Uc's Sonnet

Though beautiful, I know your kind: a grace
in stride and conversation, a charm that blights
all guests. You smile, so well, and you watch fights
break out among the rash, stirred by your face.
All this is known, of course. I find this place
but idling: the young know what they want, they see
already without my aid. Your coterie
is staunch, decides here all that is the case.

But here I am, to sing of you yet more
because I love, though my too-familiar timbre
in me itches like a cracking bell
does hurt its maker, I still sing well
enough: your father keeps me on. With limber
voice I'll stay, I suppose my word I'll pour.

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Shore House in Mantoloking

Via Montale

You don’t remember the house on the boardwalk
with the sharp brow above the dunes
and doors swallowing wind,
your swarm of thoughts stopped
restless in the sandy foyer.

The East flecks the outer walls
and the slats your laugh has sunk into
make a creaking walk, loud with dice
and giving like a snake's ribs.
A thread ravels out, you don't
remember, another time stunts your memory.

I hold a still end; but the house
is on the move, its weathervane
turns without pity, black with smoke.
I hold an end, think you're breathing in the dark

Now on the horizon a fugue of rare light
 from shore pooling oily on the water.
Is here the way?
You don't remember the house
in my night. I don’t know who goes, who rests.

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Free Margins

A screen with holes, with barken vines
never before caught in the act of piercing
but now I see them, blown by the the wind
squeezed in between these buildings
into the window, into the room.
I jump at them, unwisely. I get them, they fall
a few floors slowly, I think, though I suppose
thats wrong. But I am hanging on by my free margins,
an evocative name for the fingernail,
the part of it that leaves the finger.
To be fair I hung on for only a second.
Then it hurt. I fell slowly.
I thought, this must be wrong.

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This plant in the gutter grows up

This plant in the gutter grows up
and curves down like a long nail
that hardly scratches the face of brick below
as the wind fidgets
its distal edge along the mortar.

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