Sonnets V-Viii

Afterglow by Michael R. Burch The night is full of stars. Which still exist? Before time ends, perhaps one day we’ll know. For now I hold your fingers to my lips and feel their pulse: warm, palpable and slow; once slow to match this reckless spark in me, this moon in ceaseless orbit I became, compelled by wilder gravity to flee night’s universe of suns, for one pale flame; for one pale flame that seemed to signify the Zodiac of all, the meaning of love’s wandering flight past Neptune. Now to lie in dawning recognition is enough: enough each night to bask in you, to know the face of love: eyes closed, its afterglow. All Afterglow by Michael R. Burch Something remarkable, perhaps, the color of her eyes, though I forget the color of her eyes; perhaps her hair the way it blew about? I do not know just what it was about her that has kept her thought lodged deep in mine; unmelted snow that lasted till July would be less rare, clasped in some frozen cavern where the wind sculpts bright grotesqueries, ignoring springs’ and summers’ higher laws; there thawing slow and strange by strange degrees, one tick beyond the freezing point which keeps all things the same till what remains is fragile and unlike the world above, where melted snows and rains form rivulets that, inundate with sun, evaporate, and in life’s cyclic stream remake the world again. I do not know if we can be remade?all afterglow. To the Post-Modern Muse, Floundering by Michael R. Burch The anachronism in your poetry is that it lacks a future history. The line that rings, the forward-sounding bell, tolls death for you, for drowning victims tell of insignificance, of eerie shoals, of voices underwater. Lichen grows to mute the lips of those men paid no heed, and though you cling by fingertips, and bleed, there is no lifeline now, for what has slipped lies far beyond your grasp. Iron fittings, stripped, have left the hull unsound, bright cargo lost. The argosy of all your toil is rust. The anchor that you flung did not take hold in any harbor where repair is sold.