Go, Song

Set myself the task of writing a sonnet a day through December, 2011. Did it. Here--



Go, Song, through This December

after Sir Thomas Wyatt


1

Observe that when I sang into the air
I had no reason, given all the signs,
to doubt that you would, mystically, be there
to hear love’s praises bellowed in the pines
(those that break in the storm, and do not bend).
Love, I insisted from the witness of the bards,
could not fail nor waver, nor–particularly–end.
I hear it now above the neighbors’ yards
scurrying away, turning its ruined, lovely head
to scream some parting mockery. Go, song,
wither thou wilt among the living and the dead,
utter the only truth which lasteth long:
Some are to be by love’s storm rapt and caught
and born deliciously aloft, while others–not.

2

In the photo I was sort of beautiful
in my receding, camera-wary way.
Oh, praise, I would have said, such tangible
readiness for love’s approach, the first blue day
when I was able, willing, could guess what to do.
I never, not even then, expected it to last.
Let me testify in praise of you
that the luster falling off you as you passed,
scented of you, rebounding as I know it did
from your stubborn parting of the sundered air,
hurled me back, of all skepticism rid,
to that moment none a second time should bear,
when all the feast was available for a song,
and on the laden table every dish was wrong.

3

Double Sonnet After the Unsuccessful Date

So your old boyfriend was a slob slut sick drunk
birthday-forgetting, yoga-scorning, running-back-to mama punk
hysterical-sobbing-jag inducing, dumb idle anti-dynamo
vehicular menace, roaring pissed-pants beery boy-o,
a waste of denim, Satan’s first string slam-dunk
who made you miserable and smelled like skunk–
but didn’t I see it coming? Didn’t I know
you’d take a deep breath and sob “I still love him, though.”
Why bother to note that I scrubbed, and combed my hair,
gleaned the Internet for anecdotes, changed my underwear,
reset the scope of expectations for your sake,
kept cognizance of conversation’s give and take.
I’d like to know what a fella has to do to tear
your gaze from the burnout night-cleft of despair,
to help you heed the little twittering I make
to help you keep your sense of scale awake.
He was not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
Drunken stupor is not revery.
I drove here through the shout of traffic stereophonic
expecting something more than gin and tonic.
Yet will you neither for myself nor for my poetry
bring the love that warmed him in his pukes to me.
Maybe one day you’ll mourn your loved, lost comic
and one, hearing, may guess at me. Ironic.
Out my car window now sing I across the darkened land
in measure bitter, in measure cruel and grand
how I offered myself, fairly immaculate, not quite a wreck, a man,
to hear you murmur sadly, “You will never understand.”

4

Go, song, into the frostbitten garden,
murmuring Love and Love over the stricken roses.
Tell the brown bulbs packed so hard in
that spring will thaw them ere this chorus closes.
Tell the judging angels hovering there
at the almost-invisible edge of things
what power allows affection to repair
the silent tongue, drowned road, the broken wings.
Amid the barbs and dry stalks, alone and bent above
the ruined tendrils and the slaughtered bloom
stands yet one insanely murmuring Love and Love,
as though by murmuring of that ruined room
of heat and hope, a spirit might be coaxed at last
into blue moon’s purlieu at the Solstice’s first blast.

5

Let’s get this right.
This is what I pay
for a stroke of satin in the night,
for one act of the play,
for an ambiguous delight?

Not that I complain.
Not, God knows, that I refuse.
Just allow the ambushed brain
an hour or so to muse
on what is lost amid heart’s gain.

Heart testifies it’s worth each drop
of spattered blood, of tumbled wine.
Brain, uncertain, cannot call “Stop!”
until it’s sure what’s murder, and what’s mine.

6

Oh! To be the beautiful barista
behind the dazzling order window
at the 46th Street Dean and Deluca,
at ease, a-grin, strong arms akimbo.
--he that inspires revision of desire–
was it really espresso that we craved?
Whose eyes do brim with ambiguous fire
that can be purifying, set-apart, depraved.
Observe this: what I hope and what I know
are bound in union with a diamond band.
And so, breathless, I ask for cappuccino,
breathless receive the white cup in my hand.
I’ll dare hors d’oeuvres, or even dine, at length,
when after this I’ve gathered up my strength.

7

I had forgotten how the graceful mid-life
sycamores turn Bryant Park into a grove.
It’s December. North Wind’s sharpened knife
divides the rose bush from his tender trove
of pink, the sparrow from her shield of leaves.
There, a brown rat’s scurrying with a treasure,
and in the café the Spanish couples tease
the sudden smiles they’ll lingeringly remember.
The radiant heater grazes my right ear.
This turns out to be enough to make me stay,
to make me write the finish of the year
as though it were a poem begun and ended by a holiday.
Time speaks. I have to hurry onward, though
I’ve half forgotten where I had to go.

8

You must go into one of those shops and spend
a buck or two on scarf or blouse or some
unwearable-by-you expensive odd and end
to prove that, barring incident, you’ll come
to the embrace of arms at journey’s end.
This? The man after my own heart
mentioned it as I did depart.
This? It’s for the beauty who will wait
when I approach the arrivals gate.

But make sure to remember to divest
your shelves of all that cannot be explained
before you totter toward eternal rest
The gloves, the picture frame, the silken vest,
ungiven, mock from the heap of what remained.

9

Permit me before this winter dawn to send
a message to those who wonder what my business is:
blank page. . . . blank page. . . blank page. There is no end
of blank, blank pages, until there is.
Of course it is no occupation for a man.
No good comes of it, not diamond, not treasure found
Perhaps I do remember how it all began.
Perhaps too close to sense the winding-down.
Oh, but those monuments of fulfilled desire,
when new life sprang from the lip of a pen,
between the rose and the knot of fire,
and one was whom he wanted, then.
Listen, the next stroke might be utter night.
Permit me turn my back, and write.

10


I feel like Tennyson interrupting “In Memoriam”
every few pages to tell a Christmas story
where the snow is like the ash of a crematorium
and the bells with their leaden and peremptory
tolling toll out–well, something illimitably sad.
Except I’m not particularly under it at all.
The lights are hung, tree trimmed, the tidings glad.
Still, all that mirth retains its power to appal.
One does not dispute that something is amiss,
though one does not quite venture to define.
One needs to let the loved go with final kiss,
especially now, with festal senses tingling the spine.
You’ll fear the sky is lead, the gaudy tree is dying.
Ring out, wild bells, set the wild echoes flying.

11

Go, Song, tell of the chains that bind us,
broken here, and here, rusted along each link.
Foretell where the probing sun will find us
when day stands on the New Year’s brink.
You were too wise to sing of love in its youth
when vows were swift as streams and any sweet
protestation might be taken for the truth.
Now the zenith and the midnight meet
and no one is sure who has the upper hand,
whether exhaustion or ardor has the victory.
It is, my sweet, a wide and dangerous land
that lies before. I don’t suggest you follow me.
The ripened fruit has broken from the vine.
Go, song, cry “Love!” the thousandth time.

12

The broken instrument,
the interrupted ecstasy
are two birds of this purple night:,
two singers from deep cover.

The lovers’ sadness is that this is not
what they would sing at all.
No gardens enclosed are here,
no love-knots from the rosy lover.

Distraction. Fume and cloud,
the clear road home obscure;
silence at the phone’s ear,
the sure finality unsure.

But for an instant, shattered, overcome, however bent,
the full throat and wisdom, the all-in-all of what we meant.

13

When, falling, you have reached the floor
you think that you have reached the end.
But, companion, beneath the floor
the cables cross and the tunnels bend
and the gray steam like the breath of beasts
awakes in thunder, and you perceive that under
what seemed quite final lie empires more.

When you touch the last white note,
the final key, you think the lordly song must be
vanished then from every throat.
“Down” warble the hard wires and the wood,
“Down” the keys which in silence stay behind
groping through the depths for rhapsody
convincing to the downward plunging mind.

14

Go, song, into the night of many colors,
into the dark where there is no dark
into the tide of love where there are no lovers
but only the wounds by which lovers mark
their passage downward into history.
Oh, how could we have loved so wisely well
and come to this? It is a mystery.
How could we have stood where white stars fell
with our arms open to the yielding sky
and come away with nothing but a song?
Even that shall fade, at last, and die,
under moon too feeble and a night too long.
Hear that? I’ll whistle, and then turn away.
You can smile in your sleep until break of day.

15

Come into the great dome of forgetting,
my sole, my only half-forgotten dear,
where each day is a renewed begetting
and a universe-in-waiting is each year.
It’s well to shake off that which wouldn’t be
and dwell for a while in sky-blue speculation
of all that might have been our empery.
Note, love, it’s but the tiniest damnation
to have loved in truth and been deceived.
Compare that to the Tartarus, blackest, worst,
of sweet promise never having been believed,
of having seen it all descending from the first.
Under the great dome of forgetting, come.
We’ll meet again, wept clean, when night is done.

16

I have mentioned now to friend and foe
in matters related to the heart that I
am easily the simplest soul they know.
No bricked up walls, no skeletons, no sly
bend in corridors which seemed so straight.
This, somehow, did not suit the weather.
Intricacies of this game I’m learning late,
that “no” for “yes” and “soon” for “never”
bear power I was tardy to appreciate.
Let me catch up. Before the moonrise I’ll refuse
what I longed for, twice, and then debate
love’s left and right, down, up, to the morning dews.
Really, I was never very good at this,
trading for mastery one sweet night’s bliss.

17

Regard my wine-red Prius awaiting me
in the café lot, so patient, so eager,
igniting instantly after long neglect, free
with her love despite my criminally meager
grasp of things mechanical. I know
why this strange tenderness, the touch of shame
when I behold her wearing all night’s snow.
Our vision of love is apparently the same:
Let in who can unlock the door.
Wake when the driver is in the mood.
If he presses the pedal, give him more.
Keep secret your workings under the hood,
unless, of course, he lifts the latch, dives in
where all of your fame and fleetness begin.

18

Mother and son sit in the Mountain Java Café
over large chai and red velvet cake,
discussing how to spend a winter day–
incidentally, but quite deliberately–to make
a memory not even what comes next
can quite annihilate. She woos him.
He demurs, unfolds, radiant now, then vexed,
relaxing finally back into the dim
sweet opening of everything, when they
were mom and me, and wide smiles
never left their mouths. If I could change today
I’d be a grown man in half spent December
sitting with his mother over tea and cakes,
following gladly every tangent that she takes.

19

Your face is a map of Moses’ Sinai:
much wandering, little coming to rest,
beauty and exhaustion, ply on ply
upon the pathways of the wilderness.
I think when morning comes the tender light
will pour like gold into the lines, like rain caress
those riven human furrows. It was right–
if one doubted– for me to spend the winter night
in embrace, if not quite familiar, then
comfortable sufficiently for a song.
You left me once. We are observant men.
You must anticipate my leaving before long.
Love is not as timeless as I thought.
You have grown old, and I have not.

20

When he sat down in the vacant spot
I heard what my sour Muse would have sung,
“Despite what you’re thinking, he would not
be beautiful except that he is young.
He’d not be witty except that he’s tall,
nor gentle but for the lashes of those eyes.
He’d scarcely have a quality at all
had he not taken us by surprise.”
Be that so, I move to give him room;
he shifts to fill the sudden space,
one thing upon the other, so that soon
we are–how shall I say it?– face to face.
Let the Muse remember what I was writing then.
Praise Venus, unfinished opus, misplaced pen.

21

I will not hear you praised by anybody.
Even the innocent stares as you glide by
are the kind of infidelity
from which a weaker heart than mine might die.
Yet I know you slay the casual eye
and swagger through their boyish revery
like some figure out of third rate poetry
whom maturity cuts off, but will not die.
It does no good to sneer that all your worth
is beauty, for you know how beauty
is my one weakness on this rolling earth,
my paradise, my prison, my infirmary.
I’ve watched men in such a wild deep drown.
I beat the waves, breathe deep, kick for solid ground.

22

The cold of my feet this winter morning
extend a harsh and timely warning:
Three fluffed cats will not forever serve
to keep you waking warm. Don’t you deserve
what every other person that you know
had since the winds of lust began to blow?
Find you a lover and find him now.
Rejoice to be both the furrow and the plow.
Love like a youth and hold it, mount it.
Love like a man and not talk about it.
Versatility should make it easier than it’s been.
No matter. Open the door, the window. Let it in.
Before full winter some red remnant save.
Let the great bear, fattened, come into the cave.

23

The Egyptians in their dark Book of the Dead
cry “I am pure!” before the demon of the pit,
so that even if sin bears down like lead
they might not, by this witness, die of it.
So under your window crying “I am pure!”
I start the dogs and wake the neighborhood,
of all things earthly, of one thing sure,
that I have fucked us back into the good.
Kissing sweetly, holy in embrace,
though seeming in besweated ecstasy,
I’m thinking of spirit in a holy place.
Learn what other realms of love can be.
They who with malice to my window stole
found me entwined with fire and soul.

24

I set down my book and realize I know more
about the goings-on in golden Mycanae
than about the lovely couple right next door.
The fault is no more mine than it should be:
one family laments in rhythmic throe,
the other hangs their Christmas lights
and smiles, but is difficult to know–
on one side incremental calamity, which delights
to the exact degree that is appals,
on the other, half nods, the blushful “never mind”
in suburban murmur with its dying falls,
rejoicing as it shuts the kitchen door behind.
My neighbors learn from the jabbering brood of Atreus
to let silence justify, to let circumspection bless.

25

The moon is gone. The at-home stars stand bright.
It is Christmas and the streets are empty.
I am missing my mother tonight.
I have lifted from the shelf the three
remaining Santa mugs that she would make
hot chocolate for. Now, tonight, no more.
I am a little melancholy for her sake.
I would hold the stupid mugs and let her pour.
I would do as we did, whatever it was.
I would dwell in one place and tether my heart
to a path, a curving arc, as the white moon does,
to change in brightness but never depart.
I pull the Irish whiskey into reach
I pour three times, a little into each.

26

St. Stephen’s Day

So I’m happy right now over nothing,
over the one-time-lovely music in the coffee shop,
over the varying glint of cold sun from the ring
of water in the tossed-off beer can’s top.
Don’t try to ask me what it’s all about.
I’m happy even lacking what I’ve told God
incessantly I can’t be happy, ever, without.
To one with my world view, it’s very odd:
as if some gentle winter Eros shot
one with a dart of animal contentment,
not caring what is well and what is not.
This is not exactly how one meant
to spend the day after the letting of the light,
having desired too much to come out right.

27

Someone should investigate the interplay
between “I love” and “I endure.”
No matter what the airy poets say,
even true love’s tenure is never sure.
On Christmas I did not return your call.
and bade you not to over-analyze.
The next day you were sighted at the mall
loading up on sale goods not my size.
Oh, I know we do not love the less
for a moment’s cruelty, a sudden veer
into some gratuitous unkindness.
It’s just that I hear the raven pinions near,
winged time in its forever onward flight,
and the first moment after noon is night.

28

Yes, I thought that quoting sly John Donne
would make my shaky case the stronger,
and even after all my song was done
your heart could sing of it a little longer.
Of course I lean on it too much, this verse
I spent my spendthrift youth subjecting,
cages, brothels, citadels, or worse
by the rivers of my vanity erecting.
There’s time for champagne and a sparkling waltz
before the tragic drumbeat starts again.
I was vain and vicious, sometimes, never false.
I was a man in the wide strange field of men.
So few nights now till our year does end.
So few words to dissemble lover, brother, friend.

29

The many-branched oak in the church yard
is singly more complex than any human thing,
its twists of twig, ravines of bark, the hard
shadows of its undersides, the bruise of wings
of birds of passage, sheltering, then gone.
We say for convenience, “The tree is bare,”
allowing the illusion of simplicity along
the ragged, riven, woven thoroughfare.
Beneath, a white tree burrows down into the black,
a perfect negative, redefining complexity,
watchful and covert, so slow in its attack
you think all’s still in church yard and with tree.
Speak first of playtime in the shade. Then draw back.
Think of ghost root going downward. Think of me.

30

Before the disintegrating moon has gone,
before uncertain blue can grow to power
sufficient to provoke another dawn,
before the timeless dark becomes the pointed hour,
I plant my feet and sing a little song to you.
Go, Song, I tell it, among the faltering declarations
and ambitions gone awry, amid the gestures askew,
the well-meant misdeeds in their crowded nation,
go far enough from me to witness what I meant
when your face first seemed to me love’s face
and all the stones were chocolate and the wind was bent.
We have nearly spent our lives recovering the place
we started from, me with a white rose in my hand,
our way aflame before us in the sunlit land.

31

Midwinter, as some slow poets still believe,
a purple anemone– a windflower- has come,
night-colored and defiant, New Year’s Eve.
It is a sign of. . . something. . . and for. . . someone.
At this most credulous of hours I believe
it is fair omen, and for me.
But of what and what consequence I leave
to the glassy angels in the Christmas tree
to know, and my suspicious heart to guess.
Bloom of heart’s purple, most unlikely flower,
welcome you are to warn, or be, or bless,
for whatever mission you fulfill this curious hour.
I’d cup my hand around you until spring.
I listen. Tell me what onward thing to sing.