And Yet MORE Poetry News!

Guess who's the Spotlight Poet for November 2008 over at well-respected and awesome poetry site The Hypertexts? That's right--yours truly, baby.

Editor Mike Burch has compiled a wonderful, extensive online poetry journal with a strong bent toward the classic and the formal, and I'm honored to have been noticed by him and invited to submit some of my best work. Not only that, but now I can say I've been anthologized with such poetry giants as Richard Moore, X. J. Kennedy, Rhina P. Espaillat, and Scott's all-time poetry hero Jack Butler! So yeah, I'm pretty pleased and proud about the whole thing.

Check out the lovely write-up poet and editor T. Merrill gave me here, along with no fewer than 12 of my sonnets, some of them newly revised and improved. Let me know what you think!

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Diana, Discovered

You're lovely and amazing--in your face
is light unlike the heavens' famous glow,
and in your eyes as in infinite space
sparkle such stars as only angels know;

Your body is a playground of the sense
whose secret spaces offer such delights
as grottoes of the Goddess, under dense
green veils where satyrs dance on summer nights;

And I, an Actaeon, drawn by the sounds
of pipes, the sensuous music of your sigh
creep through the bush and, crouched among my hounds,
steal there the naked glory of your thigh--

When years have passed and all my hunts have ceased,
your beauty still will turn me to a beast.

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Friday Silliness

Oedipus, Oedipus,
Queer as a platypus,
Where do your troubles come from?
"Though I hate to be glib,
I cannot tell a fib--
like everyone else: from my Mum."

You, Oedipus, Oedipus,
went there instead of us,
murdered the murderous sphinx!
"But for hubristic sin,
My reward was a pin
and the loss of my sight--man, it stinks."

Oh Oedipus, Oedipus,
Your birth you were bred to cuss,
For riddling you took the first prize.
"But I'd trade my gold throne
for a life lived alone,
a good book, some good wine, and two eyes."

So, Oedipus, Oedipus,
to quote what you said to us,
what have you learned from your life?
"Just try not to be sad,
and be good to your dad,
and don't love your mom more than your wife."

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Eclogue, of Sorts

Open me up and let what's outside in;
I can contain it. For today I feel
the bound'ry breaking down between what's real
and what's imagined. Yesterday my skin
fit tight; straight-jacketed, all bound and tied
like some madman enclosed by padded walls
I crouched in fear. But now that prison falls
away, and all the things I've left untried
cry out for doing. Let me gather wind
and leaf, grow florid, flowery, immense
with all Nature in my circumference--
abridge perimeters, abolish end.

Today's a day for limitless expanse,
unproven possibility, and dance.

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Workadaydream

Since there's no help, come, let us pay the rent
and bury busy noses in our bills;
sign every check till all the money's spent,
forestall a month or so these mortal ills.

Let neither art nor poetry intrude
to draw attention off important stuff;
there's gas to buy, and medicines, and food,
for which these wages scarcely seem enough.

Now, when all the weeks and days and hours
that make a life are lived but to be sold,
each youthful dream a seed that never flowers,
and possible paths barred by gates of gold--

you might yet turn your pockets out, and find
ahead the roads you thought you'd left behind.

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Pocket Garden

Try this: before you go inside to sit
in air-conditioned quiet, pull one leaf
and stick it in your pocket, like a thief.
Tell no one. Make a mystery of it.

In meetings, secretly caress the veins,
trace sawtooth edges, chlorophyllic flesh,
and surreptitiously inhale the fresh
green scent from fingertips: black earth, new rains.

It's easy to get trapped in what is not
a part of us; separate from the world
outside, and silence what's in us that sings
of sunshine-heated rocks, and fingers curled
around moist leaves. Let's learn what we've forgot:
there have to be connections between things.

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A Djarum Black, After Quite Some Time

The worst thing for you: static crack and hiss,
the orange-white blossom of a magic flame
to ring the rod in ash. It's just the same
as years ago, before it came to this.

Destruction tastes of licorice and clove,
familiar sweetness sitting on my lips
not quite forgotten. Inhalation slips
through sandalwood and memory. I strove

once to eradicate affected vice,
be clean in lung and mind, to mute the buzz
of nerves vibrating with expensive smoke.
But silence played like some forgotten joke,
and now, inspired, I guess I'll pay the price
for getting back to being who I was.

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Epigram

"This can't go on!" the rebel said.
But oh, it could. And so it did.

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on June 27, 2007

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Learning to Say Yes

Just tell them I accept. I'm getting tired
of blowing up balloons that sink like stones.
I'm ready now to loose those trailing strings
and watch their multicolored orbs disperse
to fall, sperm-like, out of a barren sky
toward who knows what airless lack of fruition.

I'm ready to accept, accept it all. I'll take
their golden chains, I'll gladly put them on. I'll wear
quite willingly the yoke, I'll pull the plow until
it sinks, until it wedges in the cracks where lack
of rain has broken, even here, the earth's own skin.
My hooves will throw up clouds of yellow smoke, the dust
made ghostly, powdered, like a broken shell.

I'll put on vestments like a village priest
who can't remember now when he believed,
when God flowed through his brain like liquid light
and haloed all creation through his eyes.
I'll stand up at the altar, say the words;
I'll swing the censer and cough on the scent,
Say prayers, baptize and bless, and listen while
the rain rattles the roof, the windows crack;
inside then, safe, I'll snuggle in my bed
all tired and drunk on sacramental wine.
I'll do it, I accept. Go tell them now.

I'll take it now, I will. I'll take the years,
impotent, yes, but sheltered, weak but safe.
I'll black the stars with ink until no light
can filter through, till all those colored dots
have disappeared. I cannot be accused.

I won't be shamed. I'll sow those borrowed fields
whose crops will feed me better than my own
however bitter they may be to reap.
I'll eat and give my thanks, although the grains
of sand wear down my teeth and make them blunt.

I'll swallow bitter bread and sour wine,
approximating ecstasy for show. I'll raise my voice
until, quavered by age and use, it will not
answer more. And even then I'll make the signs,
and croak the words of near-forgotten prayers
to children, widows, new-deflowered brides,
so strongly no one would ever suspect.
All of it, I accept. It would not do
to give those yet faithful a cause for doubt.

So tell them to prepare it. Let them spin
like hypnotists their gold watch on its chain
before my nose. I'll follow, I'll walk straight
for years--this I can do.
And will.

         I'll track it like the Magi's star
until that day when, palsied at the edge
of all, I miss my step--

and falling,
flailing,
snatch it from their hands.

Originally posted on The Sonnet Project on June 14, 2007

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