sonnet of the day

[knovella]

Apparition sonnet


Identities blur in clothing, in keys and phones
In fresh painted cars, in chains and velvet bands,
In voices heard passing in shimmering drones,
And women in black and men with smooth hands.
What type, what lie, what avoiding glance in,
cut away to the leeward side as we pass.
I do not want to see the texture of his skin,
the stubble, the knuckle, the shadow on glass,
How all he is is different from me, from you,
Your camelhair coat, your leather gloves,
How tired I am of everything new.
Under the white sky, nothing I know of
Has recently improved, not in this place.
Even the memories I most distrust, erased.

[rick green]

Well done, knovella. Can you write one every day? Impressive.

[chillicheese]

Thanks Knovella, I especially liked
the stubble, the knuckle, the shadow on glass,

[knovella]

Sonnet for Wednesday, January 11


A lawn party

Soggy cake for the county shire man,
member of the board, bloodletting swine,
his jowls escape the collar, loose but tan,
his manicured finger taps the sweating wine.

A calculus sold for each kid he's sired,
given hayrides and pointed neglect, skinned
their knees for them, whipped them when they tired
anointed them with ash when e'er they sinned

And we the children, we are rich now, slick
and sickened, naked and magic with lust,
short skirts grazing the tumbled thighs, the prick
so low hung it makes nothing to us

to leave these other ones, their kites against the sun,
while we set off killing things for fun.

[knovella]

All that god talk over there brought some of it back to me. Here's today's offering:





A Catholic Memory


I remember the furs, sable, mink, seal,
an army soft, arrayed in muffling rows,
auburn, black, a brown the air could feel
A whole fox, claws intact, it's flat head hung low,
Eyes burning down from someone's neck.
Chanel and Joy, Guerlain choking the myrrh
The air I breath cold yet thick with scent
Something flashing bright from the altar
clapped from the thurible, a gold censer
Father Lavin swinging it from a chain
rung like a silent bell down the center.
black shoes peeking from the green soutane
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
now, and ever shall be, the things I do not know.



edit: had to alter alter to make it altar.

[Digger]

I like this one a lot knovella.

[John Self]

Meant to say, k, I loved A lawn party.

[knovella]

Thanks for the replies. The sonnet for Friday the 13th, though I should have taken luck as my theme perhaps:

In the Garden

Weeping on the limestone path, my son,
In wasp-stung panic, grips his milky arm
The shock of it, the insult to his young
and tender self, and I rise to the alarm
Yet in my clenched heart a pinch of pleasure
At his sore uncalculated cry
And even afterward I treasure
that some odd pull in me is satisfied
At his pinking eyes and judder mouth
The way this hurt brings him straight to me
to correct this injustice, fix this tragedy,
with ice and calm, my hand across his brow.
Yes it hurts to even see the hurt, we say,
peek at the budding welt and look away.

[knovella]

For Saturday, Jan. 14, I give you one inspired by the song Helpless:



My Canada
(homage to Neil Young)

Where a young man drives across a desolate expanse,
His pickup grinding on, and he sings aloud
alone through the wheat fields' swaying dance
Sings this way because there's no one around.
No one ever around on that northern plain
The emptiness is the biggest thing, the unfenced
pastures, stick-built towns in driving rain.
no stoplights, straight through and into the descent,
where people go who are alone already,
Where the green earth is no comfort
and the wind is sharp and steady.
There is no warmth in my Canada sun.
Whole days of silence sometimes, though you sing.
In Canada there is still a place to go for these things.

[John Self]

I like Friday's, knovella (not that I don't like Saturday's...) - particularly the way it closes with a neat click.

[knovella]

Thanks for the encouragement, JS. I'm gonna keep going for a bit. Hope to be back later with something.

[HP]

Knovella - these are good! Keep 'em coming. Are they being written and sloshed up hot off the press as it were, or are they from a collection of work crafted some time ago? Either way, a grand addition to this forum.

[knovella]

Thanks, Honeypotts. Doing my best to write one a day, hot off the keyboard. Today's offering:

End of January Thaw

Too warm for winter's work, too wet to walk
the newer trees and check the saplings' bark
for antler rub. I drive some fencing stakes in clay,
Mend where frost has heaved the posts away.

Morning the wind comes down from Maine, throws
ice-clattering gusts on the windows.
The eddying gales lift dancing swirls of snow
Setting them down where the ground lies low

The barn aches aloud, her gray boards despairing,
Buckled and rough, now she's past repairing.
The short days grant us long nights' sleep,
Time for breathing, dreaming sweet and deep.

The world restored to what it should have been,
The fire burns, the wood is dry, the ground is hard again.

[Digger]

Love the image of the barn K. Excellent.

[knovella]

Whew, fell behind here. Had to do stuff. Today's sonnet variant tells you what. I had trouble cutting this down to size:


Another Wake

I have to go. It's what we do, I said,
The drive down it rains, a bleary Seurat
So unlike Uncle Eddie to be dead.
My father, my father, I can't think about that.

The cousins, clumped like puppies, push at me,
Nudge each other behind the garish flowers,
Uncle Eddie up front, in corpus dilicti,
Proof of death in his paneled bower.

At the house no one eats the cold buffet
but whiskey pours, and beer. The threads unwind.
In a lifetime of death we've learned what not to say.
It's time for tales recited, remembered lines,
embellished, disputed, deflated,
the truth between renegotiated,
an occasional burst of laughter close to keening.
I learned at my mother's how the gathered take the grieving,
how you need a room of people. You float like a raft at sea.
and they carry you in their talking, this rising, falling family.

So we remember Eddie's room of ancient hats,
His fat dog Brutus eating off the plates
His house that smelled of bacon fat,
His eeling spears and blunderbus, the way he spoke Yeats
like a cryptic language you might never decode,
And like Yeats, he walked the curling road.
There was something in him we are not getting to,
We see it here among us, and still it's slipping through.

Things I thought would come clear are yet unfathomed
Though we grasp at them, piecing together the flawed and faded,
Sometimes the wisdom of the fathers seems imagined
But still we try, talking through the waking of the dead.


addendum: I feel bad that this isn't a true sonnet, and I'll try to do better.

[gil]

Not a true sonnet, no, but excellent. Keep it up.

[Wavid]

addendum: I feel bad that this isn't a true sonnet, and I'll try to do better.

Yes, you must.

[John Self]

Cheeky get! Despite not being a true sonnet, this was the best yet knovella. "...this rising, falling family" - wonderful!

[knovella]

Today's offering, for a friend:

The Boarding School Scars

He's still a lad with his tuck box tricks
Laying subtle traps for those who'd nick
His hidden chocs and caramels
His cash, his pens and best pencils
That old imprivate dungeon ran him to ground
Now he lives on thirty acres with a basset hound
Raised by wolves, he was, though they wore ties,
Cannibals, they were, but civilized.
He marked his time and cut himself loose at the end,
Shared no fond memory and kept no old school friend.

[knovella]

For today, a distant memory, and again not quite a sonnet:


Thumbing It, 1979

We think we are skilled at riding our dreams
A class act, two screen stars on a night set,
The yellow lines of highways flow like streams
Across some desert country no one's seen yet.
We stand thumbs out in some town south of Boulder.
Five pass, then a truck pulls hard to the shoulder

He waits, knowing we'll approach, and we do,
Sixteen, full of magnetic inebriation,
Two miles down, I say. Get in then, you two.
Pressed against him, I can feel his agitation.
He's talking, eager, bares his fangs in haste,
His poisonous secretion ready, we are the prey.
We have a plan for this. Stop here, I say,
Thinking of the speed and the falling away.
We hit the ground heavy and fast
and the truck stops and idles, and moves on at last,
the red lights creeping on down the road.
How I remember Colorado.

[knovella]

An Upstate Town

The trees shake as I drive through,
past girls ghostly white, their hair dances
in the wind under shivering branches,
such lithe and bloodless ingenues.

I was here, a summer once.
the year I came unglued
Even then I trusted no one
which was the right thing to do.

Outside a party I lay down in the night
my vampire getting ready for the bite,
he was doing something I could not feel,
the pinch, the moan, the sanguine meal.

[knovella]

Inspired by a true story and Ondaatje:

Kay in Ceylon, 1949

She lay inside the incandescent night
a pale chrysalis wound in yards of white net
as the rats ran across the beams, out of sight,
Between where the walls and open roof met.
The Sinhalese woman slid past the bead-hung door.
Kay thought of her mother who'd walked years before
through whispering rain on the banks of Freiston Shore.
She thought of chalk bread, of fliers and fighters, the lightning of war.
Her husband came in, bone-shattered and tight,
Threw his boots in the corner and landed his flight.

[knovella]

Finally, a proper sonnet, shallow though it is.


I want to take a straw poll on sonnets--what do you think of grammatical inversions for the sake of made rhymes, much of which is done in the 'classic' style? I feel uncomfortable with using them, but maybe that's just some contemporary need for the prosaic intruding unnecessarily.


Anyway, today's:


Nineteen

When all the world was fog and we were wasted
because it didn't matter then what we became
and each day like another, all the same
so narrow in our view, so little tasted

And still it felt like living. We were young.
And day was night, and night was never ending,
For dance and talk and dance then sleep descending
where the first fell and the rest would lie among

like jungle animals returning home to die,
their fragile bones returned to the ground
We would not move and would not make a sound
Losing only time, but still the time went by

They say that youth is wasted on the young;
Is the bee's sting then wasted on the stung?

[chillicheese]

don't know if this counts, it's probably illegal sonnet-wise and it's definitely sketchy but today was the first day this year that I went to and from work in the .....

!! DAYLIGHT !!

Early morning blues lifted
by the light of the sky
All my winter drear shifted
now that spring is nigh.

The dead dark days are over
for another year at least
Now it's safe to dream once more
of summer's baskng heat.

O breathe it in, O soak it up
this luxury is free
heart beats, quick step
Right now it's good to be me.

A treat indeed yet simple pleasure
to travel in daylight for work or leisure.

[wshaw]

Finally, a proper sonnet, shallow though it is.


I want to take a straw poll on sonnets--what do you think of grammatical inversions for the sake of made rhymes, much of which is done in the 'classic' style? I feel uncomfortable with using them, but maybe that's just some contemporary need for the prosaic intruding unnecessarily.



Loved Ninteen, especially the sting at the end. Your straw poll fell a bit flat but personally I loathe grammatical inversions...

[chillicheese]

Grammatically invert away Knovella, your sonnets rock !
This was the best I could manage on the way home tonight...


Noo-Kip

Toss and Turn, the lords of the deep night arena
taunt their subjects while the smiling clock face mocks
the flailing sleeper's failure to break into the house of dreams
Nothing works, not counting sheep, not even counting flocks.

The icy glow of street lamps light the edges of the cell.
Walls close in, ceiling lowers, locking the lid of the chamber.
From this sentence there's no chance of parole,
imprisoned by the inability to slumber.

Snagged on the thorns of indecision,
too bored to stay, too tired to rise,
Another few hours building up tension
to face the next day with raw red eyes.

At last I drift off but what do you reckon ?
The alarm's due to go off in 30 seconds.

[knovella]

Very fine, chilli! And thanks for resurfacing the thread. My sonnet machine crashed and I've had to get the repairman in. A particularly nasty quatrain got caught in the spewer.