sw00038usabys-15.apr.sonnets.7of25

7 of 25                                               

 1976 Today
                353 bicentennial year sonnets (92-106)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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7 of 25


Brian A. J. Salchert