I’D LIKE TO WRITE YOU ANOTHER SONNET

I’d like to write you another sonnet.

Nothing about liquidity and time,

I suppose, nor even Halley’s comet

and its aphelion. No poem sublime

as Auden meditating on Voltaire,

or Lowell recalling his uncle’s strife.

But something simple as Frost who declares

how a birch can bend like a lean young wife

drying her hair in spring sun. How I can

watch your eyes reflecting light, and yet see

light deeper still within. I’m just a man

with a keyboard and memory: Ay me!

she sighed on her balcony while he gazed

from below, and the glorious night blazed.

Roger Armbrust

May 20, 2012

SODA CENTRAL

He’s recalling his handy plastic cup

marked Soda Central, a bevy of stamped

22 oz. sentries neatly lined up

as curled gatekeepers among artwork swamped

over the cylinder like curved guitar

strings and Peter Max-style loopings and dots

all in butterscotch-color ink. Dark tar

of tobacco juice would slog from mouth’s slot

down the cup’s length, stain its walls, form a sludge

pool at its base. It’s hard to sense now how

nicotine soothed him, link it to light nudge

of morphine from his epidural, slow

like a dying battery; how lumped chaws

could cost him his sacred tongue and left jaw.

Roger Armbrust

May 13, 2012

YOU WHO CARRY BEAUTY

You who carry beauty like a poem

whispered in pearl ears of smiling muses,

knowing your gentle phrases can please them

to no end, how each lyric amuses

gods at their leisure like lovely children

dancing deer-grace through their Elysian fields,

dance on. You who carry beauty hidden

even deeper than your sacred face yields,

deeper than your ocean eyes reveal, show

me the way through green valley of your soul.

Guide me at your runner’s pace, vision’s glow

encircling your loping form, calm control

in your joyous song: angel’s clarion.

You who carry beauty, please carry on.

Roger Armbrust

May 10, 2012