The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll iii

Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Joyce Wilson

	Rain Crow by Stephen Sandy He shakes himself awake; reconnoiters; caws to Tom or Dick or Jerry, of this fox he saw. Taunting his groundlings, manic for applause. Then off he sails trailing crow calls, rau- cous as gale-whipped branches cracking; saurian, raw, brassy cries, hungrier than any appetite he ever had. Long hollow wing bones, maw packed with marrow, lock in position—bright feathers slick with wet light. It is to complain he rides the updraft, tacking. Cruising elohim in a black coat, wings hovering like temple eaves, gives shelter, now here now there, from the rain, moving across parcels of earth below him; the barren plots, the fields bound up in sheaves. Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Sandy
	Spell by Stephen Sandy The letterhead, an architectural shield of Brown’s Hotel in Denver Colorado, the graver’s lashing flourishes now grimed with age; across the center on the dusty field of Crane’s best stock, hand-printed letters stood unwobbling, like masts of fence risen from snow; a gate the wind opened. Brown ink strokes climbed to make a gaunt design I could not read at first. Cyrillic? Saxon? Inch-high ink strokes like little ladders. Bewildering, dark; —spell . . . H E L E N K E L L E R. I feel a rallying hand, the hovering verticals of mind; galactic, stellar wakenings. Taut spell on a field else blank. Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Sandy
	Tenants by Stephen Sandy Madly shaking plaster from rafters two of them scamper, hurl themselves on laths—you can hear they’re two. Shaken or moved together by some ecstatic impulse, they unfurl their two-step, ascending clamor vibrating the floor. This subversive animal order among the studs, joists, frills of plaster—their raucous whirl takes over in stereo; scrapes and thuds waken the tenant & his girl sleeping or trying to sleep amid the din and cosmic twirl of tails, twin rodent dragons in small clouds of dust with cosy strife contending for the pearl of telos, till they fall from lust silent in a double swirl of sleeping squirrel. Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Sandy
	Spitting Images by Tanya Ubiles Duarte We drink our flat pop and wonder how come the degrees of our faces aren’t quite right like the lucent ones we’ve grown to love that know no sudden curve or hanging meat. With make-up blues, with shades of pink and wine, we sprinkle, powder, measure, blend, and yet here there is no magic like when Mami grinds, grates, dashes, pats the candy rice, appears more queen than cook with her button- nose, her hair as black as an open mouth. With this newest knack for exploration we see her cheekbones, her dapply pores in our own. She jerks the leg that needs rest within itself, kisses her princesses. Copyright © 2001 by Tanya Ubiles Duarte
	Do You Have Fire? by Tanya Ubiles Duarte I posed at the half-wall with a Newport when an older girl, Carmen, arrived at the bottom of the hill wearing a walk- man, head shaking like a maraca or a guiro. I made sure to hold it not like the girls with their sissy u’s or v’s, I held it as a joint and I’d release clouds through a slice of my mouth till she caught me by surprise and asked, “tienes fuego?” Holding my matches, she asked, “you inhale?” She took a drag, sucking breath through her made- up mouth, watching my next move, which was pull the smoke in with so much air I blow up the room inside like a big, black house. Copyright © 2001 by Tanya Ubiles Duarte
	Ramón by Tanya Ubiles Duarte They say that when Ramón Tovar makes love you go to hell for having seen that much of yourself in an instant, that you have it spelled out, then lose all—he’s like a witch. Though I have seen his father’s eyes sunk against his purpley skin, his tongue shoot out a pumping heart, stood while his mom rung the bell of a boarded house and cooed something, I never knew his magic. I kissed him, years ago, spin the bottle, felt charged but by what? I only wished for spells while Ana’d been straddling him since sixth grade. Something must’ve happened in my dreams because I know this end well. Copyright © 2001 by Tanya Ubiles Duarte
	The Doubles by Tanya Ubiles Duarte In the States we have a house on a hill like Cusa’s in PR. Cars can’t climb it. Our visit—she yawned by the windowsill, our lost luggage dragged by men who hated their jobs, the land-ladder up, but Mami wouldn’t back down. When night fell she ate Cusa’s beans and liked them. I knew we were in trouble—no one cooks better, “States or no States,” so for the next few nights they both made the most awful beans. We ate them with the face my Mami makes at my schoolmates and friends in our own mean streets—“These are the people cause trouble,” when talking of her own, her doubles. Copyright © 2001 by Tanya Ubiles Duarte
	Chuleta Lips by Tanya Ubiles Duarte Marta’s got chuleta lips, I don’t care what anyone says—you could defend her but no excusing or mistaking stare could flatten, shrink, or thin them. Remember: I know well the way they start at the teeth as if they grew right from them, the way she sort of tucks them and only half-smiles with us when we flap our jaws and clap our heels. She’s the only one of us with hazel eyes, for my family as good as gold. Then she has to dye her hair caramel to seem even more special, but to know her lips is to risk they’ll leave you empty. Marta’s got chuleta lips like me. Copyright © 2001 by Tanya Ubiles Duarte
	To One Elizabeth, Alive and Unconvinced, with Apologies to One More Famous and Long Since Deceased by William Ruleman Why do I love thee? Oh yes, I could sit and count the reasons, but . . . what good would reasons do? For optics tells us why a sky is blue, and climbers, why they risk their lives to mount Everest’s perilous crest, hydraulics, why a fount insists; yet who’s assured that “crystal clue” to why the powers-that-be have thought to endue us with the need to provide a rational account of all of our own, and the elements’ acts? So ask me not to explain my love for you, my love. “Because it’s there,” ill explains the climbers’quest. The fount can hardly say why it spurns the flask, nor optics why the snow in your face will turn mauve (I hope) when I say: “With you I simply feel blessed.” Copyright © 2001 by William Ruleman
	Petrarchan on Women in Love by William Ruleman Attempting a sonnet on Lawrence: a contradiction for sure. And yet, I feel a need for restraint after all that wayward passion and complaint. Unleashed emotion as seldom before in fiction or maybe since, Victorian restriction excited nervously, to make some faint and others die. Though Freud’s the patron saint for all of this, it’s still a mystic depiction of high Romantic unfulfilled desire— like Keats’s panting “more happy, happy love” but not content, like Keats, to lack possession of the loved one: instead, the endless, teasing fire of yearning to be below, beyond, above— anywhere but here, with this dark and hellish obsession. Copyright © 2001 by William Ruleman
	A Sonnet for Richard by Minnie C. Bindas As sunlight quivered and hurdled the clouds, buds exploded at dawn. “Hear ‘tu-who’ out of the dark, as owls leave for the night.”And as worsening sea wrack sprawled and choked the gurgling brook, the sunlight on the water spritzed red in ripples of speechless rhymes resounding like Handel’s calling “Glo-ri-a.” In the mottled water, a clutch of ducks sailed on a practice run. “Richard, listen, Hear, all around you, poetic meanings. Sonnets slit through rocks and roots Nurturing straight to the heart.” Copyright © 2001 by Minnie C. Bindas