FOURTEEN LINES AT A TIME: SONNETS 2006-2009
by J-P Voillequé
Contents:
I. Author's Note
II. Terminals
III. Borrowed Pages
IV. The Reticle
I. AUTHOR'S NOTE
The sonnet form has been around for a long time, and most poets take a crack at it at one point or another. This book gathers two sonnet series and a collection of other experiments in the form. The form is the overriding theme, but as I was putting this together I was interested to note that other themes emerged as well, more often (it seems) than in my other poetry. Perhaps because the form itself demands focus (you only get 14 lines to make a point, after all), many of these poems seem to isolate particular moments in time, little cameos of a life or lives. As befits a poetic form, process also plays a big role, with much attention paid to writing as invention (see, particularly, "after Stevens" in "The Reticle"). Naturally, I hope you enjoy this little chapbook.
"Terminals" is a sonnet of sonnets, a series of fourteen poems that (often) follow more formal rules of prosody. The fourteenth sonnet is comprised of one new line and thirteen lines that are borrowed from the other sonnets in the series. The poems center around the speaker's relationship with his father, who appears to travel quite a great deal, and may or may not be involved in some way with nuclear waste. Terminals is based on an older set of poems that needed some work - again, the forced focus of the sonnet form came in handy.
"Borrowed Pages" is a section of sonnets written mainly in the style of great sonneteers - Thomas Wyatt, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Frank O'Hara. We are all great thieves, and this repurposing of subject matter into contemporary language was great fun. A few of these poems do not claim an identifiable influence but simply push the form for a specific purpose. Despite being modeled on classic examples of the form, there are varying degrees of attention to the "rules" in these poems, setting the stage for "The Reticle."
"The Reticle" is another series of fourteen sonnets, but it's much looser structurally than "Terminals," and more in the spirit of Ted Berrigan. A reticle is a lens or tool made of transparent media. Most such tools are created to enable the user to see in a particular way. Likewise, these sonnets began gathering themselves together as I was thinking about the ways in which we see the world, the lenses we apply. I hadn't intended for it all to get so grim but we end up side by side with the homeless, the nameless, on a street corner of your choosing, railing at phantoms.
That's the way it is, sometimes, in a sonnet.
II. TERMINALS
1
You may think I heard those reasons
but I did not. Dear father, this game
will never end. Already the days smell
of piss and neglect.
Who calls? It is a dark night and cold.
Dice and invention seal the board. I've
not heard the reasons though you spoke them.
It will never end.
Your thoughts and my thoughts the same.
Swollen figures - puffy weeds in urban
pastoral moments - inhibit passage through
the maze. No endings
or beginnings and are you still here, father?
I told you, I told you. This game will never end.
2 SLC
Left turn at terminal D lands one right at
gate 47 standard departure point of 2427
or 2447 to Idaho Falls. Salt Lake a joke
that no one figured out. Moments perhaps
of hoping for connection a phone call to me
or sister, gently probing broken shipments
of your flesh and astonishing, pent up
mind. Moments, even, of wonderment
at life or simply awareness thereof and the
implications boggling! the potential endless!
delicate caress of phone on ruddy ear numbers
stored in memory with little else to guide it
(e.g. my son was born of a line of demons)
and quick, breathless for the pickup, hello
but already having forgotten what there was to say.
3
close cropped hair, widows peak inviting
comparisons to great thinkers. At the
terminal, a flight - the movement is
the thing. A war like no other on the tube
in the waiting area. This game will never end
only dice and arrivals and departures.
Cycling through the WORK of atoms
and their own termina, the path and
destination of the little death from Chernobyl
or Rocky Flats or the radioactive beagles
piled high in a buried train car in Washington.
You are here to aid my understanding of
the life you lead. Epitaph all well and good
but there is a secret in this tracking, in the
labyrinthine course of environmental risks.
4
What a baying that was, the notes rising
as the tests commenced, the hounds stupidly
eager to please, eager to die at the hands
of science. Their carcasses inviolate, shining
in the night, their litters dead at suckling age
and thrown in for good measure. These are
the things we are brought to, in the end.
Wrinkled brows of skins left preserved,
names on collars, perhaps, or if you're quite
strong willed you may put them before a fire
in the real world, dreaming of rabbits one second
before the bomb came, and took you with them.
You were reading a description of a place you'd
never been to. The sun there is like that light.
5
One photo has a fat baby, still not crawling
or even really showing an interest and
Dad looking universally the same, smiling,
hand on the little tummy of the baby.
One photo shows a grown man, beside another,
both in tuxedos and boutonnières. Smiling
glowing losing hair together. You can almost
hear the photo say, don't speak of pasts or futures.
One photo is of the sisters that the men never knew.
One of friends who find them impossibly distant.
No other photos of the two men exist, though
late nights in airports they wonder if they
couldn't possibly reach across the continent
and snap the other one into the same frame.
6 Rollandet Field, I.F.
This game will never end. Soccer ball flying
through a netless goal knocks the boy flat
and despite predictions the game stops:
Stunned silence then crying and a huge red
spot on the forehead, ice is brought and from
some deep pocket brandy waves beneath nose,
burns throat and stomach. The cold makes
all of it worse and the men mumble about
pupil size. Who among them remembers
their own name? What sort of question for a
boy left gasping and alive by the monkey bars?
Indeed he remembers and utters it-
he wishes his name was a talisman. Instead
it rings madly inside him for fifteen years.
7
The chessboard is deep in thought. Father is
playing black, son chose the opening,
set the tone of the conversation and
now if juris doctor Wallace Stevens
were here he would surely say the chessboard
is the struggle of two minds and one mind
and the knight poised to kill in the center
is the dream of the son to the father.
We would learn of trees and lamps huddled
near the scene to attend the game, the pindrop
ticking of a clock in the house somewhere.
Too late for that now. Instead the game will
never end, is the only game they ever
played, means nothing and everything at once.
8 Jackson Hole
Snowdrop on still peak at dawn. Left breathless
from the climb up Mt Rendezvous which we
always called Ren dezz voose for fun. If you
climb it the tram ride down is free, not bad
for a summer morning tryst with health.
These tanned yuppies in fancy, useless outdoor
gear eye us warily as we hop the rail
and make for coffee in the gift shop.
None of this ever happened, but it could have
in someone else's memoir, the bonding sweat
of verticality, the risk that life
could be suddenly more than the grinding horde.
I climbed this mountain once and found nothing-
scrub, clatter, the jay lonely for the worm.
9
His name rang inside him for fifteen years.
We too are one project, one dispersal
from source into groundwater. The taproot
divides us into veins of the same thirst.
it will never do to have no rules,
no endpoint to the game. We know death
and suspect it to be the absolute
but our dreams, father, of the dogs piled
incorruptible in the cattle car.
Leadlined coffin. Who better to answer
and tell us our name. They bay in the night
and the wind carries their trace. Elements
divided into safe unsafe, well unwell
at the terminal within you. Harsh luck
10
to be the one in charge of such pitiful fates.
Hands coursing over the data, the body's
meaning lost within the chorus of mind.