The Future

At what point did the present stop
Being present and become the future?

I wake and I am no longer secure
In the bedclothes as I’ve always been.

Nothing threatens, but there is nothing
I know I can safely rely on either.

Was it just another tick of the clock?
The one too many? The fatal one?

Is it only what I’ve lost, beckoning,
Being ignored, rescinding sanctions

Of such long standing I’ve forgotten
How crucial they were to my senses?

Time? Or self? No, what I now fear
Is the two become the same thing -- 

A last fling, a dance that whirls me from
My partner’s arms into dimming air.

Kite

 

What is not about this day?

A blown tangle of string,

White paper, bowed

Cross of wood dangling

By its tail from a tree limb

Outside my office, twisting

Itself into knots, spinning

When the wind drops. It wasn’t

There weeks ago and when I

Pull it down this afternoon

With a broom handle

It won’t be any less there

Than it is here and now.

IF, Sonnet #608

If the end doesn’t end, what then?

This moment is already contingent.

I dare you to count from one to ten,

To ignore a found dime, even a cent.

Each moment just comes back to us

Like the wind in the tree’s susurrous.

We’ve never been here before to be?

Yesterday and tomorrow are empty.

If I walk around the block every day

The houses never look the same,

Flowers grow and trees disappear,

The sidewalk means don’t lose your way,

Signs say don’t misremember your name,

But nothing guarantees that I am here.

New, Sonnet #604

Now is perpetually new:

My hands in dishwater soap,

Or two hawks locked in mews

In air that inhales, exhales hope —

Nothing is always out of scale,

Nor is every metaphor stale.

There’s no trick to all of this,

No existential treatise.

A moment is a moment’s kiss

We perpetually miss.

The dishes are clean and dried,

No matter how hard we tried

To ignore them in their dirty sink:

Little that we knew we now think.

Then, Sonnet #603

Then we were what we are not,

Our only vestiges of characters

Who long ago ignored the plot.

Within the high branches of factors,

We’ve continued climbing down,

Never touching a limb we've known,

Except what swiped at our backs.

The undone things one never lacks.

Some like to remember, some forget

Intentionally: “Those I never met.”

If and then! We cannot choose which;

If we don’t unblindingly recall,

Then it just becomes a mental itch —

Then after the present’s fall.

Photograph by the author.

Before

It is all before, which is all

That’s left. Thinking hits a wall

When it confronts what’s to come,

Unknown numbers, null in sum.

A chimera slips into the room

Then disappears into its womb.

We knew it by its straightened tail,

But never glimpsed its toothless

Maw — nor heard its lonely wail.

Leave before? No, it is ruthless,

Determined to wait — patient

As a tomb — beckoned and ancient.

This

I turn away from this —

The moment I won’t miss —

Bowed beneath the aegis

Of the blood's next beat,

Which will never repeat.

Every blink is a defeat.

Hour

For Lucien Stryk

A strange word — an our

And a silent H that lours

Over us, a hidden power

Giving us us and taking

Us away — asleep — awakening.

Rock

Even the soft are hard,

The boulder or the shard;

The pebble or stone, all scarred

With the stylus and the cloth

And the wings of the moth.

Still up the mountains thrust

Into skies of water and dust,

Then crumble at last to sand,

Until the flatness of the land

Betrays no fleck of bone,

Nor relic of brick or stone,

And no one left to be alone.

Clock

I own a clock that can’t tell time —

Acts like an unruly street mime.

Not only does it refuse to chime

At any quarter of or on the hour,

It always runs faster or slower

Than time itself, and often backwards.

Its hands clap out nonsense words —

There are no numbers on its face.

I turn a ring to change its pace,

As though duration is relative.

Its works know no imperative,

Not like an hourglass, but a sieve. 

Music in Time, Terzata #33

Music in time: evanescent,

Humming ghosts of tempo,

Neither past nor present,

Equally fast and slow,

Epitomes of entropy.

Violins sing, horns blow

A memory of melody,

A broken string on a bow,

One chord of a threnody.

Staffs roll row on row

In their staccato descent,

A momentless flow

Of tones, incandescent.

Free Curve to the Point - Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves (Vasily Kandinsky), Sonnet #576

 

Now? Everything points to the now point.

There are no revelations in the joint

But what the curvatures of time anoint

Like ten fingers playing here’s the steeple

When inside there are no little people.

It is a lovely world after all,

When simple, not straight, no awkward bending

Of air, just the eagles’ mad descending,

And the cringing voles’ mute, terrified ball.

Then? A word for time with twined intention —

Then I was and what will I be by then?

Two words (not three) for all of duration

Lead us through the revolutions of arc,

Freely to the point of the question mark.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase at Amazon. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

The Sheltered Path (Claude Monet), Sonnet #538

The old man plods toward senescence

On the sheltered path of his thought.

He thinks only what he can sense,

Senses only what he's been taught.

The trees on the path were planted

Decades ago as a windbreak.

Their trunks have been slightly canted

By dumb and insistent breezes.

Always more asleep than awake,

He follows that path, coughs, wheezes,

And nothing much occurs to him

He hasn’t sensed a thousand times.

Revelation would be a whim

Of these trees, these rustling chimes.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

 

Stone Henge (Thomas Hearne), Sonnet #477

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:
My Human Disguise.






What confronts us always hurts us,

Duration that doesn’t endure —

An articulate susurrus

In language absolutely pure

Of meaning, yet the understood

Plucking of a stringless oud.

These settling stones are no older

Than my standing here among them,

Though I will sooner grow colder —

The builders having meant “amen.”

I said “hurt” — I don’t know what kind.

The muscles clench and doubts impinge

On leanings and knowns of the mind.

It’s not a stone but a time henge.