[I dreamed I had to find my way from the city where I live now]
I dreamed I had to find my way from the city where I live now
to the place I call my hometown, I had to ride a bike and night
was falling and to make things worse there had been flooding,
there was a flood, why in dreams do streams escape their borders,
why must I backtrack to keep myself from drowning, the alternate path
was dark and then I had to pee, squat on the side of the road among
the cattails and puzzlegrass, and lost my pants in the process, lost them
in the dark, there’d been a flood, I was wandering without pants between
the land of my earliest days and what I now call home, then came a man
in a truck, just my luck a man with a truck, a knife, and a dream, it was
a knife that could cut an ear of corn from its stalk, many ears from many
stalks, he saw that the road was dark, he saw the shadows of stalks
in the moonlight, and then he robbed me of my dream, it became his dream,
and like Lorca in “Rider’s Song” I never made it back to the motherland.
* * * * *
[There is a certain state of grace that is not loving]
There is a certain state of grace that is not loving.
Music, Kurt says, is not a language, though people
say it is. Even poetry, though built from words,
is not a language, the words are the lacy gown,
the something else is the bride who can’t be factored
down even to her flesh and bones. I wore my own
white dress, my hair a certain way, and looked into
the mirror to get my smile right and then into my own
eyes, it’s rare to really look, and saw I was making
a fatal mistake, that’s the poem, but went through
with it anyway, that’s the music, spent years in
a graceful detachment, now silence is my lover, it does
not embrace me when I wake, or it does, but its embrace
is neutral, like God, or Switzerland since 1815.
* * * * *
[My literary tastes of late are manic, Hopkins, the complete Grimm’s, just now “The Shoes]
My literary tastes of late are manic, Hopkins, the complete Grimm’s, just now “The Shoes
that were Danced to Pieces,” Chekhov’s notebooks, and on TV a Hitchcock episode about
a murderous ventriloquist and Riabouchinska, the dummy he loves, a woman puppet
who wears a crown, I move from novel to story to Chekhov’s precious but banal ramblings,
“the wife of the engineer Gliebov, who has been killed hunting, was there. She sang a great
deal,” to a current novel, this one I read on a small apparatus with a screen on which one
turns virtual pages, and is most directly about doomed love, that’s the through line of all
my selections, and then my sonnet begins to speak back to me, it is my lone companion, my absinthe drinker, my crowned confidante, why, it asks, do you leap madly from text to text,
and I tell my sonnet of leaping from my own bed to my sister’s when the doctor made a house
call to inject me with a vaccine, bed to bed to escape his serum, “Do you want typhoid fever?”
he shouted, but I leaped, imagining myself royalty who fled the king through a passageway
under my bed where my prince waited in a boat to carry me to the ball where I would dance
holes in my shoes and sing a great deal, then die of typhoid fever, like Gerard Hopkins.
* * * * *
[Poet’s note: “These sonnets are part of a forthcoming collection, Frank: Sonnets. Together, they compose a kind of memoir — not simply a narration of events, but poems that consider the nature of memory, love, addiction, death, and rising (or falling) into selfhood.”