Dan Schneider's Omnisonnets

A Non-Commercial Decade Of Dominance!

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Poems from Omnisonnets: Kiss Stevens On Safari The Passings The Rape Of Mary You Are All Desire

Poems from Omnisonnets 2: Donald Blumeau In The Unicycle Poem Judge Roy Bean Promulgates Justice In Langtry, Texas- 1882 Midnight At A White Castle In Bloomington, Minnesota Triceratops Herd Running Viva Brontosaurus!

Poems from Omnisonnets 3: George Schneider Plays Handball- 1933 In Love Say Hey Psalm Shonisaurs Drying.... Vincent Price In The Drapery Folds

Poems from Omnisonnets 4: American Polyphemus Gibson And Koufax Leda Genomica Siamese Reflection The Bang Of The Paper On A Screen Door's Morning The Measuring

Poems from Omnisonnets 5: Another Life Beauty Bare Death Of A Spider Frankenstein Manque' On Milton Tallulah Bankhead To Death Where Ignorant Armies Clash Why Are Missing Links Missing?

Poems From Omnisonnets 6: Chia Schneider. Alone. Death From Above Falstaff On The Pot Theory: The Game When Moschops Was Hungry

Poems from American Sonnets: AS 13 AS49 AS72 AS110 AS128 AS142

Poems from Holy Sonnets: HS1 HS2 HS3 HS4 HS5 HS6 HS29 HS38 HS40 HS47

KISS

In 1914 Bela Kiss ran to the War,
as if apprentice to a rewarding master,
leaving within his domain two dozen steel drums
to bloom garrotted murder sealed tightly within.

Two years later, when needing stored oil supplies,
the army came to Czinkota to claim his horde,
then recoiled, under crusts of war-hard horror,
at the pickled remains that they had uncovered.

But Bela Kiss was dead, had been killed in the proud
service of an Empire, so what could be done?,
until spied in Budapest, then New York City,

by people who would lose him, again and again,
in a land where cruelty induces laughter,
disappeared, one among an American crowd.

STEVENS ON SAFARI

It can not ever change. What once was there
is still there because it will not be changed,
but something is changing. A feel for change
can be attained- yet not through change itself,

but rather without- through a change in view;
this pain beyond logic just rearranged,
like a leopard sneaking up into range,
of a young gazelle in ignorant health-

then the chase begins, the break from all things
   thought as commonplace, yet hoped for as rare,
   in a dutied life subsumed in a blue
   besides color, or its recognition:

from a bower a glower, and the cat brings
forth the death of youth, this love of clear vision!

THE PASSINGS

There are years to go before the last perfect day
on Earth. Then the sun will begin to swell, and life
will cease, shorelines will retreat as oceans boil,
and all will glow a barren red and airless gray.

By then I will be shadow, long dead. Now, I live
amid joys and sorrows, with the love of a girl
in a backseat, behind her mommy and daddy,
as they pilgrim to a motel in New Hampshire,

blowing kisses out her window to teenage strays,
drunk in a sportscar, honking and cursing at her
family squareback's pace, as they are full on passing,
as if they are ready to face eternal sleep,

as they leave her family behind on the highway,
that is endless, and endless, and everything.

THE RAPE OF MARY

This void is that she could never swallow:
when behind the ravening marketplace,
that pit of commerce, the alley growing
darker with each step, where that day expunged

the moment it happened- removed her space-
from within. She encompassed its shudder,
or so she dreamt. She thought, then, tomorrow
she could begin to love this difference plunged

beyond her Lord. But that feral smile,
his mortal smells filled the Holy Mother
hung on a fiction that could never be:

the virgin's delight; the rapist plowing
past her desire to be defiled-
O to be fucked so immaculately!

YOU ARE ALL DESIRE

My needs, they fall away from me. (Dull flesh-
can it convince itself?) They are: oxygen-
to flame each breath; sources of food and water-
to quell the instinctual ravening
brought by you; sources of clothing and shelter-
to protect my body from the world's duress.

My needs, they fall away from me. Not you,
my love, for you are verging on somethingness,
like the full beats of my growing heart, which falls
likewise itself, in infinite crashes
into conflagrations which are only all
that keeps my sonnetry in this small purview

which falls from me to you. Should you inquire:
You are not a need. You are all desire.

DONALD BLUMEAU IN THE UNICYCLE POEM

Words of former import cannot impel
you. Who would ride high upon my carriage
is one that has style, as well as balls.
All depends on the swift pivot of flesh
with steel, of rubber with a single wheel,
as you who have ridden well know. The urge,
no matter how hard, nor often, you fall,
will not allow your desire its crash
to futility, for failure has worth-
whether you know it. Donalid, it is you
who move this poem. Long after I am earth-
eaten iron, all that was your effort
will be nothing more than I am, as you
become what it was that you always sought.

JUDGE ROY BEAN PROMULGATES JUSTICE IN LANGTRY, TEXAS- 1882

You,
Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales,
guilty
of murder,
I sentence you to death by hanging. In a few weeks
snows will flee, ice will melt, all nature will be glad,
Jose. But you
shall not see summer.
You shall hang from a tree's
branch until your corpse draws vultures from its reek
and naught remains but the bare bones of such
a cold-blooded, copper-colored, blood-
thirsty, throat-cutting, chili-
fed, sheep-herding son-of-a-bitch!

MIDNIGHT AT A WHITE CASTLE IN BLOOMINGTON, MINNESOTA

The girl recalls 7:37 p.m.,
and its twilit heart that the nighthawks whiled by,
as she presses her nose against the smudgeless glass
to watch them eat. A colder lean in to learning
engages her eyes as the customers glide by
the burgeoning white, that vanishes up close, as
the night loses dominion within the light square
and she drools for a slider, a hunger that stems
from a place that she shares with them: unawareness
undiscovered. The manager sees her prying
gaze, and orders the child away. So, she leaves
the bushes, till onions recall. It is not fair-
this notion of unawareness that no one grieves
for, or reflects: a boundary which never was.

TRICERATOPS HERD RUNNING
*a trisonnet for Chris Cornell

It cares not what will name these trodden plants
in later times. This now is all there is.
Now, in what will one day be Wyoming,
it rumbles through the steppes with stamping feet;
by the thousands its brown shag littering
the dusty earth. The living sun glowers
over it as it swarms the shaking plains,
and a pack of juvenile T. Rexes-
with time, enemies- now, just meat on horns,
victims of this driving primitive dance,
collective soulless minion of its genes,
this push over hills and trails. For hours
it lasts- so long that no known reflexes
can be branded cause of this dino-swarm.

+ + + +

Skulls enjoy the cold fear heat. It ends them
with a ceaseless rush. It trumpets its claim
with a violent swagger. It turns mid-stream
and heads for the hills where once it began,
as the small primal mammals hide within
their holes in the ground. The living cyclone
rages, for nothing will quell its demands
as it sunders the sod within these lands
it renders first fear. A T. Rex suspends
its own hunt for life, by another's death,
it smells its others' end in every breath
it takes. It retreats, abandons the heath
for the moment- then its eyes snag a chill:
Rhinosaur sees it from beneath its frill!

+ + + +

The young Rex waits for the pass of the storm
as the old bull, also, waits for alone
to descend. In the distance goes the horde,
straining itself against emergent I's-
as this- which can only define its meat-
these wars between atoms, clashed bone-to-bone
the beasts war once more, driven by the warm
impulse of blood. Under flesh-riven skies
a poverty of bones sketches defeat
for the callow. Does the cosmos take names
or make note of the slaughter? An old call
summons the bull, red hollowing its horns,
brings it home to the oneness, always all
until it ends. Soon, they all will be dead.

VIVA BRONTOSAURUS!

Fuck Apatosaurus! That deceptive-lizard
moves no boy to grand wonder. But Brontosaurus
does!- the thunder-lizard of film, mythos and dream!
With its fifty foot tail whipping a sonic boom
it called to its mate, and made all comers cower
as it rumbled its mass, cracked its sinuous tail.
How can we fail this great beast? What is wrong with us?
Or they who name it so weakly? Damn cladistics!
When I hear Apatosaurus I want to scream
Viva Brontosaurus! Call plenary power
to bear! Bad nomenclature sticks in the gizzard
when true natures call! Send priority to Hell!-
along with those fools stuck on rules and statistics!:
Take heed as the beast heralds your name's doom! Doom! DOOM!

GEORGE SCHNEIDER PLAYS HANDBALL- 1933

There is no creation I do not feel.

My dad, at sixteen, on a handball court,
hunches to slap the hard rubbery sphere
against the wall. He is not smart enough
to know that he should be miserable.
This lousy place is a Brooklyn schoolyard,
and this time is a luck-forsaken year,
enjoyed by only those few who are tough
enough to forget the moment, but not
the moments, crannying between each crack,
of the black on fist, and those in concrete,
which can only grow. It is for these spots,
that the boys take their aim, that the ball seeks.

There is no feeling I do not create.

IN LOVE

The only word is Love. It is what binds
things more securely than the o and v,
which are bereft without the l and e
to give them structure, if not grand design.
Nothing is permanent, as Love proves this
so, as well the uselessness of Beauty,
without Love to engage it. Can you see
the parallel? Love is just what it is,
as well is Beauty, which mouths the full o,
which sounds like a u (the short vowel sound),
to become part of the structure that grounds
only what matters to those, in the know,
who see what is loosened by loveless minds
unable to ask: Where did Beauty go?

SAY HEY PSALM
1955

There is a beauty no summer can heighten,
nor any winter diminish. It is in
the cheers that rumble around the Polo Grounds,
from last September, and the searing fly ball,
cracked from Wertz’s bat, and the Kid in full flight,
and the crowd caught up in the screamin'-mimi,
of a moment, until he sticks up his glove,
over his head, corrals the ball, in a fall,
echoing through the months, and- maybe- the years,
of silence that is moment, and can only
be, until his spin-and-throw makes all of sound
resume, and thousands swoon, with a newfound love
of seeing. There is another kind of time
where death is unseen, and comes last to the ears.

VINCENT PRICE IN THE DRAPERY FOLDS

An indignant resign resides in the box
that shapes his eyes within the frame of the world
windowed and decorated and fluttering
in the motions of motion you largely see
but choose to ignore: his earlier career
was a banal extravagance into here
where the flesh remembers no time he was not
creepy and old and decaying with silent
eyes that entwined you like the billowing cloth
which frames your gaze away from television
and into the real world or out into it
because all is tragic when one is without
as he in between the cloth and the glass or
the divine chaotics of wish and snowflake.

AMERICAN POLYPHEMUS
7/14/66, Chicago

Corazon Amurao watched, under the bed,
as her eight friends were butchered, by Richard Speck,
this summer night- don't say lambs led to slaughter!

It was here she discovered Odysseus,
again, and the wool of her clothing, which was
no protection. Then, she heard Richard's laughter,

as he strapped on Gloria, no bed of doubts
rocked, above her, underneath it all, the last
first acceptance of the war, she will surmise,

deep with senescence, the fractured undertow,
subserved by silence, hers, and what has increased,

through membranes of being, a longing for seas,

which waits through the neaptide, long after she's ceased,
to measure quiet, the quick of tomorrows.

GIBSON AND KOUFAX

One's heart is a jackal that preys and lunges.
One's eyes two diamonds defining a laser.
This green is where they navigate between us,
who watch, in a time when the country plunges
into what it's becoming. Going faster

is their speed. Here is where "WHAT MIGHT'VE BEEN" is,
when the elders recall men like Satchel Paige,

and "King" Carl Hubbell, alone in their defeats,
and victories, unable to tete-a-tete
against each other, or different men with bats.
Outside, they're beating the Negroes in the streets,
and giving The Jew three numbers from Hell, yet

here two men dominate boys with wood. With rage,
they swing and miss. The past is forever that.

LEDA GENOMICA

That unfractured fastness suddenly seeps:
         the wings without flapped, they bruited pain,
         as if voguing were a talent it lacked,
         for a maximum forum of disdain.

The face of the slight hides the chase within:
         deific proteins surged, recombinant,
         as no lips dripped over unfeathered skin,
         and the crush of the cross-link was not sweet

No tether of flesh entendered itself
                                        as the broken
   woman gathers her mind
   about the cygnet forming, monstrous breed,
   borne of fleet action. Will the child feed,
   in vivo, her need to fuck herself blind?
   Or will it forget the once-disturbed pool?

SIAMESE REFLECTION
5/11/1811-1/17/1874

CHANG BUNKER
1844

I feel the love you make, unto your wife,                  I thought I was loved, then I dreamt you died,
like some passage deep through a planet's core,      and pulled me through the collisions of love,
as my eyes go white, as you go inside,                     the familiar hues of tragedy, come
and the hillock of you shakes hard beside,               to these ruins of the future, I dream,
this quiet earth that has become new life,                 as you sleep more soundly, within its tides,
                               the conundra of which grow more replete,
                               as I close my eyes, and an odor climbs,                                               ENG BUNKER
                               within my mind, and your feet meet my feet,                                                  1874
                               with a coldness, that I cannot define.
Then I do. It is you!- Or is it me?-                          For you are not all things, my brother dead,              I float, as if in a gray soup of isness,
growing into death, yet seeking out more,                merely all that was good. You stood above,             and dream of the suddenly mortal world,
as her breath finds its way over my form,                 the dizzling waver of restlessness                             and its humid skin, we shared as children,
as there comes the beast, unknown to the norm,      that gawked through, the years of the circuses          when we knew everything would just begin,
who do not know the other side of me.                 and shows. I wake alone within one head.                 and that death was just the future’s business.
                                                                                                                    A blood clot, I felt, was what rendered you,
                                                                                                                    done to all touch, as I touch your fingers,
                                                                                                                    and dream of the foundering hulk of blue,
                                                                                                                    bound for my body, content to linger,
                                                                              unifying the quarters of my heart,                               as it spoils, the younger, nicer dream,
                                                                              which connect with yours, now devoid of love,          the one from which our bodies have spilled,
                                                                              and life, sunk low in your still auricles,                        into this world, one hand grabs another,
                                                                              where nothing of me is, and nothing feels,                   as this thought abounds, my silent brother:
                                                                              as if I am, less than your death's last part.                   The dead do not realize. They only seem.

*Addendum: This is a poem that journalist Bill Moyers refused to read &/or acknowledge as great.

THE BANG OF THE PAPER ON A SCREEN DOOR'S MORNING

Something once owned avoided the morning,
and took to the trees, and opened them full,
to the emptiness of the grown-up world,
where something was filling, something induced,
by a place, a face, a far-off image,
which struck like a gesture [what is softness?],
and hurt like a mirror [what is therein?],
resolved to the light, its ruthless rising,
which stuck to the patterns of everyday
slanting, among those who beamed, among those
who shivered in the nowhere, which quivered
to the astrophysics of eyes and touch,
warming the waking of Truan Ngoc Linh,
who thinks, Don't worry, I only had hope.

THE MEASURING
*off the Oregon coast

The dark and rising chemistries of blood and salt water and blubber
floats high on the remains of the sperm whale pod,
devastated by the swift and brutal machinations of the killer whale
pack; minutes ago
a rosette of thirteen sperms studded the grayness of the sea and sky
with their hard skins, as familial love
huddled them about each other, as the filling swell of the orcas'
presence and persistence furied the ignorant sun
above them all, to a ruthless attrition of heat, overhead by star, below
surface by blood, the bellows for oxygen
sprayed twenty, or more, feet over the ocean, the sperm whales' tails
aroused and bashing eddy and swell, flailing impassioned
nothingness, until one dislocates an orca's jaw- at least the suffering
will not be all one-sided!-
as the unmercied mavens of malice heave one of the larger beasts to
its side, intestines bloom and flutter in the forty-five degree tide,
above the madding, and the waste reaches tonnage, serves as
practice for the callow orca calves,
brine-worn end for a dying, helpless mother as its pod breaks hope,
the brief flower of a soon-to-be-forgotten war,
as the unpitying black scan of millions of gathering terns and gulls
abides above the din, the cliff rocks bleachers to an unfolding feast,
as that which survives all but death, is the beautiful torment of nature
feeding their keenness as the sperm whales dive,
and the killers leave a wild communion of intent and opportunity for
the hunger of the reserved and impartial airborne circlers,
augurs of the coming; far to the horizon a more greedy and histrionic
band of flesh dead reckons the taint of ending.

ANOTHER LIFE

An electric wire holds life, like this dawn,
high over the gutter, of the infinite
city, where Jacob Schwarz sees his only Keds,
dangling above him. He cannot get them down,

though he shakes like the dark wing of an unmade
bird, under his bosom, for a wind to blow
him to freedom. He learns, like others, the way

they multiply, and rot, on utility
wires, and that Zebby O'Toole runs the show
on Harmon Street. In a few days they will be

worthless, for the weather, and the sun-blanched white
Jacob mouths vague locutions. His curbside seat
ends any thoughts of what loss is. For his Keds
his head moves 80° in the starsight.

BEAUTY BARE

What Turing knew is that 1 or 2 were more
than mere numbers, beauties, or markers of place,
laying powerless and prone in their own space,
nonexistent till pondered by computers,
organic or not, for the subtle motions
of emotions belonging to them, in shifts
of state. Anyone can relate to the drift
of numerals, from the infinite oceans
of conscious thoughts, where no regions of the heart
can distinguish dyspeptic pepperonis
from insights, that change the worlds we think and see,
or that they create. What Turing knew is that
science is sense made reason, that 1 or 2
are tools, and you are the memories of you.

DEATH OF A SPIDER

Its camber up the ceramic white surface
fails again and again. The sides are too steep
as I imagine it. Its legs giving way
eight times as often until they cannot grace
themselves with an order. This time is to wait
for its strength to feed on its own, as I see
its outline dissipate from the bathtub's slope,
as it tries yet again. And I can relate
to its failure, no matter its own deftness
of being, as it tries again. With each slip
its focus shuts out the world, in relation
to escape. I simply take it in my grip,
wrapped in tissue, till it no longer misses
its life. Its struggle, itself, caked by motion.

                           FRANKENSTEIN MANQUE¢
             "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance-
                                it is the illusion of knowledge."
                                        -Daniel J. Boorstin

What is there to say?- The incorporate things
were building within, as Victor played his hand,
proving the gravery of this newfound land
of science just that. When a creation sings

it is an ecstasy that has too many
forms. Under the shadow of the Jew he saw
his lot, and returned to it- willingly, too!

But his time had no pay. He was bodywise
but poor in his living, or making it more
than himself. When the creature opened its eyes

he saw it was less than the sum of his schemes,
and not the me modeled on his former self,
as any mother has felt, beneath the stealth
of pride boasted- then the return to the dream.

ON MILTON

The idea of the eternal is not
Oracular in nature. Speed is not
inclined to the Divine, but to the thought
muscles which bid at this Poetry brought
to the few who can know, and the masses
who cannot. Witness, as the Life passes
from Light to you, whose Heart attempts to read
words buried like the Vision of the Dead
would do if it was; simply if it was-
not a higher caste is needed to cause
these lines of a Son of Delphic Descent
to impress their way to Disorderment
sought for by Kings, who for lack of it lie,
with both eyes blended in the World's reply.

TALLULAH BANKHEAD TO DEATH
1968

"I fail only myself." She is repeating.
Bereft of an audience, her thought failing
even that Alabama streak. She mutters
words no one recognizes. At least, not near
her they don't. Words like fuck, cunt, and lesbian
ring from nothing, a deeper than mountain need,
purer than the driven slush of her life. Here,
she rises to denounce all casting couch men,
all the poets who worship stasis and fear,
all the whores who deny they are cocksuckers
and bitches. "I really loathe this life, at times-
especially the bastards who see my greed
for living as some sinful thing. The poor, dumb
shits don't see God is empty- pass the bourbon....”

WHERE IGNORANT ARMIES CLASH

Under the winged tantrums of the sun-lovers
they drove, over the forests made detritus,
discordant, and brutal. Each formical slave
fixes its destiny to collective right.
Onward they mill in a blinded willingness,
worn simplified to an ignorance of time,
made null, the colonies revivifying
themselves on an evolutionary love
beyond logic. Impediments rise to fall
before the darkling blinks. Two millionfold ones
which run their worlds, and have a million years, fight,
stored up in their insistent genetic haul,
destroying all that merely flee or succumb,
are what lift their endless beings through the night.

WHY ARE MISSING LINKS MISSING?

Because 5 is not beyond imagining.

The cladists and, their brethren, taxonomists
all suppose species A is at a 0,
species B is at a 10. The break between
the two is the mythical, magical 5,
and plotted between both these extremes, of course,
are all the fossils that have ever been found.
If you are grounded in classification
you will search all your life for that number 5,
while all the 4s and 6s (not to mention
all the 4.ls through 9s, and 5.ls
through 9s) will slide on by, like they did in time,
the natural divide, where untidy truths
lay bare, and number 5 is where it will be.

CHIA SCHNEIDER. ALONE

To me it is you, little kitten at play,
inhabiting this dream. I hear your soft squeak
wake me. Many years from now I will speak
of your broken hip, and the very first day
we saw you at the Humane Society-
both unspayed and with claws. That did not last long
as your black and white face filling up this song,
caring how you played with our feet, constantly,
as we tried ways to sleep, dream of what is now,
when I pick you up and your squeak is no ghost,
thinking of other stray names that came, and how
I chose Chia. If I should say this to you
would centuries cross the darkness, again lost
in your eyes changing me? To me it is you.

DEATH FROM ABOVE

Blue kestrel, you are not so much
Death, as its quick bringer
to the vole. Is it such
as malice, or nature's hunger,

freeing the vole's motionlessness,
in that last subsecond
of unconscious duress,
or does it matter what beckoned?

The fraught beauty of your plumage
shall have to hold its due
inside the winged pillage.
You are gone. A part of me, too,

feels the urge to sink a talon
in what will be not young again.

FALSTAFF ON THE POT

Nor wives nor enemies shall guide me away
from my duties. As liege I know everything
that wanders from here to there, and everywhere
I am loved. Inside, I hurt. What is a clown
but another person's misery? I am
no jester, yet here I sit. Will the young prince
keep me, or view me part of his father's court?
No matter. I turn to the future and see
only good things and prosperity. Ahead
of me people see John, and they call me John-
not Sir. I am one of the masses. Beloved
by all manner of creeds and classes. The day
is here, and I greet it, depleted of me-
and any other bits of humility.

THEORY: THE GAME

Pascal [in a box] rolled the dice one day,
then passed them to Fermat, who decided
not to play. He then palmed the pair of cubes
and started to say…. but decided no
way would be better. Newton, however,
shook with excitement, even as he shook
the dice, and rolled them half-way down the felt,
where Einstein played nothing in his brief smirk
(to Heisenberg surely some sort of scheme)
to knock von Neumann out of the saddle,
and into the game. But, damn! Then Tipler
proved them wrong, and showed Pascal had been right
to pass the dice, because Archimedes' game
was fixed to the last breath of recorded time.

WHEN MOSCHOPS WAS HUNGRY

    it
      ate all that it could;
or rather, all that it should. This beast-
was it reptile or dino or something else?-
                 opened its jaws wide, and then

    ate
        everything upon its plate,
figuratively speaking. Of course, you know
it was a carnivore- an eater of meat; or not?
                 You know, I do not know it

all.
Encyclopediae do. I think
I will open one wide, and pretend it is Moschops
one late Permian afternoon, and tear at what flesh I can-

AMERICAN SONNET 13

Would that War Admiral were less himself,
as the lengths shatter between the two gaits
that define his place behind Seabiscuit,
and the non-winning end he had never felt,
late in his career. 1938
held a bare resemblance to other years,
which held their own, even in their decease,
as the finish line extracts all will to quit.
O, swift coming colt- your image dies in me,
as your eyes feed the wind that comes with defeat,
the stormy gusts of swifter forms passing- wait
before giving it all up to decay.
Nothing can ameliorate such eyes,
save for tomorrow’s: let them come. Let them rise!

AMERICAN SONNET 49

Against his flesh, if ever flesh was him,
the gun is pressed, and inflects his weakness
for mayhem, and all that is his utmost sum,
laid out in bodies, stretched across Texas.
Strangely, this was disturbing some essence
with a resilient pang, a touch of the far
side of being. To him it was presence
which made the man a man, and not the other
way around.
When the sun rose one morning
a gentle part of him clutched at his breast,
but could not best the desire for nothing
which gave him his name, and made him insist
on its fullest use: John Wesley Hardin
crafted strength from where his quick draw began.

AMERICAN SONNET 72

Live it out, Ezra Pound, do not instigate
more eyes to incite what you already are
into some form of martyr. You reprobate,
without a platform!, does any ego bar
you from you? Or does nothing worthy prove
itself virtuous? Are you all that they say
you are- the one whose provocations move
poet after poet to greater display
of themselves? Or is your name already
vanished into parody? Have you a start
for those who have not encountered your steady
verse, laced with the subtlety of a fart
in a church filled end to end- to its girth-
with droners and deaf-mutes? Do you know their worth?

AMERICAN SONNET 110

To hold one’s speech, and to castrate the tongue,
is an act that is given in Bloomington,
Minnesota. Angela has come undone
in her twenty-eighth year of remembering
little as to who she is. And when she does
she is outside herself, yet feels it the truth,
although examination easily shows
self-construction the cause, and not the proof,
of the distortions she feels herself to be.
Then it is over. Like a dream it bends
to that part of herself she lets herself see
in her young son’s eyes. Lonely, he pretends,
as she once did, in a chill sterile place,
imagining the years of his coming face.

AMERICAN SONNET 128

The child wades in an ancient Florida
as his parents watch, swaying in the sun,
until afternoon gives way to hunger,
as the father calls out that swimming is done.
But the child is tickled, and stung over
and over, without uttering a sound,
until his father turns to his mother
and rushes the ocean, with a single bound,
to pull off some jellyfish- cause of the blush-
that have stung his son, who barely mutters
of pain. To him life is sharper in the crush,
as his mother pulls off more of the creatures,
remembering Jacques Cousteau, and his dives
to where hang octopi in warmer tides.

AMERICAN SONNET 142

This Indian dead- a Cheyenne or Sioux?-
bleeds into the earth, providing a feast
for the things crawling around under the boot
of the Buffalo Soldier, finding peace
a thousand miles away from the home
he knew as a child, out in the fields
unrelented by sun, the scarlet womb
which cast him liberty in a green deal
he would not renege on, even if he should,
for he could track rabbits three miles to death,
then walk for a day unlost in the woods.
So the Army was a natural breath,
and his gun a symbol of personal rise
from slave to master in a dead man’s eyes.

HOLY SONNET 1

Death rises and blows. Not with water nor sun
does it surround all that matters. What is rare
is its absence. In a century or two
natural forms decay, unless a sphere
of unity intervenes- a body
of perfection which challenges the gaze
of aesthetes emerging from a darker place.
Imagine the flea’s panic in ungroomed hair,
tossing at night, upon peregrine pillows,
and you will know the black hand, unlicensed fear
which hardens into the familiar, and then
loses itself in worlds askance and askew
from the adamantine world the senses show,
and eyes sifting the shapes of uncertain urns.

La mort souffle en rafales. D'eau ni de soleil
elle n'englobe le solide. Ni ne donne
guère de répit. Un siècle ou deux, et périssent
les formes naturelles, sauf si s'imposait
l'unicité d'un corps sphérique si parfait
que les esthètes éblouis croiraient rêver
en le voyant surgir d'obscures profondeurs.
Imaginez les affres du pou bourlinguant
d'oreiller en traversin sur une tignasse :
vous sentirez la main d'ombre, la peur panique
enkystée au sein du familier, diluée
ensuite par les traverses de mondes torves
loin de l'univers adamantin de nos sens,
quand l'œil disperse les cendres de l'incertain.

HOLY SONNET 2

The spirit resigns. The trees grow higher
than the pain in the knee. What sense is pain?
It just alerts the almost mighty doctor
that the body is its own universe.
A comfort grows. In the mind it exists
as war emblem against the material,
as self and despair enjoy their brief reign
over the mind, which similarly rules
over its things divine and things mundane.
The spirit retains. The light grows greener
through estuaries of broken leaves, which shift
in the wind no spirit knows like the skin
which births those primal things, as desire
wonders:
will love be the last my mind will work?

L'esprit s'abandonne. L'arbre a autre mesure
qu'un mal au genou. À quoi rime la douleur ?
Elle fait savoir au Grand Manipresquetou
que le corps à lui tout seul est un univers.
Rassurant. On pense avoir trouvé l'étendard
du ralliement contre l'ennemi matériel,
dans ce bref règne qui est nôtre, qui unit
désespoir et raison, et qui s'exerce autant
sur ce qu'il a de divin que sur le profane.
L'esprit n'abandonne. Plus vert, le jour s'étale
en estuaires de feuilles brisées au gré
d'un souffle inconnu de l'esprit, il fait membrane
de première mise au monde, alors le désir
se demande
si mon œuvre ultime est l'amour.

HOLY SONNET 3

Sing with your laugh, for I am reminded
of a day when your body was the river
that spun through my veins, split me, and blinded
me to duality. You were my lover,
though you knew it not then. A laugh like yours
is a song that floats through Alpine shadows
that seep through the summer grasses with more
coolness that blooms. Like carnations it grows
a peace which tangles with each inward breath,
the bounty of life at its most undead-
your laugh. Suddenly it is more than a laugh.
It brings me nearer to myself- the choice
of a knife that is brutal, or merely red
in the aftermath refreshness of its voice.

Chante dans ton rire car j'ai le souvenir
d'un jour où ton corps était fleuve qui roulait
dans mes veines, qui m'ouvrait et m'aveuglait
à la dualité. Tu étais mon amour
et tu l'ignorais. Ton rire était chant porté
par l'ombre qui se diffuse sur les alpages
et coule dans les herbes d'été en surcroît
de fraîcheur épanouie. Œillets, il est paix
qui se mêle à chaque souffle qui me pénètre,
récompense de vie au plus loin de la mort,
ton rire. Mais soudain c'est beaucoup plus qu'un rire.
Il me rapproche de moi-même : c'est le choix
brutal d'une lame, rouge tout simplement
dans le regain si rafraîchissant de sa voix.

HOLY SONNET 4

What watches as I hold you, and skim your waist
with my forefinger? Is it smooth, transparent,
as the path from here to the moon? The best
one can hope for is that light is true, not bent
by the gravity of desire, or
a Manhattan morning. Is it Sunday
now? You are naked as your stride. Your hair
fills the empty streets in a spacious way
one cannot describe with words. Very like
that which observes us in slender vision,
inhabits our dreams, even as we deny
it power over us. Is it all a dream,
here in a north Broadway premonition,
that strikes at the waist from between us, and beams?

Quel regard nous tient quand je t'étreins et, d'un doigt,
t'effleure la taille ? Est-il de soie, transparent
comme une échelle de lune ? Le mieux qu'on puisse
espérer c'est qu'il tombe droit, sans s'infléchir
sous l'attraction du désir ou de l'ambiance
d'un matin à Manhattan. Serait-ce déjà
Dimanche ? Sans voile aucun tu vas par les rues.
Ta chevelure investit la ville déserte
d'une indicible omniprésence fort pareille
à celle qui pose un regard léger sur nous,
occupe nos rêves, mais dont nous refusons
la mainmise. Y a-t-il autre chose qu'un rêve
dans cette lumineuse prémonition
de North Broadway qui nous explose à la ceinture ?

HOLY SONNET 5

The little world of the t.v. screen is made
not with wires and electrodes, but within
the mind of those who sit back and decide
pleasure is an option of life, and in
its indifference they grow comfort, for life
is like that, too. The t.v. is not hard
to understand. Its seasons roll on. No strife
occurs when the channels change. It is part
of the natural. The t.v. is a fruit
which opens in a crackling bitterness,
but ripens with its light. Ever on mute
it affects all about with its visual
reach, pushing against unnatural distress,
and inviting a freshness some call the soul.

Le petit monde télévisé n'est pas fait
de câbles et d'électrodes, il est installé
dans la tête de ceux qui se la coulent douce,
ont choisi l'option plaisir et trouvé confort
dans son indifférence. À l'image, d'ailleurs,
de la vie. La télé n'est pas si compliquée
que cela. Elle va de saison en saison.
Les chaînes passent sans anicroche. Tout va
de soi. Acerbe étincelle et puis déhiscence :
le fruit télé mûrit dans sa lumière. Même
sans le son il impose à l'entour son emprise
visuelle, repousse l'affreux cauchemar
et importe une vigueur qu'on dit être l'âme.

HOLY SONNET 6

No healing inures. It only placates
the will and the ideal to grow some more.
      Life’s raw fingers
                                   motion
and summon this love which has to vacate
its original place- that you only saw
      when you lingered
                                    in one
you did not know,
            with a flicker
of Eden’s new
grasp at the dark-smiled earth, which does not want
      of anything quicker
than a new mind to haunt.

Guérir n'est pas aguerrir. Ce n'est qu'apaiser
le vouloir, l'idéal qui pousse à davantage.
    La vie ne met pas
                               de gants
pour intimer l'ordre à l'amour d'évacuer
cet asile premier, seulement aperçu
    lorsque l'on s'attardait
                                    en terre
inconnue, image
             ténue d'Éden
repossédant
la terre au noir sourire, qui n'a d'autre envie
     plus crue
que d'obséder à nouveau.

HOLY SONNET 29

Laughter: again it clashes with my thoughts
of yestertimes, when lightning was merely
your backdrop, and your clothes fell like the snow
in a child’s dream of the past, or nearly
enough to it to agitate the highlands
of my body- which speaks to itself, and lets
listen its morning, breaking through love’s show
of itself, as it grips me firmly, and mans
me to force love from my lips; your body comes
closer to shadow, even as it appears
lighted and firm in its tone and its sum
before me, with the foliage of fire
crisping all senses- like your laughter my ears
or your lips bringing forth my hips’ entire.

HOLY SONNET 38

The man on the bus has eaten it all-
the banana, the grapes, the tomato, too,
in an odd salad made of vegetables
and thought. The girl sits alone with the glue
of what was, and walks the small streets to school,
where no child embraces her, and the swings
are not warm with play, and the day has cooled
with the coming of decades in between.
The man on the bus was white. Now she says
to herself that the school would segregate,
and the walk was full of wandering eyes.
Yet, imagine the girl thought as one of us,
and the fruit just as fruit we can all relate;
then what of the hungry man on the bus?

HOLY SONNET 40
*for Michael D. Petti

Not sonnets are safer! Refuse that word!
No fire is truth. No heart wills its rise
into the poem as it heaves and it spurns
safety for this life- or some sort of prize.

No art makes its love by wresting control
from the mind. To the heart goes the thinking
of thoughts, of loves, and of poetry’s whole
numinous path- often left for the making

by ‘poets’ who are not. Their verse is astray
from what is the real; though they mutter return
in sonnets that somehow lead love away,
into a mass of petty confusion,

where love is not won. If only it could
be that simple, the poetasters would.

HOLY SONNET 47

The body of Autumn Garcia imprints
itself in the mind of a memory left
to wonder of her living, all these years since,
like a seduction unaccustomed, bereft
of touch. Her torso so perfect, her hips
like a dragon’s in that warmest December,
as her flawless face frames ungestured lips
leading down to huge breasts, unencumbered
by the bustier, drawing eyes’ desire
from men who will use her. If given a chance
she will outstrip the predicted sense of her,
to open her legs to more than circumstance,
unlike those women who love the death in men,
named in her posture, set apart by her grin.

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