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The Allure of Cliché: A Sonnet

Andy 1 min read
poetry
Royalty-Free photo: sky, dusk, darkness, evening, waters, sea, light, panorama, ship, sailing vessel, lighting
Royalty-Free photo: sky, dusk, darkness, evening, waters, sea, light, panorama, ship, sailing vessel, lighting

Neither the moon nor stars alone allure.
Celestial lips may good metaphors make,
yet we can’t long mere metaphor endure:
we seek cliché for companionship's sake.

Were this duvet draped over you and I
I’d have no need to exercise my mind,
for it’s the body not the mind that dies.
If only I could the perfect words find

I might countenance life's great solitude:
hard as love may be, it is harder to write.
Still I write you into my arms, O crude
reprieve from those interminable nights

which beckon their own alluring relief!
What does the drowning man desire most?
Are we not all drowning in quiet grief
like shipwrecks ever-longing for the coast?

I long for you is no dreadful cliché:
all poems fail; all vessels sail away.

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Foul Weather Friend

I am a foul weather friend, dear poetry.
I have paid you no mind when spring rains
wash clean the marble statues of gods
and a cheery sun
reads aloud your sweet inscriptions,
nor when awed children skip through museums,
nor accordion-song fills the subway,
nor a stranger does another stranger
a kindness,
nor blueberries are so ripe they bleed sugar,
nor velvet chocolate cake knocks you dizzy with love,
nor, after making love, my wife’s perfume
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First Game

There in the back of the closet
of the room that was once my room
and is now a museum to childhood
is a photo, slightly curled with age,
of ten scrawny kids in awkward poses,
baseball gloves stretched out as if
to catch a ball just out of view;

and there in left field am I, shielding
the sun with my glove, tracking
the fly ball, an ice cream truck playing
its melodies, metal bats ringing on
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Fulfillment

May the road to fulfillment
be long and steep and smeared
with fog, moss-lined, leaf-strewn,
rockslide-prone, oft-closed for repair,
haunted, the darker the better, no sun-
or moon-light, bulbs of streetlights,
if any, smashed, filaments exposed
to the cold like nerves, scarred by
lightning, by overturned freight trucks,
by mudslides left uncleared, the only
life or light that of your high beams,
flickering, weak like a voice shouting
praise at a waterfall, how beautiful,
how

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