Some Sonnets

I like cadenced, rhythmic lines, but rarely use fixed forms. The three poems below are exceptional cases: all, more or less, Shakespearean sonnets. (The first has some tetrameters, but, if you like, you may take more time to read them.) I find at times that the arbitrary requirements of a sonnet lead to unexpected places, allowing me to surprise myself. 

The Wind 

 The ululation of the wind outdoors, 

like bay of some large beast, is charged 

with brio by which my own breath’s enlarged. 

I’ve swallowed cities, mountains, mice and boars, 

bits of facts about some mendicant 

five hundred years ago, atomic weights, 

exuviae abandoned, Malay straits, 

the deer that come at night, a hierophant 

of old Eleusis, dust beneath my feet. 

Just as gravitation works both ways 

love must go back and forth as does everything

I see and hear and eat. Each sight I see 

outside my window pane adds one 

more thread unto my own self’s skein. 

 Sonnet: For Fred Hampton and Mark Clark assassinated by police December 4, 1969 

 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are dead today. 

 for last night with the dark the rats came out. 

The dawn was soon to come, still all was grey, 

and when the smoke had cleared there was no doubt: 

the ancien régime has still some bite; 

a man who’ll sell his soul will sell his friends; 

and politics, when boiled down, is might, 

so high ambitions need not bring good ends. 

They stood with Borinqueño Lords and whites 

from Uptown arm in arm and spoke their word, 

and when it ended in a bloody night, 

one doubted whether anyone had heard. 

Oh, had we Archimedes now in space 

to move the earth onto some better place! 

 Sonnet 

This brumous day the vapors mask the scene. 

Boundaries blur to grey on grey. That elm 

not so far off might be Pleistocene 

or else on Mars or some supernal realm. 

Yet one of normal eyes and average height, 

though he may be no wizard and no dunce, 

while looking out his window to the light 

can sometimes see a million miles at once. 

But now as there’s no take on distant sky, 

he’s turned back to that shadow-play, 

the cranium’s cinémathèque, the inward eye 

to find what light it sheds upon the day. 

Whether what he finds be ore or dross, 

the afternoon will come to be no loss.