Lunar Halo - sonnets

SONNETS

In the year 2000, HBO introduced a series called G-string divas, a showcase for strippers meant to supplement their Real Sex and Sexbytes lineup. Some marketing guru evidently thought it would be a good idea to promote their new show by holding a sonnet contest. So not having anything better to do, I wrote the following Shakespearian Sonnet:

1. Distinctive beauty lingers in your walk—
an elegant grace that glides and beguiles.
Your movements speak volumes; your gestures talk,
“Come hither, come here, succumb to my wiles.”

Entranced I stagger unsure of my feet
when logic’s Hermes (Doubt) taps on my shoulder.
“Beauty’s allure and charm only seem sweet
what lies beneath is most certainly colder.

Remember the cloud, that nebulous pet
that tempted then left poor Ixion cursed.
Your monstrous spawn instead shall be regret.”
My head spins round toward you, thinking the worst.

But one sidelong glance, one soul searing gaze
dissolves my doubts into logical haze.

It was chosen as a finalist featured on the HBO website for a couple months, but I did not win the grand prize of a trip to New York to have dinner and attend an Opera with a stripper. Although I believe I had already won a larger prize, namely that of knowing that I loved form poetry and it loved me.

That being said, somewhere over sonnet #135 I went to this über draconian poetry forum, where there was this dude reaming out people who didn't write in proper meter. I thought he was a jerk about it (actually I thought he was an embittered university professor somewhere in the deep south who thought he should be teaching at Dartmouth or something. The funny thing was, I was interested enough to find out there actually was an english professor by that name at a rinky-dink university in Georgia. What can I say, having graduated from a rinky-dink university in North Dakota, I know the type.) but it still motivated me enough to get a couple books on meter and start writing in ye' olde iambic. In going back and trying to edit past sonnets, I found out I tended a half iambic, half anapestic tetrameter or even triple dactylic with a catalexis (especially in Petrachian sonnets for some reason). The first sonnet above is actually reworked to iambic, with the exception of the line five which makes sense and is actually quite clever(I think) in context. I'll try to label any past sonnets that are merely 10 syllable in random meter as decasyllabic, until I have time (read if ever) to rework everything. Here's a freshly written iambic sonnet, lest my scansion be faulty.

The Crows of Tokyo
for Kazuhiro Ikegami

An angry flurry of jet feathered wings—
turbulent heirs bourne by a wind divine
bristle atop gates of neglected shrines
casting darkness of cherry blossom spring.
Their jaundiced beaks, with caustic barking sing
tales of ancestral roost amongst the pines
before the curse of crowded power lines
and what scavenged tidbits man’s excess brings.

Their Tengu* tricks, once great cannot transform
themselves let alone tunneled eyes held fast
more busy** with career than wisdom’s art.

Above the bustling haste of crosswalk swarm
the soot black ghosts of Edo’s fiery past,
grieving, watch death indwell their children’s heart.

* Bird-like Japanese goblins. Allegedly, they were the reborn spirits of overly proud warriors that could take the form of crow or man.
** In the original kanji isogashii, the Japanese word for busy literally meant “death in the heart”, The kanji has since been changed.

When I attended Duquesne University, I had the pleasure of meeting several Japanese students. When I visited a girlfriend in Japan a few years later, Ikegami-san picked me up at Narita airport and showed me around Tokyo for a day before I went to Hiroshima. One of the places we went was a natural history museum (the one that looks like it's on stilts or legs). Anyway, Kazuhiro lingered a noticeably long time at the fire-bombing of Edo display, which as an American prone to guilty tendencies made me a bit uncomfortable. The poem itself deals with an interesting (I thought) conceit. Since there are tons of crows in Tokyo, and crows used to be associated with Tengu who are the returned spirits of proud warriors, why not assume, for the sake of trying to be cool, that the crows are returned angry spirits from Japanese killed during World War II watching over their children and not happy with some of the implications of a more westernized culture. When I finished the sonnet it reminded me of that day in the museum and that I still owed Kazuhiro some money.

137. In Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delight
fantastical beasts, sleek and fat, abound
around a fountain spire. The twisted ground
repels the sky as black winged birds take flight.
Within the heart of a transeptal grove,
beside the tree that bears darkness and light,
a pair of fair-skinned reposers invite
their creator to teach them of his love.

But at God’s feet a stronger sermon speaks
from harmless frogs and rats, whose tortured squeeks
go unnoticed in paradise. For they are spawn
and pest who need not sin to suffer beak
and fang in Eden born of Babylon.
They grieve...they die, as god and man look on.

Bladder Pods

The Golden Banner snaps on spring masts lean.
The Monkshood nods nearby, immersed in prayer.
The Stork’s bill wades through shoals of shallow green.
And Bladder Pods…um Bladder Pods…well they’re

equipped quite simply with bladders and pods,
a practical name spared those mythic gods
whose gardens grew from tales of heroes slain –
Adonis’ blood and every slaughtered Dane

imbuing Hyacinth and Pasque. What shame
or lesser beauty haunts this flower born
to bathos, while more flowery words adorn
those Bladder Pods by any other name.

Yet, even with a name so ponderous,
it’s likely kinder that what they call us.