Jackpine Sonnets

Love in the Nineteen Fifties

On that beach with light shifting breaths
Of breezes touching us like gentle
Curious, strong, all-surrounding presences
Watching, and you watching . . . I stuck a gull’s
Tailfeather askew ten white degrees
Out of perpendicular to match
The slant of the nearest sail on that diseased
Warm doubt of a day.
                Grief hope and fury
Were all there, speaking tentatively
In a jury just met.
                Wants too early
Stirring your blood, vision, nerves and mine
Over that tilting token in the sand;
Having made a sign, still wanted a sign
While low lightblue waves just tapped the island.

in that time the wise
rarely swore to anything
since most words were lies

U.F.O.

Shall I compare you to a u.f.o?
You’re just as mysterious.
Shall I compare a u.f.o. to you?
Those vehicles exist. I saw one sure
As the fact you’re gone and I’ve tried
Hate as a cure for love
In covens of thorn with roses, where I hide
From complicated beauty more like yours;
Rating my half-cut death as fate
When I’d promised fate more future than that.

It shone like the sun: but only for an eye
Which sought it out; otherwise just a strange
Moveable star it was. Nor did it glare
Or illuminate the scene around it.
Until my look fitted onto that stare
Winter had combined all other seasons.
On other planets other things change
And I’d loved you too long, at most for half a reason