been here once and will again
to bandy with the sunlight's pastel spots.

-

June: Year-day 174

Step out.  The wind will not/ slice off your nose,
the moon not host itself upon your tongue;
nor will you snatch the fragrance of a rose
or learn how Martians on your tastebuds sung.

This ageing night, darkening in a corner,
whatever its new faults and attributes,
more an enchanted well-wisher than scorner,
won't chop you up and bury you in roots.

So take your thoughts and sail them to the stars
and raise a cup to gentleness.  For you
are moving through a night of special grace,
one that, though each circumstance of which/ bars
your being from certain pleasures, is true
and good, and soothes your back, and clears your face.

-

June: Year-day 175

Well, my friend, let's go gather conversations
from the winds.  It's a good day for it.  Not 
a place up the sky is harsh with light.Nations
wrangle, but not a place down the sky's/ sot
with deep gray clouds.  Just dark enough this morning
for the mourning dove; just bright enough this
afternoon for the goldfinch.  The kid horning
in the distance won't make me want to hiss.

"I tell you, Pat, too many of our young
lack respect, especially/ for themselves;
will not care, work, grow up . . . be women / men.
Why?  Coddling parents? laws?  Have we begun
planting barbarians?  Free humans delve,
create, live sensibly!"  And we, my friend?

-

June: Year-day 176

The Joplin and Springfield rainbows trance eyes--
lemon, turquoise, orange, gunmetal, rose--
and I don't understand why their repose
graces so southwest Missouri, and pries
those portions of my heart and mind/ ruled
by the gods of self-indulgence, or why
so many of the rich watch the poor die
and laugh, or one's fundamentalist fooled.

Beyond culture the world's alive and well,
but who is there, or once there can remain?
The rainbows of the spirit start in hell;
the rainbows of the body end in pain.
I do not know which ones of us can tell
where light bows/ in a world so/ streaked with rain.

-

June: Year-day 177

The body is a fragile work of wonder
rising on the arches of its two feet
with its lungs pulling in air, sour to sweet,
the voice of its courage the voice of thunder.

And the arteries, veins, and spritely nerves
aligning their ways through the flesh the bones
support, and the wild inaudible tones
of the molecules, and the muscles' curves.

Oh, in a moment the heart could spurn pumping,
an insolent gale slash throats with a board,
a bittern intrigue with its hidden thumping,
a candidate bore with his whitewash stumping,
a mind go crazy in a locust hoard,
a body flash in the beauty it's stored.

-

June: Year-day 178

To live is to die; to die is to live.
Apple blossoms hold apple blossoms more.
Our joy is measured by the joy we give;
when our virtues virtue, we don't keep score.

Murders occur in our brothers' backyards.
The phoenix rises as its ashes choose.
A person's touched on by the things he guards.
And no one wins until he's learned to lose.

In the alley the trash/ sneaks from its cans,
and moments of sadness savored and snuffed.
Weeds in a corner clutch air with their hands.
Caught by an anger, a lost window slams.
He was stripped and stomped by shadows of toughs.
When we love, we bless, but neverenough.

-

June: Year-day 179

Sometimes it isn't worth a Teton Dam,
my attemptatholding the flow of fuel
and controlling it for the person who'll
be me if I soundly/ change who I am.

Graces laked to be continently used
by a spirit their free flow might devour,
and laked to strengthen such apportioned power,
tunnel this spirit's weak anchorage fused.

Some naturals won't unnaturally 
be tampered with, especially by ill,
unstable souls as this one.  Just can't win.

Seeking myself, I use you; you use me,
seeking yourself.  The smeared blade of the will.
It's as rare as heaven/ to defeat sin.

-

June: Year-day 180

As the sun coasts toward the tunnel of green,
the blue sky hazes its coming farewell,
our U. S. flag still/ on a pole to tell
another sharp day in our land we've seen.
Then the flag's bounced down in settings serene,
and the mother folds it.  Even the smell
of the zyphers please; and yet Rome once fell
for lack of a durable/ king/ or queen.

Nowhere, nowhere, can we humans erect
a realm so perfected it cannot pass;
someone or something . . . find means to detect
the weaknesses in/ the roots of its grass,
even if we in/ our wisdoms suspect/
what seems so solid may/ barely be gas.

-

June: Year-day 181

More tests; yet more tests.  It's TB perhaps.
It's my allergies.  Anyway, I must
now go to the hospital.  We can't trust
it will heal: my system; that a relapse
won't occur; the minor cramps in the calves,
the tender blotches that redden, and swell
round ankles, turn dark; and what I can't tell:
the fluid on my lungs . . . nothing that salves
can cure, returning stronger than before,
spreading from the lower legs, while the aches
and discolorations there deepen, filling
my lungs more.  So, tests: whatever it takes
to reveal the/ low-grade culprit, restore
my body to a state less/ slyly chilling.

-

Junes: Year-day 182

So, I'm on umber St. John's third floor,
gathering out a window, and a cop
is completing an accident report;
and a newsboy, shirt off, braking to a stop,
has taken his tan from view; and a sun
I cannot see shines a wind-gabbing maple;
and a car/ whirls round a rock; and a hunt
for a bird without chains/ becomes my staple.

After attempts to collect sputum, neither
of which was very successful; the lettings
of at least 6 vials of blood; X-rays to
re-explore the fluid on my lungs, either
the temp, pulse, & pressure readings are/ getting
to me, or a bird without chains can't coo.
-

12 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                        

sw00042usabys-15.jun.sonnets.11of25

11 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (153-167)

-
June: Year-day 153

Esoteric jibberish, foolish talk.
Some of what I have rhymed is tough to sense,
and why?  You'd think I'd not want my thoughts dense,
forcing readers to closely eye, to stalk,
to untangle vines from bushes, from trees,
and winds from waters, from hillocks, from fires,
extricate my desires from my desires,
here, jumping, climbing; there, on hands and knees.

Yet my words gather and part as they will,
not that I do not imprison their plays;
but sometimes--as when one swallows a pill,
observing the changes it makes, and weighs
them--words appear: a feral, foggy chill
within; but gentler than torrid forays.

-

June: Year-day 154

Somewhere in the tapestries of the air
a bit of a weave defines who I am,
or was, or may yet be; yet changes there
as a wolf becoming a bleating lamb
or a coat of moss the skin of a snake,
and so whispers, wheezes, whines to me me
in words tough to grasp, whether for my sake,
yours, or no one's/ I/ even hear them, see.

Look into it, if it soothes your heart; trace
each/ chameleon turning/ as you can.
Maybe what's invisible eludes you
less readily than it does me.  One's face,
you know, is not seen without help.  Who ran,
trueing the false, falsely fieing the true?

-

June: Year-day 155

Richard Kostelanetz, your visions splinter
the windows in my blood, driving the ice
in so that I have no name for the winter
hardening there, far from romantic, nice,
touched with fantasies of emotion I
can snuggle up against.  Oh, I know you
don't wish death, though you are/ more of the sky
than the roots, more pure math type in hue.

But, listen, Rich, I wouldn't mind so much
if you wouldn't; your cold sky beauties catch
my heart in my mind.  Let my warm earth touch/
move your mind in your heart.  Still, though we scratch
gossip, we show & sell, Kostelanetz,
honest addictions: our graphics, our sonnets.

-

June: Year-day 156

Bridal wreath, red maple, sun: West Bend, bright
for "Alice in Dairyland" and this year's
"Alice" finalists.  Young women's hopes, fears
pageanted out in three packed days of flight
into and from the no-man's land of truth.
Candelight heat, spirits releasing care,
fragrance of virginity in the air:
what fate portends in a mole, a wedged tooth?

Janice Marie, name of the miss who'll win.
Janice Marie, name of my wife--not entered.
What will the first do with her year of fame?

Some will say we are dying, fast in sin.
Some will whisper: "By evil they are mentored."
White, red, brilliant yellow: so winter came.

-

June: Year-day 157

Bold Forbes, Elocutionist, Bold Forbes.  Third
horse in four years to win the Kentucky
Derby and the Belmont Stakes.  So good, lucky:
yet neither good nor lucky enough, spurred
though he was by a jockey of deep skill.
Oh Secretariat, last of the great,
how soon will one like you charge from the gate
and fix us again with the triple thrill?

Heywood Hale Broun, sports' announcer exquisite,
always I am pleased by your dandy visit,
your mixing of literature and sport
and history, your warm distinguished air
counterpointed by flashy clothes.  Swift, spare,
the thoroughbreds sweat to match your report.

-

June: Year-day 158

Pentecost.  Anniversary fourteen
of that hard blooming from the seminary
to where I experienced more of the cherry
in me, bringer of injury and keen 
embarrassment I still haven't defeated,
even though my embarrassment's now more
for those who malign than from any sore
I feel from the center of where I'm heated.

Embarrassments of other kinds I jail
however/ ought to be significant,
and easily could: our ignorance of
the praises Aaron Burr and Nathan Hale
deserve; our letting self-hatred reek, rant,
destroy; our choosing/ clean hands/ over love.

-

June: Year-day 159

As many things as I reveal to you
about me, there will always be things I
will not reveal, things hid in corners by
my fears and shame and better sense, askew
or not, so you can never cleanly view
who I am, not that what I let you eye,
anyway, tells much, whatever blue sky
it seems to fly through, however on cue.

You will just have to live with what you get
as the trees' leaves jitter, waving hello.
I haven't prepared a succulent breeze.

What you know you know because bodies let
some things out despite what their wills would show;
but for much more than that you'll have to squeeze.

-

June: Year-day 160

Coincidence has charms that chill my spine
and urge wandering laughters from my heart.
Reading Anne Sexton's "Gods", its fourth-last line--
I was on the toilet--gave me a start.

Coincidence blows bubbles through the air
that float good moments from when I was young,
and bad ones too.  Coincidence wakes care;
reminds me of when the honeybee stung.

Have I passed this way before?  Will I pass
again?  Whether or no, there are returnings
that cave our mouths, stun our eyes behind glass.

And where they are not, they're replaced by yearnings
that cycle everything even so.  Under
an ocean's deepest kingdoms, Man's cleft wonder.

-

June: Year-day 161

Cartermania.  Everybody's gone
peanuts, cracked and jumped/ right out his shell,
waving his thin-skin flag over the lawn
of his ignorance.  Oh, Hamilton, hell
were you on when you said the masses couldn't
be trusted to choose who's best for this nation,
two hundred now, of united states!  Wouldn't
you thrill to see what's come of this creation:

All the peanuts queued to be cooked, and crushed,
and processed into the creamy and smooth,
nowhere crunchy, nowhere natural.  Sam,
how many of them/ have been Jimmy-flushed,
and smile, as if only what's soft can soothe
their ailings!  Pray I'm wrong.  I hope I am.

-

June: Year-day 162

Outside the drapes the glary winds so shiver
the leaves/ I think for a moment it's raining
against this building's bricks, the sky a giver
of snippy lashes; but I'm merely straining
for metaphor and relief, the truth shows,
as if dryness and flatness are not mine
to use, as if I much preferred quick blows
to the heart, the guts, the head.  Life's so fine.

Albert Goldbarth--your eye at the knothole,
looking out from the park of your strange dreams
as your galaxy races, births, and whines,
amazing/ the editors' eyes--your soul
delights me too, some; yet rarely what seems
is: imaginations remake the signs.

-

June: Year-day 163

A / New Jersey.  Victoria and Swine 
in combination?  A variant of
Hong Kong with Swine?  The final/ loss of love?
The result of my forgetting what's fine
and good about me has/ acquired its shine
more centrally from one who stands above
my ambition, my silly wish to show
my self too far, than/ from me?  End of line?

Having missed death in a half dozen places
because someone wanted me kept a while,
I could peacock in my luck, though I know
such fanning would obliterate my traces,
mock the strutting in my unearned style.
So, I guess I'll just warble/ where I go.

-

June: Year-day 164

Anniversary eleven for me
and Janice, wife who keeps mesome ways chained
as also herself because she's/ remained
my spouse, and well may contiune to be
no matter how much I wish I were free
those moments I don't want to be constrained.,
don't want to be--as I've often complained--
shadowed & silent.  Let them/ hear and see.

Anniversary eleven.  And I,
because I'm neither famous nor rich nor
self-pleasing gutsy, may exit my door
(if I get that far) but ought never try
to  enter it, knowing how hearts decry
the insouciance of a weedy flower.

-

June: Year-day 165

Early morning: Ohio: the pale clouds stick out
their flaming tongue; the thermometer cracks,
anticipating.  My teach aunt, stout,
indomitable, drives; the U-HAUL tracks
behind.  We washboard past the eiree lake,
the Pennsylvania grape vines--the Olds
Cutlass, silent, smooth--intending to make
Swampscott by 8 PM if the planned holds.

Strangers we pass, each my sister / my brother,
special / gifted, bad / good, sober my glasses.
In a rotting nation, not much relaxes.

This moment, that, I wish I'm somewhere other;
still, riding toward Emerson land, the grasses
of upper New York waving, spins my waxes.

-

June: Year-day 166

The America of business is to
spoil the view: the next exit 30-A,
Johnstown, New York, for Gulf and Holiday
Inn, right there on that red/white sign for you!
right there near the top of that high round hill,
surrounded by trees and trees.  Yank it out!
Can't you hear your guts jumping/ up to shout,
"Yank it!  Chop it down!"/ juicing/ for the kill?

Loose your triangled flag, so debonnaire.
Fine.  But if you own a business and/ so
need to advertise, do not let whatever
helps to sell/ become the/ land of your care/
so its flag will dishonorably show--
but, crud, why sputter so.  Green trees forever.

-

June: Year-day 167

Ralph, here I am, an ignorant man
in Concord, my hands on your headstone, praying
for strength, hoping that through such help I can
say with my pen/ much that is worth the saying
so whether I seek the heaven of Yeats
or Valéry's universal self or
communion with the Oversoul or gates
to another, or my, or no thought, more
than just a tit and a tat of the poems
I make will attract eyes and please the ears
of those who behold them, changing in small
but affable ways the cares in their homes,
raising a laugh, a smile, an insight, tears/
touching a hunched heart toward/ the straight, the tall.
-

11 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00041usabys-15.may.sonnets.10of25

10 of 25                                             

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (137-152)

-
May: Year-day 137

Their burial mounds: Bones scattered with bones:
strata of them.  Many by white men's plows
made flatter and wider.  Bones under stones
under much earth, bones, stones, earth.  When the boughs
still arched over them, a sacredness swept
the airs they rounded toward.  Indians since
have come, respectful, sad; short vigils kept--
where axes, plows, and excavations mince

for space, food, knowledge--knowing who has broken
the aura there and there, or, if not, changed
that aura, corn planted where trees once were,
we not caring what skulls beneath have spoken--
crumbling when touched--or, if caring, deranged
anyway, scratching for more than lands bear.

-

May: Year-day 138

Cashing in the chips.  It's time to go, take
a long walk through new territory, watching
for signs of contentment, watching the lake
breathe, the swallows flow, the winds crest, while crossing,
with each move, millions of lives.  The hours,
seconds, years my life's been given I've yet
to appreciate.  And these lives, these powers?
I barely know them in the burning wet.

Forgive me, forgive me not, I am cashing
in.  This pace is much too fast.  It is time
to kiss the turtle.  So, adieu, good-bye.
Look for me, if you must, ambling, not dashing--
a change of heart on entering my prime,
wondering where I'd care to die, and why.

-

May: Year-day 139
(#6 of 15 I removed earlier this year)

-

May: Year-day 140

Oh forget it, man, your life is not here
nor there nor there; yet, you have stuck yourself
with your overspending on the wrong gear,
making it difficult to move.  Fool elf,
if you had sat down seriously; but,
you didn't, and even if you could do
it over again, wouldn't.  In your gut
you know: only from now can you change you.

Only from now--complaints, regrets, behind.
Likely turn.  I could fair as well entreating
the evergreen to be everpink.  Find
a way I must though, or go on repeating.
If I cannot somehow make myself fit,
I pray I'll pass, bearing/ the hope of it.

-

May: Year-day 141

Wake-up calls.  Wake up!  Wake up!  Wake-up calls.
First night in a long while I've stayed awake
with any ease auditing to the walls
a day's accounts at this Inn.  One mistake
I made, though, and then another, forgetting
to phone two guests, my thoughts wound with the tangles
of imbalances, those here and those netting
my weakened defenses from my well-set angles.

Oh, yes, mistakes are made by anyone 
human, and are not necessarily
sins, acts that jolt a self from where it spins;
yet a man shrinks seeing a rising sun
when no corresponding sun seems to be
brightening his spirit.  We treasure wins.

-

May: Year-day 142

Let those of us who can, do: marry, love,
increase each other, children blessed and blessing/
while those of us who can't, do otherwise
yet rise supportive for the health of all;
and all of us explore below/above/
& on the level, confident in stressing
the primacy of life; and each surprise
tomorrow today/ with care, catch each fall.

You like me, if you do, for who you think
I am; so also I like you.  Yet who
I truly am as who you truly are
only God knows.  So do & be: dream / link.
Wizards of circuitry / fools of a zoo,
we hide to live.  Pray/ someday/ truth can star.

-

May: Year-day 143

It's amazing how sometimes everything
works out right for an act that has gone wrong,
as this morning when I stepped outside:  Zing,
six junior high boys hurrying along
on their bikes; then, the last one yelling, "Mike,
slow down, you're going to have to pull me.
My chain fell off."  Then, the one on the bike
ahead/ slowing, his beltless jeans bulged free

so the trailer could clamp his hand on them
and turn a sure failure into a gem
of a small victory, the two guys easing
to the school grounds, snuffing anyone's teasing,
knowing that as a whole leaf has a stem
their action was: both functional/ and pleasing.

-

May: Year-day 144

Peace, amid frustrations: nine days behind.
Metaphoric brilliance, or none at all,
genius will shine not only in the rinds
but also in the pulps of its penned call
and also in the seeds, and, in the leaves
and wood/ look forward to/ and back upon
fruition, and, in the blossoms believe,
for everyone, perfection's lights are on.

Is it summer?  Is it fall?  Is it spring?
Is it winter?  We can anytime sing
and sing, trace the palpitations of sorrow
and joy; can anytime begin or end,
continue, revise the moments we spend
recording moments/ for moments tomorrow.

-

May: Year-day 145

You have your crossto shoulder; I have mine.
Yet this is not to say don't bother me
withpleas, complaints, and groans.  No one's divine
who knows he knows but dimly, that the sea
could never let him walk across its waves
without his Lord's provision, without faith:
no human looms divine.  And so what/ caves
your spirit/ must cave mine.  I share your wraith.

Imperfect, often I'll be mean to you
and you to me, or another of us
be mean to you or me, or you or I
mean to another being passing through.
No bomb surpasses human hatred.  Thus
"Thou".  We need Life, each other/ to be, sky.

-

May: Year-day 146

Death comes in puzzling pieces; also life.
Our enigmatic universe spins out.
You move with a loved husband, a loved wife
in fantasies where neither of you shout,
or weep, throw things at each other, or beat
flesh black-and-blue, and red.  A willow touches
the weedy yard, the scummy pond.  The heat
prostrates the house.  People/ swing by on crutches.

That is the top and bottom of it, hard
as steel.  There is no sense complaining or
trying to tie this minute in knots so
it can't get away.  Whether green or charred,
it will second by second show its door
opened then closed, moved by/ the on-the-go.

-

May: Year-day 147

The level of my caring sinks and sinks
till I see the rugged stones through the muck;
be they winks, be they drinks, be they jailed inks:
I view them askance and decry my luck.

My hands in my pockets, eyes in my thoughts,
the teeth of a dragon sprouting cold men,
I come like Jason and the Argonauts/
then fall off the plank into could-have-been.

It's just no use/ trying to rise, the air
isn't there for my soot-lined lungs; the words
I need have all wandered on, gone to seed,
hit dead drums.  It's just no use farming care
on the waters of my life; ranging herds
of circumstance/ scare it down, think it feed.

-

May: Year-day 148

Friend, do not talk to me of love and death;
I've eaten so much I'm sick & afraid.
When the leaves have gone, I wish they had stayed.
When the phlegm comes thick, I pray for a breath.

Do not speak to me of beauty and right;
I've drunk so much I'm wobbly & pale.
When a blossom wilts, I wish it weren't frail.
When a day's too hot, I welcome the night.

Talk to me rather, if you have to talk,
of the eye of the storm, which cannot see;
where not even breezes have learned to walk.

Speak to me likewise, if it lets you be,
of a game whose structure dances from chalk,
and tests the balances in each bent knee.

-

May: Year-day 149

Status?  You gullible--.  Gems.  Gold.  Sit down.
And you needn't flap your hands around like
some dame in a snit either.  Put that spike
on the floor.  Maybe you should be a clown.

The trees all hazy with heat; a tired cat:
halfin shade, half in sun; yellow bug juice
in a glass pitcher on the lawn/ near loose
flagstone; purple alyssum puffing fat.

What'samatter, that glitter/ turns you on!?
Such a false space: rainbow sherbet!: all me!
Glow with your hot/ in-fashion elegance
to hell.  We are all sick who cannot don
a wisdom-sewn concern, a sympathy
shining with knowledge, a shared permanence.

-

May: Year-day 150

Overcast skies, and from those to earth, fog--
Wisconsin, one hundred and twenty-nine--
here in West Bend where a few things are fine
but many are not, and this is my log
on a couple of them.  What does it say?
Hear.  Brian's log.  Sun date five/twenty-nine/
nineteen seventy-six.  Have let the wine
of the auto-erotic haze my way.

Nobody saw me but me and my Rune.
I'd been building this daydream about who
I am; it carried me/ into the Inn,
a confrontation with a Beechwood tune,
a ride to the edge of a rumble.  "You,
be true," I hupped me, "though they pull the pin."

-

May: Year-day 151

"Poetry is for the intelligent."
So?  Seeds in the rich ground of who you are,
in the right weathers, enter the airs, sent
explorers/ ringing your/ medium star.
A robber, armed, may accost your wee life.
An emotion, pure, will disjoint your mind.
Are not these post modern days?  Won't the knife,
the gun, the vial of acid each serve, bind?

Well, too bad!  Think that I am; think I'm not.
Love me; learn from me.  What is is, and stays
so/ even if I have/ had enough/ and
want a different future.  I have got
to/ recall the past, alive in the plays
made, whatever the truths/ dealt to my hands.

-

May: Year-day 152

In the heart of the artichoke, no blood;
in the cone of the storm, no dreamy sight.
If while I'm writing, my pen is in bud,
and pushes leaves and blossoms out of night,
thank desire and environment.  Stand free.
We will walk the spaces in molecules,
examine an atomic galaxy
in its spinning electron light.  No mules.

Remember when stopped at the end of May
to look at the days the daffodils danced,
to bow to the irises kingly old,
think Arthur Miller now gone from our play
and the parts he so outspokenly chanced.
Be glad for each wisdom, shining and bold.
-

10 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                       

sw00040usabys-15.may.sonnets.9of25

9 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (122-136)

-
May: Year-day 122

The self-winding watch of the poem ticks on
so long as it's read, its readers held
and charged and changed/ by what they// look upon/
and hear/ as nowhere are emotions quelled
or the intellect left without designs
to ponder, place, be pleased by.  That is why
while a good ode, sonnet, free verse piece mines
its varied ways, it spells the ear and eye.

That is why this first of May can indulge
both Catholics and Communists and still
tick finely too, opening our mouths, bending
our recalcitrances, flattening the bulge
of our self-importance, used by each will--
and using in turn--toward times without ending.

-

May: Year-day 123

Have you ever felt badly about
things you have done?  I have.  So badly that
I cannot stop thinking on some, and shout
bleak condemnations continually at
myself inside: so much so sometimes they
confuse my necessary thoughts with their
furious echoings, thunderous grey
in a spirit whose skies ought to be fair.

If God forgives me, who I believe does/
and has, who then am I not to.  All you
I've wronged, I know I cannot change what was--
however much I'd like to; know it's true//
apologies/ are not enough.  Because
we're as we are, we're best when winds are blue.

-

May: Year-day 124

Confusion pervades.  The moral designs
formed in my psyche when I was a child
still haven't dissolved enough for the wild
in me to become act easily.  Vines,
bushes, trees/ chopped down, trimmed to formal lines
of such preciseness I have often smiled
sadly.  Viewing them, I retreat beguiled
and testy, my fingers/ playing your spines.

Give, and take, though.  All wildness wouldn't be
acceptable either.  Oh, incidents
occur requiring more of the one than
the other, the artist-woman must see--
having spoken, as I have, of balance--
must see it's relative to what's at hand.

-

May: Year-day 125

Killing time's one of my proclivities
for sure.  I do it best when deeply tired,
letting my pen squiggle grey creeks where trees
have laid down; my imaginings getmired
in the swamps of dreams, the rem caves of sleep;
and somewhat well at a dance floor's edge, gazing
at lovers while into them daggers leap
and the blood from their spirits spurts, amazing.

The hours we force our beings to endure
the exigencies of ill-bred desires!
You'd think we'd had it with human manure
and the hard smoke of malodorous fires!
You'd think I'd have found an effective cure
in the face of tombs and sinewy spires!

-

May: Year-day 126

Passing through, a salesman of pots and pans,
of services, of words, trying to catch
you off guard, get you to buy--my plans
for doing so preconceived, set to match
your wants so/ you equate them with your needs--
I work a little magic before you
which (if done well) plants in your senses seeds
of must have you nurture/ before I'm through.

Then, whether I stay to see them bloom or
hurry off to plant others, I relax
somewhat, smiling to myself, because one
who enjoys what I have to sell, whose door
isn't trained to crush feet, who'll pay the tax
of effort and time, is better than none.

-

May: Year-day 127

In Japan, yesterday was children's day.
In America, another'll be theirs.
Childless at 35; likely to stay
so, still, I feel I understand their cares:
that though they jump and roll and scurry off
and seemingly want to laugh and dance past
any rule or need, turning just to scoff
when they're called, come home, anyhow, at last.

Of course, there are the unusual cases:
those, for instance, who run away for good,
withdrawing to more salubrious places;
those who/ run for a time/ to learn what/ should
be done/ so they and others like their faces;
those who suffer, can't run, but wish they could.

-

May: Year-day 128

Desolate, a dead leaf on a rough rock
island in a swirling river, my stem
anchored in a crevice of that rock, shock
troops of water and wind tearing my flesh,
shattering my bones, I wait for the knock
that will snap my stem and set me adrift,
a wish I constantly chant as the clock
of the elements rudely chimes and ticks
and tocks my disintegration.  The moon
gores the cape cloud passed by the night.
The sun blinds a spread-eagled air.  Too soon
changes wrong what changes again will right.
Someone/ flicks a match, and its moved flames prune/
to brilliance and ash, wisped from sight.

-

May: Year-day 129

So many poems exist, and will/ and will,
leafing into sun, their small voices pressed
against the wind, their bodies seeming still
in the turning dance for whichthey are dressed
variously--mounds, hills, mountains--as seasons
touchand are touched by them.  So many beings
traveling out with their feelings and reasons
momently caught for whomsoever's seeings.

So, likewise, this embodiment of me,
cracking open, uncurling, stretching: shape
displacing sky, transformation of air,
transformation of earth, of distant sea,
the enchanting and enigmatic rape
that fire is, dancing, still, taking to share.

-

May: Year-day 130

Give me the grace to forgive myself, Lord,
Life, for my too quick tongue and too quick pen
though I fear even that will soon be ignored
by circumstances: again, again.

Give me the grace to give of myself, Truth,
Way, and not just for solace before death
but moreso that Death as Rude Icy Tooth
die/ because I and others honor breath.

This moment, next, allowed to flash, alive
in a world rife with splendors, sorrows, loves;
or taken from it, the matter of me
shed, left behind, compressed to dust, to thrive
in trust, whatever new beyonds, aboves
I work to move my spirit toward.  O see!

-

May: Year-day 131

The world is full of recipes I'd just 
as soon forget, and full again of others
I'd just as soon remember; let the dust
hide, or not, whether grandmother's or mother's
or Aristotle's or yours or mine.  I'm
told there are large carnivores and small birds
dying out; that somewhere too soon in time
die this Earth's needed elements, and words.

The usual, usual: Synergetics,
pyramid strength, Findhorn and Lindisfarne,
the double helix, cloning, cybernetics,
cryogenics, black holes, painting the barn,
tush, Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
exobiology, things left behind.

-

May: Year-day 132

Stopped to see Tom Montag last night, and learned
it's time to get back where I started from,
to deal more directly with what we yearn
for: a United States where we can come
and be comfortable, whatever forms
our chattings take.  And so the history
of our nation must be rewritten: storms
flavor its bland skies; songs nest in its trees.

Oh, I know Tom may find it hard to praise
this sonnet path I've decided to walk,
it being too formal, too civilized:
its borders too perfect for storm cloud rays
to fall on with pleasure.  But let me talk
so; even here blood and thorns exercise.

-

May: Year-day 133

Expansive journals of Lewis and Clark,
of Jefferson, or whomsoever we
in this blessed country of the supposed free
are privileged to use against the dark
of the many stories sold us to mark
our patriotism: thank you wells the sea
in us under the moon;thank you each tree
of our good wishes from its budding bark.

Brought here, born here, let's recover what's true
beyond where George's axed cherry tree rots
and old dark Abe's vaunted honesty grew,
knowing historians' redolent plots
may not be the ones to hold ourselves to
if we're going to abide, loose fear's knots.

-

May: Year-day 134

It's about time we let those who so hate
that they'll kill willy-nilly where a foe
is visioned have the days of the mad fate
they apparently want/ so that they go
to their deaths quickly and happily, leaving
the rest of us to end our differences
in peaceful ways, and avoid the false grieving
of those heroing those/ who tossed their senses.

No need to spout what revolution is;
that it's sometimes right to die for one's thoughts;
that this nation was born in violence;
nor even to say your rights are as his,
or his less than yours.  Fight only soul droughts.
When they kill in Boston, they make no sense.

-

May: Year-day 135

The words: "Rebellion to tyrants is
obedience to God" require no fancy
philosophical support.  No blank quiz
of questions either.  We needn't get antsy.
What's true in its heart/ is true.  Or, at least,
we might say: "Obvious is obvious."
When somewhere out of the brush a crazed beast
attacks, detering it is up to us.

So the king of England wearing his crown
as if he were sovereign of part of heaven
had to have that crown knocked off his cocked head/
to learn what's poorly built must crumble, down
to its last weak brick, the incessant leaven
of truth infusing it until it's dead.

-

May: Year-day 136

Common knowledge it is/ too often we/
make what is simple complex, leaving death
outside the window no more than a breath
of cold air designing, so what we see
enchants us better than it frightens us
who in artificial warmth think our lives
cannot be suddenly nipped.  Who survives?
Anything can be blanked without much fuss.

Today the air is hung with rain and fog,
and the long flocks of ripples migrate south
again/ on the asphalt flyway; our thoughts
likewise, if we let them, sucking the grog
of this weather too long.  Pleasure your mouth
with the liquor of light, and warm breeze draughts.
-

9 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                     

sw00039usabys-15.apr.sonnets.8of25

8 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (107-121)

-
April: Year-day 107

Aftermath: warm weather still; a Good Friday
too good to believe, seventy-six and
climbing/ with just a light haze for this high day
this morning to indicate the hour hand
on reaching three will catch us watching rain
again, will catch us on our silent knees
asking false forgiveness for all the pain
we've caused and cause/ between our/ rosaries.

Golgotha, ground of our spirits, the thief
of jeers; the thief of blessings, let the sun
shine, despoil our looked-for symbol of grief,
our Linus cloth, the vacuous relief
we get/ thinking a sign that says we've won
has been given us, who founder, undone.

-

April: Year-day 108

Holy Saturday; I finally finished
John Ashbery's "The New Spirit", poet
of self-imposed isolation, diminished
desires, that I am, knowing how to blow it,
yet not even doing that very well,
writing a meagre sonnet a day, half-
expecting to be killed soon, marked for hell,
forever unable/ to rise, to laugh.

"The System"?  "The Recital"?  I don't know
when I'll get around to reading them.  Death
would certainly cut my chance.  From the dark
I now am in I would just have to go
to that dark as I am, without that breath
of Ashbery air to give me more spark.

-

April: Year-day 109

Easter dawn, light strawberry sherbet striped,
I sit here at my parents' dining table,
remembering a child's stained fingers, his hyped
nerves, and hearing geese I have not been able
to see, the folded linen, the rolled stone
returning and returning, as the dawn
smoothes to lemon-orange, and the long known
flame-behind-trunk, egg, forces to the lawn.

Will be going to church this morning, sad
though I am about it because I've got
to complain there to my rife Rune God, grim
through His followers toward those who have had
hours/ unblessed ways.  Ought a condemned man not
join/ in Communion with those/ against him?

-

April: Year-day 110

In my left forearm an off-and-on ache
disgruntles me, makes me look to my heart,
wondering whether for anyone's sake
I'm wise to expose my feelings and art
as I do, showing isolation's flesh
and bones where they're lodged in me; howthey claim
my attention, depriving us of fresh
outlooks, so that we wish/ I had no name.

Yet Gail and Noreen made an Easter basket
for me: a pack of Trident bubblegum,
a Nestle's Animal Bar, and who'd guess--
an egg with my face.  I would never ask it
of them, any of it; but let it come.
A body can't take too much  loneliness.

-

April: Year-day 111

Emerson, man, your courage, verve astound!
Such body your thought has, such power, I'm
convinced its rising in you/ many times
rose you/ gesturing, eyes intense, the sound
of your voice stopping the books in your den
just as now my reading your "Self-Reliance"
moves me to quote to my wife; my defiance
to lift me "upright and vital", this pen
in my right hand, this red pen, chasing yours,
pressing signs on this waiting looseleaf sheet
so that it too rises (verdured with strength
enough to embarrass the Supreme Court
and the President and Congress)/ & speaks
flowers/fruits that excite lives all their length.

-

April: Year-day 112

To rhyme is to punch the eyes of an owl;
to attempt to mend days with threads of wind
is to think you have found a rhythm.  Scowl,
look nonplussed, titter.  I don't care.  I've pinned
them anyhow, the truths of these delights,
these pains.  To rhyme is to bite moons in trees;
to make a rhythm is to stanza nights
with the punctual passing of scared knees.

So the leaves fall on all the shores of Earth,
and the blood beats through arteries and veins;
and doors close and doors open and hills climb;
and whoosing, crackling fires affirm rebirth;
and the ashes of summer build new gains;
and the Black Angel greens with fame and time.

-

April: Year-day 113

Time crumbles like sand drying in a palm
when memory makes presents of our pasts
and unexpected turbulences cast
terror and confusion into our calms;
but so it is, for neither you nor I,
however we build cities in the sand,
can long build anything which strongly stands
against winds and suns beating rainless skies.

So new gives way to new gives way to new,
and known gives way to known gives way to known,
and always we are infants coming through,
and always we are ragged to the bone;
and if we must dig well to see what's true,
we must, with understanding, build alone.

-

April: Year-day 114

O yes, "It is we who wither away,
not the state", Randall; & yet we who grow
strong and jouncy also.  Imay not know
enough to choose well the course of my day
but that won't stop me from trying.  Let's say
our say then, vocally or as we flow
otherwise, despite the angers that blow
from us, the frustrations, regrets; so pray

as caringly as we can, thankful for
each moment we pass through, allowed to fill
and be filled by: surgeon, patient, nurse; teacher,
student; decadent; fireman, victim, store
detective, policeman, guard; driver; mill/
mine/foundry worker: each a/ mystic creature.

-

April: Year-day 115

And so, when Chris Peters came to me smiling
with excitement because she'd seen and heard
Gwendolyn Brooks, my envy started isling
me, and I acted toward her like a turd,
happy for her, but stinky with complaints,
irked at feeling a garbage island, cast
from thought, my own included, the brown taints
of hurt pride excluding me to the last.

However, this same morning, more than I
am worthy of, to be sure, I've been blessed
with the duty of checking Mrs. Brooks
out of this inn I audit for; so try
to work and still chat, get good things expressed.
My feelings pirouette behind my looks.

-

April: Year-day 116

If we kill each other, do the crows care?
The male robins puff their proud orange breasts
and trill their pleasant mating songs.  Who shares?
The spring birds mated/ weave their/ holy nests.
If this rich nation fights with that for more/
befriended so positioned to be raped,
its psyche shaken . . . even if its power
breaks its attacker's holds, neither's escaped.

Though Rune forgives; though Rune alone can judge,
knowing the best the circumstances and/
the ways they've tangled, each (stuck in a hell)
still has himself to fight with: forgive, nudge--
however painfully--toward health; demand
some sort of restitution from; love well.

-

April: Year-day 117

April: turn; turn about: yet sweet; yet cruel:
the hornets of mad weathers sting and sting,
the daffodils of gentle light blow cool,
the naked dancer wriggles off his ring.

Inceptions chocked with death designs stretch forth.
We meet ourselves/ remembering passed years.
Our dreams from east and south and west and north,
however deep with smiles, are deep with sneers.

Your hand, now touching mine, now by itself,
has fortunes in it only you will know,
as dills and honey waiting in their jars,
each one yours, each; each on its given shelf;
and I will rest and work and watch and grow--
within, without--toward fruits and hearts and stars.

-

April: Year-day 118

What sorrows come upon me with the dawn,
the brightness of its airs chiding my death;
what spiteswhen I for safety view the lawn
and a red pepper Stingray stops my breath!

Oh, hu, hu!  Can you believe?  What spins?  Please,
I should be singing glories at my wake,
be sharp and teasing asa lakeshore breeze,
not a dumpy toad/ for-- for humans' sake.

Everything in its rightful place: the world
given, the world we make: towers of steel,
towers of glass; mountains, sequoias, skies.

Everything in its fitting dance: spots curled
in an afternoon sleep; hood crest, mag wheel,
eagle, CB; incense, songs, cuddling eyes.

-

April: Year-day 119

Conditioned reflex.  A sonnet should rhyme;
but not too definitely, so we're able
to guess the word each line will end with.  I'm
serious!  My words are/ all on the table.

I will give one here, take another back,
keep trying/ to shake my opponents, even
if it is an imaginary stack
I'm using.  Don't tell me what I should leave in.

I am only trying to do my thing;
more, honor the charge to play life whole;
I won't always seek to trick when I sing,
slip you a seven you think is a king.
Let's not argue about body and soul.
Care about So Human an Animal.

-

April: Year-day 120

O--give the world away.  We'll buy it back
tomorrow.  We haven't been using it
very well, anyhow.  From our sweet lack
of understanding--it needs a rest.  Sit.
Maybe if for ten thousand years we let
it whirl on its own, it will improve some,
enough at least so we can rightly set
our creations on it; be wise.  But, come,

I want you to see something.  This rare Earth,
blue, white, brown, grandly spinning in the light
of its star, has only limited worth
without us, even if we are fools, quite
obviously, too often sure the birth
of wisdom in us/ wields/ sufficient might.

-

April: Year-day 121

Lord, when the death frame's near, beam that belief
I'll need to/ enter Glory, be that child
You said each must.  But what of now? the leaf
turning.  I seldom live as though--.  Tossed, filed,
I Am Who Am, yet/ pleased to be/ alive,
move me, alive, to please, who so hard fails,
who tortures himself: inside, outside; thrives
not/ well; despite intentions, thrashes, wails.

Peripatetic philosopher, Son
of Man, my Brother, my spirit's one hope,
I swear I'm so ridiculous: cocked dung,
strutter of worded attitudes all spun
from love, sincerity, but forming tropes
more praised than acted on.  Make virtues tongue.
-

8 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                    

sw00038usabys-15.apr.sonnets.7of25

7 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (92-106)

-
April: Year-day 92

Tomorrow President Ford will arrive
in this badgered country of beer and cheese,
political hype, political jive,
political shots at a passing breeze,
mixed with an honest spice or three, performing
for us.  O the man himself is concerned
enough; that won't change his bothersome storming
where, after the ice, so much must be burned.

Spears that were limbs with intricate ends, fanned
to graced benevolence, rupture us coldly
who watch, watch/ for the hibernating green
to camouflage the wounds wounding the land,
and skies of spirits that would strive more boldly
to conquer loss/ but for// reminders seen.

-

April: Year-day 93

President Ford, I am not on your side
though here and there we may find we agree;
wheeling around in this "land of the free",
there are too many times I'm pushed to hide
with my thoughts and desires; bury my pride
because laws condemn me for being me,
and some folks imprison me when they see
I am not like them in the deep and wide.

So today you pass through wealthy West Bend,
seeing how ice can despoil and create
where this small writer, and his smaller friend,
in a world too small for their energies,
may have learned the best what greeds they must hate.

-

April: Year-day 94

The ways I love are dangerous, concealed
as they are under disguises of care.
Erase that.  I'm not really so congealed;
or, from the other side of sight, so bare.

The problem is, the difficul--, the truth,
if you really want to know, is that I'm
lonely, like a hawker in a fair booth
no one stops at; pirates, without a lime.

Oh, what a joke this whole thing is!  Who knows--
maybe I am a devious twerp, armed
from the heart with snaky designs, a man
out to get you (whatever way) with shows
of false impressiveness; with small words, charmed
to bursting; with looks that/ win what they can.

-

April: Year-day 95

Which hour was it I first learned who I am:
this hour, this hour, where my dreamings begin,
or an hour passed, where my dreamings began,
or one to come, where my dreams willswim;
or will I never learn, or always learn,
whether in or out of a given form
how here I am loose and here I am firm,
or how well I'm sewn, or when I am torn?

Ulysses, old, clambered out of his ship;
Adam, old, driven from the Garden/ slumped;
Satan, old, fire-eyed stretched/ against his fall.

I, what I know, will know, making this trip
where clouds and roots and animals are clumped,
accept from the past, and/ change in my call. 

-

April: Year-day 96

Closed in this bedroom, the sun hidden west,
a lavender haze to mock me behind,
I do what I can with the light I find
from the shaded bulb on my crowded desk
and the still blue air my windows impress
as I pick and order out of my mind
the imaginings there that best shined
when they first sparked in my synapses' clasp.

Weeds, timbrels, diatoms, bells; houses, docks,
offices, slips; a goldfinch? warbler? alighting
near a crow, then coastering shallow back
from the oak: a warbler, I'll say, this writing;
a goldfinch some other, when autumn rucks.
The crow?  It's really a starling I'm sighting.

-

April: Year-day 97

Touch me not; sleepless, I am weak as fluff
of dandelion, only to be kept
in the camera of memory, rough
and dusty, and, as recalled, to be wept
over, smiled at, held in a thought, and sailed
on the waves of the air; or in the frame 
memory of a camera/ curtailed
for us, where we love, to name and rename.

If yesterday I felt I'd embrace you,
today I feel more I could do so still;
tomorrow I hope I will still feel so.
Yet what I feel/ I probably won't do,
today or tomorrow, fearing the chill
of a lost friendship I'd rather feel grow.

-

April: Year-day 98

On the average, we American voters
line up for hits; our ignorance cheers hell;
in our voting we flounder as sailboaters
who've never sailed, yet try to, though the swell
we should have begun on does not exist
and we/ go down with our votes in wild crests
because of feelings we could not resist,
believing those (believed too late) were jests.

Time on time, without end, doing our thing,
the slithey truths we are gatherers of,
learned and forgotten, we opt for the sting
of the viper-tongued, thinking that there love
of country is the most sincerely shown
despite how wickedly the winds are blown.

-

April: Year-day 99

When the universe ends, what beyonds?  Hell?
Purgatory?  Heaven?  Dimensions only
dreamed of?  Or not even a nothing lonely
and afraid?  Who can any way now tell,
or could ever?  Of what importance are
these questions?  Blinded by a middling sun,
awed byauroras, winds--on this sheet, spun,
here, I still write these words to reach: how far?

Deep in a city's yellow night, shrunk, lost;
rooting the elements with a coarse word
hard to appreciate,hard to transume,
I tweak the eternal; ignore the cost,
a rose's fragrance on my fingers heard,
and the flames surrounding an icy plume.

-

April: Year-day 100

If I weren't forcing myself to make rhymes
and worry about the syllable count
and the argument of the first eight lines;
the denouement closing each sonnet out,

it wouldn't be so difficult to fill
as if quite naturally from inside
this form approved by my persistent will,
this challenge to my implacable pride.

Then, even if I should somehow fail,
though gallantly striding along the rail
to make our attentiveness most worthwhile,

I at least should there have spoken to you
and gotten us somewhat pleasantly through
on the form and meaning of that frail style.

-

April: Year-day 101

Each of us hews a life unknown to us
yet I wish here to represent us all:
disheveled, vital spirits who fly, fuss,
meditate; who doctor each other, brawl.
So we're not the same.  So I can't be you
in particulars.  Common realms remain
enough that/ shows of me are enough true
to intrigue and charge through their joy & pain.

You know how it is:  there are things we've done
that we keep secret, and there are things we
strut, though we sometines/ bring into the sun/
things we should not; neither you nor I see
perfectly, roiled as we are by who's won,
by time, by things.  Poems cage perfidy.

-


April: Year-day 102

I hate time, having to bend to it,
aware of our existence in each other,
of having grown/ from a father and mother;
my trying constantly to make things fit
within the tick-tocks that won't quite because
the durations of them are longer than
I calculate against how fast I can
experience them from coming to was.

A sparrow hawk pulsing over a field,
a tall friend yelling good-bye from a door,
the holy leaves waiting/ to be revealed,
each land-and-ocean-watching sandy shore;
my eyes by yours magically touched, healed:
voices out of stones that stretch and sway; soar.

-

April: Year-day 103

Tomorrow, Jefferson, man of the farms,
whose intellect surpassed our constitution
yet who hid in the country of its charms
a salience (for fear of) diminution.
And what that secret value was and is
I'd like tosay, and say and say again,
but go ask him as, lovely, it was his
whichrounds and deepens/ flat and/ shallow men.

The point is:  Intellects can not get stuck
in one pinched way of going/ if this Earth
of conscious being is to long survive;
so Thomas, while the rural ease and muck
both were delights to him, still knew the worth
of ranging/ far around, Bucky-alive.

-

April: Year-day 104

Relax, it is past time, past time, past time.
Your uptightness has gone too far, too far.
Though softly you reflect upon a star,
you much too nervously jostle to rhyme
the details of your day-to-day existence,
mourning the lack of this, surplus of that,
wanting swift light magics out of your hat
but getting nothing for your strict persistence:
nothing other than headaches and tight bowels
and burning blood and trembling flesh and bones
and thought-aches setting consonants and vowels
and metabolic tics choosing tunes, tones
that indicate to those who care/ who owns
dreams to jerk the eyes and chuckle the jowls.

-

April: Year-day 105

Desires--hear them, drumming across your windows--
leaves, rains, air; moths, June bugs; fingertips; birds:
the ragged i's of blocked dreams; the thinned o's
of throats shouting coarsely understood words:
the sun that cannot quite get/ through the cloud:
the pale shoot delayed/ by a granite rock:
ideas lost in neural mishaps: cowed
motions: chances slain because of a clock.

Last night five plus lines came to me.  I tried
to keep them in my head during my sleep
and till after midnight at work.  Three died,
or have seemed to, leaving something we'll bleep
for now.  Explorers in my brain have spied
with their hearts before, and will, what caves keep.

-

April: Year-day 106

For several days, warm sun without clouds;
today, clouds with just fringes of sun.  Cool
in the wind, my organs boil; I can't fool
anyone.  Yes, such weather rules me, crowds
against my limbs and thoughts, jacketing their
frenzies; but it also arouses frictions
under my skin, setting each of the dictions
vying for prominence in amazed air.

I didn't want the clouds to come trumpeting
their grayness against my frail off-white life.
I wanted more sun.  Why suffer a sting
from depression again.  For me, the strife
of merely getting on is enough.  Weather
like this?  Oh, at least I have a long tether.
-

7 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert                    

sw00037usabys-14.mar.sonnets.6of25

6 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (78-91)

-
March: Year-day 78

What once was clear is clear no more, yet shall
be clear and unclear again, rising up
and falling down, now dark, now light.  A shell
which holds the sounds of waves, yet not, holds us.

You come to me; I, you: each into each,
wishing to be as two transparencies,
films of substance in intermingling reach;
willing/ only to give/ in slow degrees.

In our hearts: dunes, mountains, rivers, old skies
revolve, and birds, through the eyes of gazelles.

In our skins: words of spies and counterspies
dissolve, and laughs, with the ringing of bells.

In our minds: every dream that mystifies
or solves/ chases us from (or into) hells.

-

March: Year-day 79

St. Joseph the Worker's Day, and the swallows,
ensconced again at Capistrano, we,
forced to see our reasons are/ full of hollows
for the trillionth time, mordantly agree
when a letter from an insurance rep
cites me liable for an accident
I never had, and sends us out-of-step
as that sold orange van in Beaver Dam sent.

High on a mountain or skyscraper, much
can be logically fixed on clear days,
though not all, and certainly not all ways.

And on clouded days or in caves and such,
little, if anything, with reason, stays,
hiding and changing as models' toupees.

-

March: Year-day 80

Guilty?  Oh yes, we all are: in this; in that:
railing against pollutions of water, air,
land/ while ignoring where our selves are at,
sickened by fear and hate and lack of care,
and alcohol and nicotine and hash
and marijuana and the dust of death's
angels, and vallium and stolen cash
and gambling--all/ impoverishments of breaths.

Not taking time for proper exercise
is one of the pollutions I allow.
You?  Prostitution?  We're so worldly, wise.
If ever once we truly gathered how
our furious desires pluck out the eyes
of our weak, endless spirits, we'd change: now.

-

March: Year-day 81

Gods o of laughter, of sorrow, your voices
here we hear, rolling across this round mountain
with the cool fog from the sea, the old choices,
the old commands.  Goddesses o of fountains,
of fires, your changing shapes we see, escaping
from earth with the dreams of sleep, the old dances,
the old paralyses.  Dressing, undressing,
obeying, rebelling, we stake our chances.

Yet verses we approve, however rough,
however ragged, obstacled, should be
somehow acceptable to those concerned,
should follow the curves of feelings enough/
they both enclose & magically free
that space and time we've honorably/ earned.

-

March: Year-day 82
                                 (for Sandy Troedel)

Kumquats and boysenberries and the edges
of love.  If who I am is less than who
I might have been, less than you, clouds and hedges
still scare and please us both.  And as I grew,
you grew too; and as I grow, you, as bright
and frail as shafts of wheat, as today's breeze,
each to her own fullness.  So, though wrong, right,
or neither, we can smile and hug with ease.

That is why, mom, this afternoon, I smear
our bland white bread with exotic preserves
and chant incantations to frighten fear
from the gray, the bush, to compose our nerves.
Come, mom.  Come sit. Come play, come talk, come hear.
Oh! how from bark and pane that robin swerves!

-

March: Year-day 83

We are strange: mammals of sleek consciousness
veined with darknesses, irised with light, damp
as a root cellar in our bones/ but less
warm, flowy as a gown, stuck as a stamp
carefully placed so whatever it is
it's stuck to is sure to get where it should,
tired as an arthritic dog poised to whizz
through flamed hoops, sharp as an ax/ killing wood.

Confide in us; sooner or later we'll
be sure to let everything out: inks
from their pens, bulbs from their sockets, decay
from their teeth, just as/ we allow a heel/
out for a walk, sly (and obvious) winks/
out for approval, seeds out/ for a jay.

-

March: Year-day 84

Again it comes, close, riding the prevailing
westerlies, crow presence, hard to believe,
huge as a house, dreamless, caught in a wailing
that joins, yet/ mocks ours.  What butterflies grieve
but the dead leaves, this morning's wind so strong
we can see it do as yesterday, drive
an empty box near perfectly along
the steep curve to our lot, passing alive?

So Janet Gilles Araoka, away
in Japan mothering two boys, returns
from that confusion into ours, and we--
not at all expecting she'd come/ to stay,
or come so soon, or, as she has--bring ferns,
and bonsai yews, and roses, and a plea.

-

March: Year-day 85

The problem with death is it stops the voice,
but not the artist's, the maker of light;
the fires in him are so limned they/ daze night,
Tiresias him in the realms of choice
in his awareness of his place and others'
as they speak to the edge of his last word
inthe manner in which he is best heard,
he with his/ starred fathers, and sons, and brothers.

The fern in the mirror, droopy yet strong,
sending with no visible pause arced shoots
through the stodgy air (in this bedroom), rates
a double of praise for its green-rayed song
as, when, expectantly, flared from their roots,
Earth's visionaries rise: to end Man's dates.

-

March: Year-day 86

Thank you, Harold Bloom; A Map of Misreading
springs my bones, freshens my blood, strengthens me,
forcing me to struggle with thoughts exceeding
my extended abilities to see
until I have met them over and over.
Nothing is better for a lazy spirit,
However sweet/ resting/ in stingless clover,
than to enter theory, and never fear it.

Milton in England--where did Shakespeare go?--
Emerson in my United States: seeds
from which more seeds still darkly form and grow,
belated as we are, our hopes and needs
most difficult to fill, and fulfill, so
beset with anxieties where/ light bleeds.

-

March: Year-day 87

Sleep: the body's balm, or so one's led to think:
the shadow-time rejuvenation comes;
those moments highly active brains can sink
from their jittery waves, buzzes and hums,
draw inward all their energies, for needs
that in their daytime states cannot be met
but merely, sometimes, recognized as seeds
whose potencies will sprout and blossom; yet

require darkness and quiet for their best/
development.  Eight hours today.  Eight hours
I find I quail to admit, in my quest
(however foolish) for eternal flowers,
are not a waste; that by denying rest
of such an order/ I might strain our powers.

-

March: Year-day 88

Up from the left, ahead, a pickup pulling
a boat approaches the freeway, disturbs
my being, primal lakes/forests/times bulling
to awarenesses, nouns becoming verbs;
then recollections of Chicago: yards
& yards of people from the Tri-State seen
rushing to unite, bless polar regards,
show how airiness replaces the screen

consciouness stood when insights manifest
archetypes, and time collapses, & places,
and one's insignificance radiates
with one's significance so that the jest
of the world, the glory--we; all our faces--
dances, alive with gratitude; elates.

-

March: Year-day 89

Such darknesses, such searing lights, Lord, jam
my simple attempts to see these last few days.
It's almost as if from not enoughpraise
(or too much) I could forget who Iam,
what little of me I have a grasp of;
that amidst those changes within, without,
my rankled mind drifts about and about,
trembling, between the ports of hate and love.

Maybe so.  Maybe always so.  Whatever,
I need You now to walk with me across
the hilly fields and through the fallen branches
in the ice-stript woods, and along the clever
alleys and streets of this chill sense of loss
I live with, and its plethora of chances.

-

March: Year-day 90

The stubby tough potentate shouts and drums,
swatting the wind with the back of his hand,
throned where the Lake Michigan thumbnail comes
to its inside top in the promised land;
and all the king's horses gallop and ney,
gathering the votes at the polling booths,
and somewhere stuffed on the dark side of day
jesters are glowering with strips of truths.

Yet clearly this long-lived limerick king
limericks his peasants and knights quite well
for all that/ in his limerick-exciting
manner.  His realm does thrive!  So one who'll bring
his power to put down those who would spell
"liberty" elsewise/ may/ not be inviting. . . .

-

March: Year-day 91

Cry out, my spirit says, cry out to God,
or The Supreme Being, The Primal Rune;
the world gives but a condescending nod,
hearing the strange inflections of your tune.

Cry, though it only does you/ any good,
keeps death from your bones, each day on the run,
helps them to swerve precisely when they should
yet doesn't do/ what you'd rather undone.

Rabbit, forever, in fear of the wolves,
hummingbird having to cross a great gulf,
man, different, on the side of the small,

cry, though it hurts, as if trampled by hooves;
do as you do, though it isn't enough;
pray for those moments that will better all.
-

6 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert