23 Sonnets
Dave Malone
Smashwords Edition
2nd Revised Edition
ISBN (EPUB): 978-0-9667744-7-4
Copyright © 2011 by Dave Malone
This book, currently out of print, was originally published by Bliss Station Publishing,
Cabool, MO, 1999.
Discover other titles by Dave Malone at Smashwords.com:
Spring in Love
Under the Sycamore
Poems to Love and the Body
1
You don’t know the little things about my heart.
I don’t know your shifting moods in spring’s season.
Your sleepless nights, I can only guess at the reason—
How your body lies awake with thoughts of primrose starts.
I never knew how to plan my flowerbeds like a chart—
To hold green life, to water and nurture, all plants pleasing.
On a Saturday, you give me bulbs, your smile easy,
Your laugh, like the bee balm, covers me until we part.
But I wonder what latitude it is we chart,
Among these wild flowers, the stars, the seasons
Because we drift away without reason,
To be country fog at night, blacktop miles apart.
You’ve never seen my thriving, gardening start.
I’ve never seen the moods you hide in this season.
And we may never know the beds of love, their reason
Or how they’re charted, planted, in the other’s heart.
2
After seeing you, I drive the long way home
Through rolling, Ozark hills, the winding lane lined
With purple redbuds tight and forsythia finds,
Glowing against town streets and giant oaks.
When home, I abandon reason and car door chimes
To cart your hyacinth and marigold
Into my house, and over supper, alone,
I stuff my lazy Susan with buds entwined.
My house smells like a flower garden thanks to your time.
My eyes sprout shoots, my wrists purple into twilight tome.
And are you not among this dusk, this garden, my home,
Your body, history, and garden here pantomimed?
3
You said, “Red wine for me tonight.”
It chills me to think of it, the wine
Sliding between your lips and drowning in your tongue,
Your throat open, the Cabernet far-flung.
I like to think about your body tingling,
Your breath and wine and blood together mingling.
I like to think of goose bumps on your flesh.
What happens to your body, the heat in your breast.
I want to sit with you when you’ve had too much—
To hold your drowsy head in my lap and brush
Your hair until it shines, to hear you whisper
Words, not always said, inside your deepest murmur.
4
You and I know about twisting tornadoes.
We’ve seen the terrific trenches they bulldoze.
When I grab your wrists into mine, I know you know
About the starkest landscape, where nothing grows.
Your former lover has journeyed hands
Travelled, spotted wrong turns. Hand stands
At love he juked like a rodeo clown can
Nothing left in a tornado-stripped man.
But you and I understand what lingers
After circus tricks and immaturity.
You steal away on lunch hours to meet me
In the city park, a sweet harbinger.
5
Tristan and Isolde live inside our heads,
But I would never say it to you in bed
Though the story rises up the night we drink
With friends when you and I pound Cab by instinct.
We have already toasted to love,
Which leaves our friends behind who now joke,
“You’ve drunk your death”—less toast, more shout,
But our glasses already prove bottomed out.
We’ve lived the medieval story outside the bedroom
Now to find our misplaced hands under tables.
I wonder if we’ve become a wine maelstrom
And Tristan and Isolde aren’t resigned to fable.
6
I want to take up more space in the universe.
I want more muscle mass, my T-shirts tight.
I want to hoe and trench and weed until night,
Until my body’s strained, all muscle terse.