Five Sonnets

EXPLODED VIEW

I no longer know what it is to love and be loved.
It used to mean weakening and being weakened
By one through subtle extractions from the herd.
The weaker, the better for fealty. Meat is meat
Rendered to a bone willingness for surrender—
No idol in the alchemy of occurrence to declare.
Patience lets you wander in your lead leading me
To the place duplicities, enshrined in you, disperse
In ways that may or may not be your own, where
I unmake your plangent desire to penetrate mine—
You act enchanted by the sound of your own voice,
I am love come to destroy history with a callithump.
Every death an exercise in affection on the body—
We’ve passed through so many on our way to you.

UTTER THINGS HIDDEN

What does fog think about eagles?
Eyes, far with trials old as earth,
Will ends and aims to consecrate
A face loved for all a face is worth.
Blurred out with nothing left to see,
The world, everywhere at once,
Strains against what has never been
Taken apart without diminishments
And draws a sequence in the yields.
Obscurations index illuminations 
Complete but unmade by silence
And sound, appearing, disappearing,
In stops and starts to make way
Three times around the local star.

EVERYTHING YOU DO IS A BALLOON

Some mischief still in the joy I suffer through song
Drawn from a ghost box roving across frequencies.
When you can stop, you don’t want to, and when
You do, you can’t. I tried to say what I saw, but
I didn’t know how, so I said what felt true, even
If no one else could understand—you can tell me
How you came to tell certain of your stories, but
No one has yet been able to tell me how to tell mine,
Not even me. Moments in a field of presence mist.
Your eyes, lost in distant waves rise and fall in search
Of an image to hang on the smell of a corpse rotting
In the sun, potential energy patient with release
At this scale, the loneliness of the soul is generic,
Time runs backwards, the universe comes to a halt.

Francis Picabia, Paroxysm of Pain, 1915. Ink and metallic paint on cardboard. National Gallery of Canada.

Francis Picabia, Untitled (Espagnole et agneau de l’apocalypse [Spanish Woman and Lamb of the Apocalypse]), 1927-1928. Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper. Artsy.

AURA EXTORTION

People who keep saying odds remain the same
Are only a beginning. The day is breaking.
Spring accents percuss across time destroyed.
Every story, a borrowed story, mincing about.
My make of sense is I’m glad it won’t go well.
Besides, we’re free to come out from hiding
Now, I buried Joseph in a bag upside down
Facing the front of the house. Frontiers add
An absurd glory to the partial. Driving helps
Me tease out the abstractions tabled by grief.
Care is only care recalled. Ancient wisdom
Sifts through private trivia in order to keep
Time with time closing in on the craftwork
Where there’s no arriving and staying whole.

A STRANGER’S HOUSE

Let me wish you a pink night. Let me climb the glide
Of stairs when our best has been said and done.
Warned you are what you worship and told your body
Is your temple—so far, I am a way of being lost.
And if the wind were a muraled interior rushing
With pernicious scenes of war, death would set fire
To the cavalcade for absorption by those who gathered
In the wind to sing against the din of wheat outside.
There’s no new ground or undertow in the sky above
The field to recall—this darkness in my head is real. 
Thrumming through the dented pages to find a guy
Rope to calm me down, it becomes clear a burnt match
Donning a pearl festoon can do but little to turn away
From an eternity trembling to raise hell across the horizon.

Francis Picabia, Ideal, 1915. Ink, graphite, and cut-and-pasted painted and printed papers on paperboard. Khan Academy.