the subjects of the following are all now dead
Of course I wrote sonnets. As a math geek with literary dreams it was inevitable. One of my first was, I thought, lost in a house fire–actually a firestorm. I remembered the beginning:
A bowl of nuts and raisins on a trunk
a room as wide as any, sliding shoes,
whoever thought that I might be amused
should stop by at the Brunswick where I’m drunk
on all the miles I’ve traveled with my thumb…
The Brunswick is, or was, a cowboy bar in Toronto, fairly empty in the daytime. They served you two beers at a time. There was a stage and, I think, entertainment that didn’t leave an impression. But all that’s a story. “Thumb” would rhyme with “equilibrium,” but the rest of the poem was, I feared, lost. Then I found it, the whole poem, embedded in another piece of writing that survived in an envelope with a rejection letter. Perhaps it would have been best left lost.
Assymetry
A man stands at a screen door. It is night.
His eyes jerk twice for headlights as they reach
a corner that is just within his sight
that turns towards her. The screen divides his fea-
tures into little squares, a pixeled look,
his stance is leaning forward with his eyes,
his hand goes where his ache is. You could brook
a pun and call him digitalicized.
A love that travels nowhere, everything
ecstatic stops. Stops and starts. The end
recedes from sight, from memory. We bring
our absence with us, like the dead
moon in the room we slept in when
nothing mattered.
Alas
the door sticks
the mailbox wobbles
the spigot on the water jug broke off
I had to change the burnt out back porch light
when I came home
from the hospital
without you