April 2017
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
sontagk@ripon.edu
After 22 wonderful years in Ripon, Wisconsin, I am happy to report a successful move to the Berkshires with my husband and two spaniels. Co-editor with David Graham of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), my recent publications in addition to V-V include SoFloPoJo, Villanelles (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), and Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo). I have work forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review and The Crafty Poet 11 (Terrapin Books). Pantoums are in my DNA, and I am grateful to FF for accepting so many of them.
Ice Waves
Newport State Park, March 2014
Newport State Park, March 2014
They crack and ripple the lake. Blue-gray
slush points, distant polar shelves breaking,
they slow-dance each glacial groan and sway
toward us through pine boughs. Sidetracking
spring, Michigan spawns, drowns in illusions
offshore, white beach-bound shape-shifters
we try to catch like clouds on our cell phones.
A strange marriage of moan and rhythm adrift,
percussive as humpbacks hard to record, ledges
carved by cold claim the core, degrees
of wind chill, thaw, and depth serrate edges.
In this subzero sun zone, marooned ice armies
wed snow brides, their mock-cradle motion
holding us close to the frozen green horizon.
*
Holding us close to the frozen green horizon
fractal hexagons of ice raised to the power
of infinity remedy our low-grade cabin
fever as we follow the Red Trail, an hour
till sunset to navigate one woodland circuit’s
obstacle course. Silver-haired couple aloft
solo through time and space, this thicket’s
all arctic slide and snowfall footing, soft
thwack of branches, heavy-hearted molecules
of sand crystals submerged. Each cruel mid-March
prediction for Door County’s peninsula ridicules
April showers. May flowers bring farfetched
equations even in June. Hoping instead
for luckier sums we subtract ourselves to bed.
*
For luckier sums we subtract ourselves to bed
numb, the only guests in this Bates-like motel
all weekend, off-season tourists, blues shed,
fish-fry voices pitched to the frequency of whale
song, a Friday night duet of blubbery homebodies
who resume midlife comfort zones, warm additions
of arms, wild divisions of legs, geometry’s
transverse of elbows and knees, lovely traditions
at multiple angles of contact. Still married
we carry the tune of the ice machine next door
home with us, for good measure feed the orchid
four more cubes, wake to the first of four
blooms on the sill, news of an airliner down
over Malaysian waters, its trajectory unknown.
*
Over Malaysian waters a jet’s trajectory unknown,
shockwaves go viral, spread worldwide grief
with each cold click of the key or remote, moan
of family members on camera, diminished belief
in miracles. At impossible depths a black box
sinks, sends sonar pings of receding certainty
from one salty sea into another. No mission unlocks
any opaque technology, no country claims mystery
solved. Search planes, divers, remains, wreckage,
conspiracy theories throw off course our daily screen-
time and vocabulary. Under the radar no breakage
big enough floats to the surface, no tide mean
enough washes bodies ashore. On display,
the ocean cracks and ripples blue-gray.
(First sonnet published in Soundings: Door County in Poetry, Caravaggio Press 2015)
© 2017 Kate Sontag
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