Sonnet for Poe

 
So all the nuts are loosening, the bolts
bemoaning matter’s fate. When will the damned
old mansion clatter to the ground? Like colts
that romp the paddock bare, like hacks who jammed
their penny-words in clauses stale for hire,
your frayed-wire thoughts spit sparks but won’t turn off.
Your propositions chomp through time, on fire
like Keats in bed with bloody midnight cough,
a brood mom bitten by her litter, king
gone fishing dreaming that his wound will heal.
Remember when you gave that girl a ring,
the stone as blue as sea, as moods surreal,
as blood before a feeling-giving cut?
Your mind has locked a door that doesn’t shut.





Shamans of the Stars

 
The lovers clench and drift to darkness rich
as gold. They’re somewhere near the glowing chunks
of soul, these shamans of the stars. The pitch
that roils in hell, the Styx awash with hunks
of sinners and mislabeled saints: false tales.
Instead, the painters’ path, the flyways of
the symphonists, the bards’ cells inside whales
can weave reality for those who love.
And where the first half of the journey ends,
expansion then begins, where gods conceived
eternity, the wheel of fire that feeds
itself. Engulfed in light, the couple bends,
then breaks, then mends—ecstatic, rapt, retrieved
by spangled angels bearing wreaths and seeds.