Sonnettics

What aches to be released is filled with doubt,
constrained by love and faith, contained by time
which in its turn concedes a life without
such weights would be a life beyond sublime.
Take love, like some Gibraltared coast of hope,
unyielding in its ambiguity.
Take faith, like some eternal length of rope
tied off to some obscene eternity.
Now lift your love as high as you have strength
and toss it in the ocean’s shallow tide;
now follow faith along its tethered length
until you find the place where angels hide.
In time both love and faith will be released,
but doubt will be eternally increased.

If this, the road at dawn, becomes my choice
to sanctify my heart with one last glance
into the twilit memories: your voice,
that chair, a song, some final circumstance.
If this, the dusty red that fades to gray,
becomes the time I travel through my doubt
as faith becomes the night, I choose the day
to rest within uncertainty, without
the fear of loss.  This road is marked as well
as memories remembered from the past
when you and I communed but did not tell
ourselves that night and darkness wouldn’t last
If this is life, the spirit of the dawn
releases me and I will travel on.

Each wisp of life that rises with the day,
ethereal and metaphoric smoke
that haunts the morning air, the pall of gray-
not-black, that ghostly spirit we invoke
with every pulse and every breath we take,
each day of days we clarify at dawn
with dreams we chase in sleep and then forsake
to wisps of smokey life, still linger on.
That wisp of insight smoldering in ash
which sacrifices life, a brief decay,
exhales a breath of beauty, seeks to pass
its essence through the dawn into the day
while day inhales the beauty of the night
and wisps of beauty dissipate in light.

Like clumps of grass that molder in the week
between the end of summer and the fall,
I wait for slow decay.  The words I speak
denote the patient mold.  The seasons crawl,
they stop and start, like blades of drifting grass
mowed down by summer’s swift poetic steel.
They linger in the cracks that came to pass
through winters I no longer wish to feel.
Eternal in-between, eternal time
becomes the demarcation of my voice,
progressing or regressing, rhyme to rhyme,
like clippings of the leaves of grass of choice.
Such cracks bear neither peace nor subtle fear,
but hide my words until they disappear.

We close the subtle clarity of night
with days consumed by motes of dusty beams,
with visions of perception where our sight
subsumes the wrath of sunlight in our dreams.
The air exhaled from humid throats is not
the air we welcomed in with subtle hope;
while throats are dry, the words we breathe are hot,
constricted like a hangman’s dusty rope.
Come kiss my subtle mouth with grieving lips
of promises; I’ll pay you for the trick
of light that makes the word which simply slips
into the dusty air, congested, thick.
It’s love, the subtle whore of night and day
who laughs the most as she collects her pay.

One foot betrays the gravel, coarse with wet
communion of the clouds, electric sky.
If god could kill the walker he might let
the path remain betrayed, the right to die
would slip from god’s control into the stream
of footprints left depressed in muddy ground.
Ridiculous is god’s eternal scheme–
ridiculous, eternal fucking round.
One foot, one step compels the walk of one
who lives in bright denial of the night
where dreams compel the fear to overrun
the banks of god’s oppression, wrong or right.
As swift as water roiling toward his feet,
the one will find his drowning bittersweet.

Your tight, thin lips are drawn to kiss remorse,
regret, remiss should I neglect to draw
my eyes, attentive to your grip, of course
you only glance, one chance to see.  I saw
the years of sighs and days of driving home
alone.  So young, so old, so caught between
the lust that makes you stay, that makes you roam
to places where you pray to be unseen.
But 95 is long; July is hot.
I passed you north of Richmond, past the end
of everything expected, which you got:
a stranger’s passing glance, mistaken friend.
The rain is quickly coating both our roads
and miles ahead a thundercloud explodes.

. . . becomes the softest sediment below
the coldest lake of tears as pure as ice
when sanity has nowhere left to go
and drowning is the ultimate device
of metaphoric words which wait, and wait
in solitude of grubby notebook sheets,
the stillness of a rescuer too late:
emotionless, unfathomed, more complete.
She holds my hand as if it were divine
and strokes the skin above my solemn wrist
to signify her yet unuttered “mine”
as I succumb with just the slightest twist,
as rings of water ripple through the scene
while neither lover knows what loving means.

My son, there is a star men use to guide
their ships when other compasses have failed.
My son, there is a maker who’s supplied
the stars by which such men have often sailed.
There is a shore to every endless sea,
a harbor from each never-ending storm.
There is a place where you are meant to be;
in cold and dark, keep faith in light and warm.
In time a voice within will whisper peace
to guide you like a light in heaven’s vast
expanse of possibilities, release
your spirit into present, future, past.
When time and truth converge you will be one
who’s found his heart, my flesh and blood, my son.

It’s life; it’s not some sonnet I compose.
Ironic though, that words align in song
as easily as lying, I suppose.
Still, lies arranged in poems could belong . . .
unless the truth is deeper than the lines,
unless the soul is water in a well,
and poetry, the bucket that defines
the liquid verses drawn to quench and quell
the thirst for love that parches word and voice,
the love of words that sing a lying tune
of depth and sweetness, freedom in a choice
that’s pre-determined; poems end too soon.
But life is not some sonnet to be drawn
from any well while love still lingers on.