something for the season: a sonnet of sorts

Growth

We’ve gathered autumn acorns for the vase

We’ll fill with them—an ornament to place

On the tabletop.

We rest beneath the oak, our chill-stung lungs

Recuperating; down from knuckled rungs,

A brown leaf tumbles.

Corinne begins to pluck the woody caps

From their nutshells. Her cousin Lily slaps

The offending hand;

She says, Those perfect acorns . . . now they’re spoiled.

Corinne begins to cry; her humus-soiled

Fingers streak her face.

The sun grows red. The earth grows cold

Against our jeans. The year grows old.

yourself as the you

I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.--Jean Paul Sartre

So I've been undulating on the foamy swells of the Amorphilacious-Antaginons (aka Facebook) for over a week now and despite the occasional vertiginous crests and the stray stomach-sinking lulls, I feel like I might survive the scare. After all, what's a few soul-wrenching, psyche-anguishing, despair-inducing confrontations with yourself as The Other? That is, yourself as the you-that-once-was. That is, the you-that-is breaching the Nothing, reaching through stubbornly unsubstantial time, and faintly touching the you-that-was as a candle-flame might touch the fog.

Believe in ghosts, Ether, believe because they're out there. They resemble you: in the gleam of an eye or in the turn of a lip or in the cross of the legs. They remind you of you. They are you. Even when you're looking at someone-else-as-they-once-were it's just the you-as-The Other still stuck in the Nothingness of what once was but is no more--textbook case of Ghost encounter. Shiver.

To put it another way, all these old pictures of old friends and old mes gives me heebie-jeebie-willies.

Here's a sonnet--apropos of something above, I think. Or feel, rather.

Elementary

One may say that the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

– Albert Einstein

Remember sallow afternoons when we

Would count the passing cars and itemize

By color? Brother, I had open eyes

And gaping ears. I learned lessons for free

That you had bought by sitting in a class.

Who knew that stars were relatively still,

But you? You knew that salt would kill

A slug by shriveling it and that glass

Was made by blowing into glowing sand.

Remember pinching lightning bugs to smear

Our faces green and yellow? We would stand

At neighbors’ windows peering in like ghouls,

(Like what? I asked, secretly cramped with fear.

­Like ghosts, you said) no smarter pair of fools.