Metaphysical sonnets
By now the doors to the heart are closed,
restrained by fats and wild muscle fibers
sewn like ropes into a braid of hibernating
colors, always almost torn apart
by the spiraled curvature of its weft.
Shut quiet like an accordion cabled
together against the work of gravity,
masterfully the hinges warp, the threshold
seams are fused, handles dismantled
and hid, the keys are buried deep
within the pregnant earth. The heavens
in insomniac moods pay morbid attention,
keeping track of all the moving parts
and weeping bitter tears when each scene
collapses. Even the earth in its naivety
suspects the open sky of orchestrating this.
--
Know this. Within the vast, radiant, ocean,
within the confines of the words "truth," "here,"
or "time," within the apparently inexorable world
you are in fact free. Despite the towers of books
whose sole exegetical work on the verse likening
man to god is to exalt the brutally effective
operation of such a simile, you, who I consider
my dear friend, are still free. Therefore cast the bowls
in gold. Eat from the cupped and supplicating hands
of the holy ones. In poetry your soul is endless,
so your tongue begins articulation with the "O"
before the declaration of this fact. But others arise:
the earth is an incalculable sphere. Owls fly
so silently that they can dive to catch a mouse
without disturbing the sleep of another inches over.
Underground, roots and worms produce a human mind.
--
Time, imperfect animal, had long
ago begun to wander the woods
with silent steps, with cause before
effects had reason, or chance, to call
for her. I find myself emboldened,
counting footprints in the earth,
looking for proof of patterned paces,
gaits of either wisdom or folly.
But not expecting neither, my hands
default to working while my mind swirls,
trying to preserve the evidence
of a slaughter. In moments, I concede
that nothing heretical happened here,
just a meal. Otherwise when I uncover
a knot in her trail I know that she
was hunting for the body's refuge.
--
Time irreconcilable, even banal, bares its
self-replicating powers. An ordinary garden
hoe works its foot into a noduled root system
bleeding from a wound sustained long ago.
The transformation from god to god, surprise
built on top of surprise. O how familiarity
suddenly reveals itself as pure platitude.
Essentially lacking in poetic language,
time is opaque to the appeals of beauty
and emotion both. Nevertheless it speaks
the word "change" in the radical sense
in which everything obeys that interval,
and even the interlocutor, who had remained
inconspicuous until now, is measured up to
unendurable durations. And as it speaks,
the categories of silence and volume bend.
--
A glass jam jar. A buried iron stake.
A decelerating subway car. A quiet voice
getting lost among the heart's prisons.
Superfluid helium. A sudden confession
of love. The wooden planks used to build
an effigy of the fish god. The desire
in man to destroy everything simple.
The combinatorics problem bewildering
a first-year doctoral student as he spends
innumerable hours alone. Humanity's vast
troves of ready-made life's purposes.
Intuition, however dim, that I will never
understand you. Instead, consider how
I might let this first attempt shatter.
Our god in the face of a willow tree
shedding a long, long, train of vortices.