Some Vermont sonnets
Yes, I have been planted,
yes, I have been far, dis-
tantly, with my hands in
the soil, not heartless.
If my place is too stable,
too simple,—are those
the same? aren’t we able
to track tides with our toes?—
then my time is reactive,
shocks, stutters, and gasps:
and whatever the price of this pact is,
it’s always the spirits who laugh…
--
I never was not confused
about what not to do,
to send or not that letter,
or to open the gift of friendship.
I never got around to reading Ethics,
but rather hung suspended:
simplicity of nothing
which wraps decisions up like shallots,
which, by the way, I noticed
had sprouted in the cabinet:
a biological reminder
of how two lovers learn what time does.
--
Temperature and texture
of amphibian skin:
paper-cool and thin.
Quietly in lecture,
secretly, within
a Feynman diagram
unfolds a plan
to change: develop fins,
as swiftly as uncan-
ny as it is, leap
into the dewy reeds
and there, if time allows, think of integrands.
--
Chicken, water, sweet potato,
wouldn’t bother, but who would though,
to carry out minutest favors
for June the dog if she remembered
how many quills were in her nose,
dutifully and one by one,
I’d taken out. Or how, alone,
she frightens brown bears off the farm.
So when convulsing from a tick she has to go
I simply carry her to pee or set her down,
she doesn’t hesitate to track inside the dew,
I still soak her food. It’s just us two.
--
A tarp to keep from freezing
rain the heart, still hot,
just emerged and not
yet washed in ethanol or mercury, it
needs setting and fixing, pinning down
the capillaries
like rare berries
all the while the storm is thinning out
an audience of serious students
who were in hindsight right,
proposing the demo be done inside
because it was an insult to the sky, and to the tulips.
--
Once you ate your fill of leeks
you slept for weeks. Until
we met in dreams exchanging
bouquets of scallions and dill,
everything was changing outside, the waking
life. I couldn’t read the schedule
for when we were to leave: it was illegible.
There was supposed to be a storm, we were placing
all these bets. Were we normal
then and rich in spirit?
Here, it seems that we were always horrible
at making soup, that only in dreams grow all these fresh carrots.
--
Every question asked in love
is asked despite another one,
is asked while bubbling at its surface,
its words are brimming, bent, deforming
from gaseous pressure deep within
violently until the skin.
Every question asked in love
was chosen last, was almost null-
ified by rupture,
then diagnosed and sectioned,
to understand what went wrong
and why it took this long.
Every question asked in love
runs cool and liquid with another's blood,
it knows its time is only borrowed
and that its body was adopted
from parents with a different favorite
under whom it will always labor.
Every question asked in love
is born too early, terribly young,
is incomplete, malformed, left waiting
in my arms, incubating,
since in my mouth, these silent forms
impatiently take shape each morning.
--
Born in packs of six or ten
lacking symbols, lacking lang-
uage, far away from any walls,
we foxes hold Enkidu's hands
and tell him not to fear the city,
teach him tricks to void deliri-
um we know his species plans
to starve his howl and to steer him.
Enkidu look, beyond these woods
is where your destiny will put
you. Look, our son, again, beyond
their life of kilns, of 'wrong' and 'should,'
look further past these days of yours,
these days subservient to force,
smell and touch your vulpine power
and guile, sabotage the course
of nature which is not your own
so that its end will turn around
and peacefully in perfect sense
come back to our old hunting ground.
Whether or not our skulk remains,
to nourish you, or in your pain,
recall, Enkidu, with certainty,
you were loved—from us you came.