Two Sonnets

April had the feel of a blocked
memory: edgy and indolent—spent and pent
up lusts juddering about in a black-

box retort of metaphor. Spring
was like a parable you had to sleep
on with small hope of deciphering. A blacked-
out window. Or a silvered pane of one-

way glass furnishing a pretense of back-
ground. The few poppies blossomed like a red
alert among a mob of rankly hung-

over daffodils, planted in memory—prime
sustenance of the dead. Spring was a feigned
entente. Fish pushed stubbornly up-

stream toward the cold, sweeter water.

The snapshot, closeup, sampled the fine
grain: the data, captured, aggregating,
patterned—the desiderata, lapsed

or obsolescing, salvaged. Highjinks
and humdrum. You had an idiom to map
on an enigma. It was life

as is as usual, thumbruled and re-
packaged art: Metaphors deadlettered as the law
of averages and entropy—

left hissing in the interstitial dark-
ness. Absolutely undemonstrable was lack
of meaning, absence of design, the last word

pending endlessly, the one key
figure falling languorously into line.

Copyright © 2004 John de Stefano All rights reserved
from Northwest Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission