Domestic Sonnet III
Curating The Poetry Section at Eagle Harbor Bookstore
Last night under the wolf moon
you set out the best of intentions,
tying thread around a thinning wrist
to remember—though you forget.
All night I wrestled alligators
in my dreams, cursing coyotes
howling in the half dawn light.
The ferry sounding its horn
carrying commuters away.
A domestic migration.
Today I curate poetry
at Eagle Harbor Book Company.
Perhaps O’Hara, Merwin,
Gilbert, and Olds.
MERU
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day bring round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.
W.B. YEATS
Thank you for your poem. It put me in mind of Yeats's MERU which has been on my mind these days, so I'm not sure if the connection is appropriate or legitimate. There's a gospel song I learned from a wonderfully cynical friend, now fairly long gone, which he sang--we were driving somewhere many, many years ago--with magnificently naive fervor:
I PUT MY TRUST IN NOTHING LESS
THAN JESUS' BLOOD
AND RIGHTEOUSNESS
I SHALL NOT SEEK
A SWEETER FRAME
BUT WHOLLY LEAN
ON JESUS' NAME.
Chorus:
ON CHRIST THE SOLID
ROCK I STAND
ALL OTHER GROUND
IS SINKING SAND
ALL OTHER GROUND
IS SINKING SAND.
I think the name of the hymn was SINKING SAND. My late friend, David O. Roberts, who roved Rocky Mountain hot sprngs with his mule Janie, completed to his satisfaction a trilogy he titled CORPS OF DISCOVERY, on the Lewis & Clark self-published on his HOKA-HEY PRESS, individually titled, MANDAN, O THE JOY, and THE RETURN. He said he rewrote page after page until self-assured it was a good as good as Tolstoy, quoted in the epigraph to the whole: "For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men."--Leo Tolstoy [I don't think David intended to ruffle women's feathers. If I'd asked him, he'd probable have insisted Tolstoy's distinction between heroes and men was no endorsement of either.)
I share with you, and Substack, as I always do, what's on my mind. David published THE RETURN, the last volume of CORPS OF DISCOVERY, in 2004. He died a few years later, survived by four children, a son and three daughters, and at least one grandson in Canyon City, Arizona, who I'd hear call him Grandpa whenever I reached him there on the phone.
I like your Domestic Sonnets, G.K. 🤗