Early autumn sonnets
“Being” is a funny way of calling life,
referring only to its stateful parts, its stasis,
“being” is a word for life’s outer races
which distribute pressure inwards through the Spatial bearings towards the inner race’s proper cycle.
“Being” is a kind of trick on poets,
giving them a page which promises to capture ink,
but the page is a curtain, like a practical joke
gone too far, forgotten its reign once began somewhere, its own horizon, forgotten that the ink has some capacity for floating.
“Being” was the central category of a game
played by the young and old and authentic,
and having promised some victory over pretending
who we are, delivered it once, long ago, and we ourselves have since refused to share its shame.
--
Wasting time is not
the wanting of the heart for breaking,
because of patience
wasting time is more akin to pleasure.
How often we speak
of killing time and idle talk,
we say we aren’t making any progress
only when we accidentally have some fun.
So let a pride of mine be wasting time
at least for the while
I pile up and pile up
each day, as it goes by, in the laboratory accidentally breaking beakers by the sink…
--
Delicately, friend,
try not to break my heart again,
I asked for your forgiveness,
and a black heron landed on the surface of the lake where I prayed.
Lovingly, friend,
you always play, we skirt around it, then
we see what we’ve made
of this puzzle: a mockery of life and have we always been this foolish?
Openly, friend,
what else do I have to pretend?
The curtain, O, the curtain rose
so long ago—I often pray, no, every day, for your advice—when we were kids.
--
Morning has its freedom
if freedom is a virtue.
I feel in the air the smoke
under the streetlight last night—it is still hanging coming down.
Ceramic, brick. My coat over the bus
like a ghost.
In the morning what has passed is not the night,
the night has already passed, but the dawn—in the morning the dawn is passing.
Every stitch belongs to morning,
including vice, and guilt, and matter.
Once I wake up I realize, by then for the second time,
how slowly does a reason grow—by and by the morning happens for a reason.
--
This is the minor confusion
that persists throughout the ladder
of the mind, its climbing
up and down with angels, humans
working every trade with every tool,
I stir a curry on the stove
and have my tea alone, last night
I dreamt I took it all back:
and so persists this minor confusion,
where is the clearing from in which we mete out
our words and our decisions,
which plastics to buy and how can we destroy them?
--
How can I speak for a “we”
without so much as a voice,
we who as per Glück’s suggestion
shatter the big Abstract of space
so we can then be brothers?
How can I give you a “could”
when our world has already ended—
“has,” you said, was critical.
Reason so described:
technique to spot a loon’s print
amid the grass and bracken.
Presence and absence.
--
One poem to have written it
well, and so, in private,
is worth a year of evenings
spent in perfect joyousness.
To me, one poem written
at dusk, or dawn, forgives
one thousand other days less suited
towards the laboring of life.
The writing down of natural laws, or making sense of god,
is fitting for the search of Truth,
but I will take the table on which one poem’s hammered out
instead of any altar, to this, my table, blood is brought.
--
A mood is a place of already-knowing,
a place that is different than others.
Up over the main street, the awnings, of Mood,
does dance and does spin the old smells:
a woodsmoke which used to disclose where we dwelled—
now admixed with harbinging fires—clears out of itself,
preparing Mood’s nostrils, and charges that place with a heartbolt.
That place, and not others, stands already-known, and would change, if you left it, forever.
I frequent the store on the corner, at night, it never
to me would occur that the booth they set up for night-sitting outside
was suffused with a smell antecedent to snow: the moods you get used to! like autumn at night,
are the fronts of a clearing, the bluffs dense with clay, they can change as you know it, can fall.