Where the Water Lies

and a Sonnet on the Sonnet

A Sea-Song

Ah, loved and lovers,
This is my love song.
Where the water lies
far far away
beneath far skies
I have not seen so long,
Bright with the waves,
and they bright with their song,
How do I live so far from that strange shine,
Where the sky lights the waves,
and waves light sky?

Once long ago there was a child that loved;
the woman bears some quaint, sweet pang,
Still thinking of the waves
and their far song,
which they have sung for many thousand days
while she was gone;
And, half-eld far away,
she muses of their light,
their song an echo, half-forgotten
in her beating heart;
Yet a place for love still lies
within her there,
an empty place,
like seashells’s empty fane,
that knows the echo
by its absent roar.

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The hawkmoth’s wings whir.
Penstemons quiver.
The garden vibrates with spring.

---

The clouds draw aside:
silver drapes on a window,
snow on far mountains

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The Sonnet

I love the sonnet with its slender lines—
its swift fourteen—so brief, and yet a world
in miniature, as when the morning’s curled
within a dewdrop’s skin, which there confines
the dawn in its bright compass–sun that shines
a tiny dot in tiny sky unfurled–
so may the shifting rhymes that flow and swirl
make a bright mirror where their magic twines.
For in that magic world I find a space
where I may dwell beyond the darkness’ rise,
where bright truth glimmers in her wonted grace
and does not fade before my faltering eyes,
a world whose brevity defies the race
from pain to pain, and holds fast to the prize.

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