The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll xv

Middlemarch in Middle America
by Jenna Le

St. Paul, Minnesota, 1990

Named Dorothy by two agnostic Hmong
whose grasp of Western word roots was so poor
they missed the fact that, in “Dorothy,” the dor-
means “gift” and the -thy “God.” Grew up along
a reeking sewage stream wry locals dubbed
“The Brook.” Made straight A’s. Won scholarships. Grubbed
through college, salivating as she sniffed
the faint, rank spoor of the American Dream.
Forced to quit school, with rattled self-esteem,
the year her Ph.D. advisor, stiff
with rheumatism, fell flat on his mauve-
hued face (his name was Casaubon) just weeks
before her dissertation was complete.
Joined a Polish healthcare start-up, Wladyslaw.

Family Movie Night, 1994
by Jenna Le

Unrolling on the TV in the den:
a Hong-Kong-made film dubbed in Vietnamese,
the one where Maggie Cheung (all the movies
my parents rent star either Brigitte Lin
or Maggie Cheung) shines in the role of Green
Snake, a shapeshifting minor goddess. She’s
persuaded by her older sister, easy-
going White Snake, to take part in a fun
gag where the two immortal gals transform
their coats from reptile scales to mammal skin
and pose as human women for a year.
All’s well until a sleazy mandarin
impregnates White Snake. I huff, “It’s unfair
that Green Snake be left out.” “Hush, fool,” snaps Mom.

The Worst Day of Brook Watson’s Life
by Jenna Le

after Copley’s Watson and the Shark

A bare-bellied boy floats on the waves, back arched
like the body of a woman in orgasm.
His tense taut limbs jut oddly, as if in spasm.
Surfer-long blond hair haloes the harsh
grimace that he wears: his black eyes bulge
from a face that’s been completely drained of blood,
a face that mimics a Noh mask carved of wood,
mouth-hole wide and upward-curved.

The shark
(did I neglect to mention there’s a shark?)
is yellow-eyed. Her arced black nostrils flare
just inches from the nude boy’s streaming hair.
She’s not looking at the boy: her left eye angled
slightly above the right, she aims her large
snout just leftward of the boy she’ll shortly mangle.

Phones
by James B. Nicola

Every time the phone rang after his last
attack, I’d answer the call as if word
were being given. Those times are long past.
Now I recall that other things occurred
that term—commencement, summer jobs, my move
to the city; I had forgotten all
of them. My roommate woke me with a shove
at five, my first night in New York. A call—

I knew even before he saw me wince . . . .

My mother’s hesitation broke the news.

We held the service. Months passed, then years. Since
then, phones do not enthrall me with their rings
but only as devices I can use
to calm a mother’s dark imaginings.

ICU
by William Baer

Some moron cuts me off on the Garden State,
not that far from the exit for Route 22;
I crash the retaining wall, wheel back too late,
flip over twice, and end in the ICU,
with a broken this and that, fibrillation,
a punctured something, spinal repercussion,
intravenous morphine medication,
and an almost-deadly brain concussion.
But I’m thinking maybe it’s not so bad,
maybe you’ll hear about it and visit me,
as I sketch your face on a prescription pad,
dreaming of a moment that’s never-to-be:
when I hear your footsteps on the hallway floor,
when I see you, love, walking through the door.

Reprieve
by William Baer

When you finally agreed to meet with me,
I thought I was getting one more chance,
a provisional reprieve, a final wait-and-see
if we could salvage the wreck of our romance.
I thought you pitied my wretched desperation,
and that you, finally, had come to believe
in my best intentions and rehabilitation,
granting me a compassionate reprieve.
But I was wrong. I was being “sent away,”
rejected, dismissed, cast out like Cain,
into the outer-darkness, a castaway,
a fugitive, wandering in vain,
alone, never knowing what to do,
forever cursed, and marked with the mark of you.

Expat
by Catherine Chandler

“Get back!” —The Beatles, Let It Be album

New York’s five thousand miles away,
mapped in another hemisphere.
On this fine January day
it’s winter there and summer here.
Here the moon wanes in reverse;
and though my zês still sound like zees,
I’ve learned to samba, learned to curse
in bad Brazilian Portuguese.

True, caipirinha quenches thirst
and jungles breed umbrella birds;
but I believe my heart will burst
when, paraphrased, those two small words
Paul chants to Jojo in a song
hit close to home. I don’t belong.

Sisters
by Catherine Chandler

Each one was Sister Mary plus a name
belonging to a saint, like Agnes and
Cornelius, their guimpe and coif a frame
for crease-browed faces. They would reprimand
us for the least divergence from the path
of righteousness—a petty schoolyard schism
or lace-edged collar would incur their wrath:
a pop quiz on the Baltimore catechism.

But Sister Mary Jane, who taught third grade,
was sweet and kind, and thought it not egregious
for chestnut curls to fly loose from a braid.
She spared the rod, so unlike Mary Regis.
We learned our lessons but she let us dream.
That year we fashioned butter out of cream.

The Girl in the Photograph
by Catherine Chandler

The de rigueur engagement photograph
is dated nineteen ten. In sepia tones
my mother’s mother, eighteen, dressed in lace
and linen, stands with hands behind her back.
A dark curl loosens from her Gibson Girl.
She wears a put-on smile, a cameo pin,
a sidelong glance. Her bold, defiant chin
is all I recognize of Granny here—
no slippers cut for corns, no sagging shifts
and flowered aprons, toothless gums; no grim
grass widow. As I scrutinize her pose
I well believe the story handed down—
the day when she dumped dinner on his head,
taming that wayward scallywag she wed.

Ominous Sounds from the Getty Hexameters
by R. W. Haynes

Who can doubt that healing powers
Wait in the shadows, pondering
Intervention in our hapless wandering
Toward whatever peripety is ours?
Does one pray beseechingly to these,
Or is that fatal? Is there only grace
Kindly awarded to the averted face?
Is recovery better than disease?
Get the rooster feathers, the sacred knife,
And the gaudy gourds so we can rattle
As if anemic Death’s afraid of battle
And hides his face to save his bony life,
And we’ll secure this poetic prescription,
Chanting lucky curses from the Egyptian.

Cold Water Wisdom Up North
by R. W. Haynes

Surely one approves of deep, cold fjords
Demonized by time, imagination,
And icy paralysis of volatile sensation,
Beckoning violence to Viking lords,
But in warm parlors, soft musical sound
Strokes and teases, pulls stealthy comfort around,
Seduces history into a drowsy sleep
In which the mind’s unforgiving blade
Buries itself, old true steel betrayed,
In hot marshmallows forty fathoms deep.
Yet, through this soporific haze, at last,
A troubling sound of a shrewd brass alarm
Disturbs this rest, and signals dreadful harm
At hand, approaching both fatal and fast.
The volume of cold trouble forces out
A cry, as one looks frantically about.

Colonel Sanders Needs Love, Too
by R. W. Haynes

The hero crows, the heroine clucks back,
Both featherheads in chicken-yard roles,
Mad as wet poultry, wing-flapping souls
In dramatic ecstasies, their yackety-yak
Besieges the heavens with an eloquence
Betokening nature’s rich intensity
Of wit and color, symphonic cacophony,
Providence exploding inside the backyard fence.
And as those echoes blast forth distraction,
Other dramas wrap us in their charms,
Like friendly octopi with too many arms,
Involving our minds with too much interaction.
So we, like tenacious, outraged little birds,
Dodge through a storm of deciduous words.

The Celtic Armband
by Kelley Jean White

Arms are my weakness. The way the veins curve
around muscles. The turning muscles, the grooves
in the forearm, the riverbed between
biceps and tri. So if you have to mark
yourself I must admit I would prefer
a permanent rawhide thong on your smooth
skin, your arm, an intricate band weaving
gold and copper from the Book of Kells, stark
reminder of the past trying to make
you immortal, a mummified bog man
sacrifice buried in your ancestral
land, I could imagine it, you taken
for a druid, or drawn by some monk’s hand,
a dying Gaul, no chief, you my vassal.

The Old Man
by Kelley Jean White

Younger than me, she’s raising two grandsons,
beautiful little boys. First time she brought
them to the office the youngest was six
months old, wrapped up in towels, had the worst
diaper rash I’d ever seen, older one’s
ears were dripping pus. Their parents were caught
living in a car at Christmas—their fix
was fentanyl and heroin, not worth
much on the street anymore. The mother
OD’d, and the father, this woman’s son’s
in jail, “it’s kinda family tradition,
our men walk away.” She pushes up her
sleeve: her tattoo, the Great Stone Face, fallen,
RIP, ’03, “I miss my old man.”

When I Googled Sonnet Scroll I
Got “Scrotal Sonnet” and I Felt
I Had to Rise to the Occasion

by Kelley Jean White

Who’d believe you of all people would pledge
a fraternity? Chug down beer in damp
basements, chant Wa-Hoo-Wa, vomit, on my
feet? My shy erstwhile Altar Boy, elite
English scholar, writer, artist, effete
philosophy major, man who will cry
at the first hint of emotion? Scout camp
drop-out, hermit, loner, man with a hedge
against neighbor, family, friend? But you did;
they drove you to a bar in New Jersey,
tied on a blindfold then all of them hid.
Your job was to find ten girls, to ask “please,
your phone number?” String tied round your scrotum
and to the pen, squeezed your poor balls blue numb?

Distances
by Michael R. Burch

Moonbeams on water —
the reflected light
of a halcyon star
now drowning in night . . .
So your memories are.

Footprints on beaches
now flooding with water;
the small, broken ribcage
of some primitive slaughter . . .
So near, yet so far.

From Pierre de Ronsard
Les amours de Marie, Second Livre
trans. by Henry Weinfield
IX

Whoever wished to rearrange your name
Would find aimer: so love me, then, Marie.
Love calls you by your name—it’s Nature’s aim.
Traitors to Nature get no clemency.

Pledge me your heart and I will do the same
And offer mine: what pleasures there will be!
No other longings will have any claim
Or power upon my mind to imprison me.

Lady, one has to love something on earth.
Whoever doesn’t lives a life that’s worth
That of a Scythian, and his days are passed

Without tasting the best and sweetest taste.
Without Venus, nothing in life is sweet.
When mine lacks love, let me be done with it.

IX
by Pierre de Ronsard

Marie, qui voudroit vôtre nom retourner,
Il trouveroit aimer: aimez-moy donc Marie,
Vôtre nom de nature à l’amour vous convie.
À qui trahît Nature il ne faut pardonner.

S’il vous plaît vôtre coeur pour gage me donner,
Je vous offre le mien: ainsi de cette vie
Nous prendrons les plaisirs, et jamais autre envie
Ne me pourra l’esprit d’une autre emprisonner.

Il fault aimer, maîtresse, au monde quelque chose.
Celuy qui n’aime point, malheureux se propose
Une vie d’un Scythe, et ses jours veut passer

Sans goûter la douceur des douceurs la meilleureo
Rien n’est: doux sans Venus et sans son fils: à l’heure
Que je n’aimeray plus, puisse-je trespasser.

From Pierre de Ronsard
Les amours de Marie, Second Livre
trans. by Henry Weinfield
XXVIII

Are you so cruel as not to want to love?
Is it contempt for Nature? See the sparrow:
The urge to love has stirred him to the marrow:
Behold the ringdove and the turtledove.

See how the amorous birds on quivering wing
Are fluttering here and there from bough to bough:
The young vine curls around the elm trees now:
All things are filled with laughter in the spring.

The shepherdess, turning her spindle, sings
Her loves; the shepherd tunes his melody
To answer her, for love is in all things.

All speak of love, all enter in its fire:
Only your heart, as cold as it can be,
Stays obstinate and still disdains desire.

XXVIII
by Pierre de Ronsard

Vous mesprisez nature: êtes-vous si cruelle
De ne vouloir aimer? voyez les Passereaux
Qui démenent l’amour, voyez les Colombeaux,
Regardez le Ramier, voyez la Tourterelle:

Voyez deçà delà d’une fretillante aile
Voleter par les bois les amoureux oiseaux,
Voyez la jeune vigne embrasser les ormeaux,
Et toute chose rire en la saison nouvelle.

Ici la bergerette en tournant son fuseau
Desgoise ses amours, et là le pâtoureau
Répond à sa chanson, ici toute chose aime:

Tout parle de l’amour, tout s’en veut enflamer:
Seulement vôtre coeur froid d’une glace extrême
Demeure opiniâtre et ne veut point aimer.

From Pierre de Ronsard
Les amours de Marie, Second Livre
trans. by Henry Weinfield
XXIX

I love the violet and the lovely rose:
The first one sacred to the goddess Venus,
The other with the name of my fair mistress,
Because of whom I never have repose.

I love three little birds: first is the one
Who lifts wet feathers skyward after spring rains,
Then one who, widowed, to the wood complains,
One who composes verses for her dead son.

I love a Burgundian pine where Venus hung
My youthful liberty when, being enraptured,
It yielded up my heart an eye had captured.

I love a young laurel, Phoebus Apollo’s tree,
From which my mistress took a branch and strung
With plaits of her own hair a crown for me.

NOTES: Line 1 in the French is “J’aime la fleur de Mars, j’aime la belle rose”;
the “flower of March” is the violet. In the second quatrain, the three birds
are the lark, the turtledove, and the nightingale respectively. The turtledove
is renowned for fidelity. In the Odyssey the story is told of Aedon who accidentally
killed his son and was then transformed to a nightingale; in French poetry, however,
the nightingale is always gendered female. The Burgundian pine is probably an
allusion to Marie, to whom these sonnets are addressed; her surname was “Du Pin”
or “Dupin.” Ovid in the Metamorphoses tells the story of Daphne, who, pursued by
Apollo, is transformed to a laurel, from which Apollo (the patron god of poetry)
fashions a laurel crown.

XXIX
by Pierre de Ronsard

J’aime la fleur de Mars, j’aime la belle rose,
L’une qui est sacrée à Venus la Déesse,
L’autre qui a le nom de ma belle maîtresse,
Pour qui troublé d’esprit en paix je ne repose.

J’aime trois oiselets, l’un qui sa plume arrose
De la pluye de May, et vers le Ciel se dresse:
L’autre qui veuf au bois lamente sa détresse:
L’autre qui pour son fils mille versets compose.

J’aime un pin de Bourgeuil, où Venus apendit
Ma jeune liberté, quand prise elle rendit
Mon coeur que doucement un bel oeil emprisonne.

J’aime un jeune laurier de Phoebus l’arbrisseau,
Dont ma belle maîtresse en pliant un rameau
Lié de ses cheveux me fît une couronne.

EROS
by Bettina von Arnim; trans. by William Ruleman

I find him fast asleep upon a bed
Of roses—caught in their petals’ changing gleam
As fawning dew-bespangled sunrays beam
And breaths of spirits flow all round his head.

It seems as though those pure limbs had been shed:
Poured into slumber by the bees that teem
And hum, the subtle scents that drift and stream,
About the quivering body, fragrance-fed.

And now, at once, I see it start to swell:
The flower in bloom! And then I recognize,
In broad daylight, the bright one in whose spell

My own eyelids, on seeing his rise, have sunk;
For he so seizes me with those strange eyes
That, in his light, I lie dream-drunk.

EROS
by Bettina von Arnim

Im Bett der Rose lag er eingeschlossen,
Im Wechselschimmer ihrer zarten Seiten,
Die taugebrochnen Strahlen schmeichelnd gleiten
Hinein zu ihm, von Geisterhauch umflossen.

Mich dünkt, in Schlummer waren hingegossen
Die reinen Glieder, durch des Dufts Verbreiten
Und durch der Biene Summen, die zuzeiten
Vorüberstreift an zitternden Geschossen.

Doch da beginnt mit einemmal zu schwellen
Der Blume Kelch! Ins Freie nun gehoben,
Erkenn ich ihn im Tagesglanz, dem hellen.

Es ist mein Auge vor ihm zugesunken,
Der mich so seltsam mit dem Blick umwoben,
In seinem Lichte lieg ich traume-trunken.

ROSE of FIRE
by Antonio Machado; trans. by William Ruleman

Wild lovers, you are woven from the spring:
Sewn whole from earth and water, wind and sun.
Inside your eyes the fields are flowering;
Within your breasts the mountains pant, undone.

Parade your shared spring in a promenade;
And drink sans doubt or dread that milk so sweet
The lusty panther offers in your aid
Before he grimly stalks you in the street.

Stroll while the planet’s axis starts to lean
Its subtle way toward summer’s spacious land,
The violet shriveled and the almond green.

Both thirst and fount are now at your command,
So go: complete love’s old siesta scene,
The rose of fire still burning in your hand.

ROSA de FUEGO
by Antonio Machado

Tejidos sois de primavera, amantes,
de tierra y agua y viento y sol tejidos.
La sierra en vuestros pechos jadeantes,
en los ojos los campos florecidos,
pasead vuestra mutua primavera,
y aun bebed sin temor la dulce leche
que os brinda hoy la lúbrica pantera,
antes que, torva, en el camino aceche.
Caminad, cuando el eje del planeta
se vence hacia el solsticio del verano,
verde el almendro y mustia la violeta,
cerca la sed y el hontanar cercano,
hacia la tarde del amor, completa,
con la rosa de fuego en vuestra mano.

THE GIANTS NOW
by William Ruleman

Faceless giants rule the world we knew.
They all lack sex and all look quite the same,
With no belief or race and no real name;
About them there seems little we can do.

For, with them, nothing is quite false or true;
We cannot hope to beat them at their game;
They dodge each effort to affix a blame;
Attempts to fight them only make one blue.

And so we simply languish in their shade
And scurry round as freely as we can
And do our best to make love, work, and play

Inside a world that we ourselves have made—
One clear no more to woman, child, or man—
This giants’ world that greets us every day.

FINDING THE CENTER
by William Ruleman

“Death was an attempt to communicate;
people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the centre which, mystically,
evaded them . . . .”
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Clarissa skimmed life’s surface all too much
And feared that giddy plummet to its core,
Aware she might, in leaping, suffer such
Despair that all she’d lived and striven for

Might prove irrelevant. And so it seemed
For that sad-sack shell-shocked soldier, Septimus Smith,
Who wrecked his wits for an England he had dreamed
His apple yet found distasteful at the pith,

Controlled by those who’d force him to conform
And think as they did for a salary.
He had no wish to die: the day was warm;
Yet death alone, he felt, could set him free.

And when he leapt from that sill into the abyss,
Did the pavement greet him like a kiss?

REFUGE
by William Ruleman

Hummelberg, Breitenberg, the Black Forest,
20 September 2010

Almost autumn now. The apple trees still gleam
With radiant red and orange suns; the grass and leaves
Still shine an emerald green as summer fades: a dream
Emblazoned on memory, though Nature scarcely grieves
But rests—bestilled, bemused—under blue skies blanketed
By clouds as soft as shrouds that guard the peaceful dead.

A troubled wanderer finds a tranquil haven here
In homes of gentle strangers who speak another tongue.
He sleeps like a child in his bed at night and feels no fear
Though these are strangers, and he, no longer very young.

An ocean away from home, in chill and clean hill air,
The wanderer breathes, relieved of the demons that hounded him there.

Turbid Siri, heedless of my pain
by Isabella di Morra; trans. by Wendy Sloan

The River Siri ran near the Morra Castle
in remote Basilicata, Southern Italy

Turbid Siri, heedless of my pain,
now that I sense the end is drawing near,
please tell my father all that’s happened here,
if destiny should bring him back again.

Explain how I, in dying, could abate
misfortune and a miserable fate
by my rare example: his unlucky daughter
consigns her sullen name to your dark waters.

And once he’s reached your rocky riverside,
(but with that thought, what others you compel
in me, fierce star — how I’ve been thwarted and deprived!),
tell him, churning up storm-tossed waves in swells,

“They filled me like this when she was alive —
her eyes, yes — yes, those rivers of Isabelle.”

NOTE: Isabella di Morra (1520-1545) was murdered by her brothers in an
“honor killing,” caught in the act of exchanging Petrarchan sonnets with
a local count. Originally published posthumously in 1552, her work has
been included in virtually every anthology of Italian women poets since.
Some modern scholars, observing techniques in Morra’s poetry that were to
become typical Romantic tropes (such as use of the pathetic fallacy, and
placement of the melancholy poet alone confronted by a hostile nature),
have noted elements seemingly derived from Morra in the work of Torquato
Tasso, and in later Romantic poetry.

Torbido Siri, del mio mal superbo
by Isabella di Morra

Torbido Siri, del mio mal superbo,
or ch’io sento da presso il fin amaro,
fa’ tu noto il mio duolo al Padre caro,
se mai qui ’l torna il suo destino acerbo.
Dilli come, morendo, disacerbo
l’aspra Fortuna e lo mio fato avaro
e, con esempio miserando e raro,
nome infelice a le tue onde io serbo.
Tosto ch’ei giunga a la sassosa riva
(a che pensar m’adduci, o fiera stella
come d’ogni mio ben son cassa e priva!)
inqueta l’onde con crudel procella,
e di’: “Me accrebber si, mentre fu viva,
non gli occi no, ma i fiumi d’Isabella.”

To the Moon
by Giacomo Leopardi ; trans. by Wendy Sloan

The recollection of past suffering holds its delights for us.
— Cicero

Ah, graceful moon. Well I remember,
now that a year’s gone around,
how I came up over this hill in pain
to gaze at you; and you hung then over those woods
just as you do now, brightening everything.
But your face appeared before my eyes as a tremulous
cloud through the tears that clung to my lashes.
So troubled was my life, and is — that story never changes —
no, my delightful moon. Still, the recollection helps me,
this counting through the seasons of my grief.
How welcome it is
when you’re young — and hope’s road
is still a long one, and memory’s short —
this remembrance of things past,
and yet how sad, and how the hurt endures.

NOTE: Epigraph added by the translator. Cicero was likely the original
source of Leopardi’s penultimate line here and, possibly, of Shakespeare’s
second line in Sonnet 30, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I
summon up remembrance of things past.” Leopardi was a scholar and philologist
who studied classical and modern languages, including English, while still
in his teens; he later edited Cicero’s work. Shakespeare “probably” studied
rhetoric “extensive[ly]” at school (“Introduction” to Shakespeare: The
Complete Sonnets and Poems, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 24).
Had Leopardi also read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30? The virtual identity of Leopardi’s
line, il rimembrar delle passate cose, with Shakespeare’s “remembrance of
things past” strongly suggests that he had. It seems unlikely that so erudite
a scholar and poet as Leopardi traced Shakespeare’s phrase almost word for word
by mere coincidence. For us, of course, the phrase summons up not Cicero, and
not Leopardi, but C.K.Scott-Moncrieff’s English translation of Proust’s title,
A la recherché du temps perdu.

Alla Luna
by Giacomo Leopardi

O graziosa luna, io mi rammento
Che, or volge l’anno, sovra questo colle
Io venia pien d’angoscia a rimirarti:
E tu pendevi allor su quella selva
Siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari.
Ma nebuloso e tremulo dal pianto
Che mi sorgea sul ciglio, alle mie luci
Il tuo volto apparia, che travagliosa
Era mia vita: ed e, ne cangia stile,
O mia diletta luna. E pur mi giova
La ricordanza, e il noverar l’etate
Del mio dolore. Oh come grato occorre
Nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo
La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso,
Il rimembrar delle passate cose,
Ancor che triste, e che l’affanno duri!

Sonnet Against the Night
by Linda M. Fischer

Consider as you must the fruitless ends
Of youth that neither knew nor held its own
Measure and nowise one dear friend
And know that I now am alone.
Night hours from me your visage rend,
As if for us no fitful years had closed,
To fuel regret and gravid tears to spend
On what of faith so young we heedless lost.
I hold you in a chamber of my mind—
Persuade myself that some things never change—
And, for the dark, sufficing solace find
In calling forth the bounty of that age.
What time and error can no longer lend,
I secure and with this love amend.

On Wearing Shorts
by Sayoudh Roy

That March ends winter as a rule
Sat ill with me for I’d recall
A lad who wore his shorts to school
And wore them to the prayer hall

Bare-legged, sought mercy for my wrongs
Then clumsy show of stretching arms
With languid lip served choir songs
I shivered mild through all these norms

Now that I’ve pondered long I feel
Perhaps goose pimples, bristly limbs
Had small connect with morning chill
The tingling born of anxious whims

Diverted children need no toys
And April opens schools for boys

Wash and Wear
by Jane Blanchard

The man had two pairs of pants—black and tan.
Shirts varied more in color, not in style—
collars were splayed and tieless. The textile
was always some synthetic rather than
cotton or wool. His lessons, though, were real—
the quirks of English grammar; the techniques
of playwrights, poets, novelists; the piques
of essayists; the tropes of all such spiel.
I learned much from the man, despite the fact
I donned the latest fashions as a belle
of arts and letters. Once cast, I played well
the model student—eager and exact.
Decades later, my wardrobe is quite plain;
a love of language is what I retain.

Belatedly, a Sonnet
by Jane Blanchard

Today I took the time to write about
what happened long ago—our brief romance,
its ending too abrupt perhaps, no doubt
the consequence of choice and circumstance.

We run into each other on occasion;
alone or not, we stop to speak and smile,
then soon depart with obvious evasion
of explanations that would take a while.

Mine could be short: I came to realize,
for both our sakes, that we were not a match
in much of anything, that compromise,
or worse, made neither one of us a catch.

If you should ask: Why now? Why write at all?
I guess not doing so, at last, felt small.

PORTRAITS
by Robin Helweg-Larsen

Easy enough, the people in the park,
A subway addict, or some screaming child:
Knock off five lines from some chance-heard remark,
A tic observed, or mood or clothes gone wild.

A longer piece for loves, coworkers, friends,
People you’ve bonded with, played some life game;
Can’t be so flip — unless the portrait bends,
Fictionalizing thoughts in formal frame.

And closer to you than your own bed mate
Is, tougher yet, perspective and full view
Of parents, more than threaded through your fate,
They’re warp and weft, the loom, the weavers too.

So, last of all, the golden trophy shelf:
That great and grand grotesquery, yourself.

The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll xv

Middlemarch in Middle America by Jenna Le

Family Movie Night, 1994 by Jenna Le

The Worst Day of Brook Watson’s Life by Jenna Le

Phones by James B. Nicola

ICU by William Baer

Reprieve by William Baer

Expat by Catherine Chandler

Sisters by Catherine Chandler

The Girl in the Photograph by Catherine Chandler

Ominous Sounds from the Getty Hexameters by R. W. Haynes

Cold Water Wisdom Up North by R. W. Haynes

Colonel Sanders Needs Love, Too by R. W. Haynes

The Celtic Armband by Kelley Jean White

The Old Man by Kelley Jean White

When I Googled Sonnet Scroll I Got “Scrotal Sonnet” and I Felt I Had to Rise to the Occasion by Kelley Jean White

Distances by Michael R. Burch

From Pierre de Ronsard Les amours de Marie, Second Livre trans. by Henry Weinfield IX

IX by Pierre de Ronsard

From Pierre de Ronsard Les amours de Marie, Second Livre trans. by Henry Weinfield XXVIII

XXVIII by Pierre de Ronsard

From Pierre de Ronsard Les amours de Marie, Second Livre trans. by Henry Weinfield XXIX

XXIX by Pierre de Ronsard

EROS by Bettina von Arnim; trans. by William Ruleman

EROS by Bettina von Arnim

ROSE of FIRE by Antonio Machado; trans. by William Ruleman

ROSA de FUEGO by Antonio Machado

THE GIANTS NOW by William Ruleman

FINDING THE CENTER by William Ruleman

REFUGE by William Ruleman

Turbid Siri, heedless of my pain by Isabella di Morra; trans. by Wendy Sloan

Torbido Siri, del mio mal superbo by Isabella di Morra

To the Moon by Giacomo Leopardi ; trans. by Wendy Sloan

Alla Luna by Giacomo Leopardi

Sonnet Against the Night by Linda M. Fischer

On Wearing Shorts by Sayoudh Roy

Wash and Wear by Jane Blanchard

Belatedly, a Sonnet by Jane Blanchard

PORTRAITS by Robin Helweg-Larsen