I'm going to conclude with a couple of sonnets.
The last time that I taught the forms course,
I got the nerve to spend a lot of time writing sonnets.
And so I've been working on these for a little over a year.
It'll be another sequence, but it won't be book-length.
I think, with luck, it'll be chapbook-length.
And I'll read one of these new sonnets,
and then I'm going to read a sonnet by somebody else
to conclude.
This one is titled with a prefix--
"post," post hyphen after.
And you know we use it in many ways--
postmodern, postmortem, post-Bush post-whatever.
But this "post" is left to you-- post hyphen.
And the poem is after Cormac McCarthy.
I'm a fan of his novels, especially the ones that
are sort of gritty and have rich-textured, dark, musical
language.
And some of his phrases are floating around in here.
And perhaps I also channeled a little of his dark tone.
"Post."
"As if what's done could shrug and change its mind,
one pit breathed for days, a heaving form.
Shot, thrown into trenches, and set afire,
the buried alive writhe like flies, like worms.
Now, flatlands, miles and miles of silence
fenced, where noble feelings search for noble acts.
Ants, locusts, crickets-- a swarm intelligence transmits
data in pheromones and clicks.
A bright sun obscures angles in the road.
Blink after images inside the eyes.
Bodies rejiggered to holograms.
The sound of wind, the closest thing to words,
reduced to chemicals.
Memory simplifies.
Stories empty.
Hearts desiccate to sand.