Four Sonnets.

Burn, or speak your mind. For the oak to untruss
its passion it must explode as fire or leaves.
The delicious tongue we speak with speaks us.
A liquor of sweetness where its root cleaves
ripens fluent, as it runs for the desirous
reason, the touching sense. The infant says, "I"
like earthquake and wavers as place takes voice.
Earth steadies smiling around her, in reply
to her finding of pronoun, her focal choice,
& waits: while sun sucks earth juices up from wry
root-runs tangled under dark, while the girl
no longer vegetal, steps into view
a moving speaker, an "I" the air whirls
toward the green exuberance of "You."

Only to themselves are the passionate
hot. To the objects of their passion they
are cold. What Yeats knew. They eradicate
what they notice; the thumb hard-crams the clay
impressionable under it, to lie flat,
apt to the shape a cold-steel scribe may
cut or spurn it to. Yet they know passion
must drown to ripen sweet & give fair play
to the whole life hot passion speeds us from.

Clay, be glass. Cling to the crystals of sand
that tell you, centuries of soil will come.
Not-heart, translate root-ends the planter's hand
cut & abandoned, to slow chrysanthemum.
Heart of felt life, drop your guard, be still, be slow,
easing all you long for toward all you know.

The place of language is the place between me
and the worlds of presences I have lost
--complex country, not flat. Its elements free-
float, coherent, for luck to come across;
its lines curve as in a mental orrery
implicit with stars in active orbit,
only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.
The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite
air of imagination that stirs immense
among losses and leaves me less desolate.
It finds me spotting a sentence or a name,
telescoped, charted for recovery,
to say against the daily sinking flame
& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.

Spelled out in the body, history is slow.
My label reads: cryptic amateur, adept
at dailyness. Crowsfeet, muscles, scars have kept
the record of waves rising then lying low:
  Sun-squint breakfasts as foreplay. The intense
  hungers of no funds. Tubs of linen sheeting
  heavy, scrubbed and hung. Songs. Triumphs and defeats.
  The broken kitchen. Free-born words. A fence
  of my own. The right to vote. The open air
  of common walkways.
  I read the
honey-striped
turn of body caught off guard, its full text ripe.
It gave birth to keep its word in good repair.
Grateful, grateful, my hand slow to turn the page
turns it, labeled grateful, already engaged.