Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DECEMBER: A SONNET SEQUENCE, by FLORENCE KIPER FRANK



Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DECEMBER: A SONNET SEQUENCE, by                    
First Line: She thought, 'now I am vulnerable to two!' . . .
Last Line: As she stood furred within the month december.
Subject(s): Ignorance; Dullness; Stupdity


I
She thought, "Now I am vulnerable to two!" . .
Still with a trivial gesture she denied
The wounding, the dark wounding in her side;
Rejecting tragedy, disdaining too
That this could so humiliate, subdue,
Who had a humorous and a delicate pride!
"My soul is an aristocrat!" she cried --
"Aloof, has nothing of the parvenu."
And then she hated him, this casual lover
Who could so fuse her body at a touch.
"Me, the essential Me, I'll not give over!" --
Rejoiced to think she was withholding much,
And bit her hands to think that she could give
Her very life curved in his body to live!

II
She, knowing that this guilty love must end,
Perplexed herself with "guilty" and forswore
The phrases that had prated thus before,
Smiling a wry smile at solutions penned
By formalists -- yet those who would defend
Her own bewildered heart mistrusting more.
For comradely these two come through the door,
And they are friends and each her darling friend.
And in an evening where the shadows twist
The low-beamed ceiling with capricious gloom,
She idly notes the beating at her wrist,
And laughs between them in a firelit room. . . .
Outside, the circling of the windy snow
Forever and forever, she thinks, will blow.

III
The child who made their mutual daylight sane,
The life that from a double stream is fed,
The dear one of their early marriage bed --
If she might bring him forth again in pain,
Be heavy with him, be heavy with him again,
Drugged with his sweetness and made dizzy with dread!
The woman is weighted so, so quieted --
Forsakes the plotted wanderings of the brain.
And holding him, she vowed it could not be,
This tumult come upon her unaware --
"Now I shall make a girdle girdling three!" --
And pressed her kisses on his eyes, his hair;
And thought that this might be another child . . .
And at the thought her heart grew strange and mild.

IV
"Some day this body will be excellent mind!"
She mused, "and mind in body will try to know,
With happy logic and with tolerance slow.
Some day this body will be quiet and kind,
And all the hurt of the blood will be defined.
I shall be glad," she said, "to think -- and so
Find God within the intellectual glow,
Who else have wandered in ecstasy and blind.
"I am too young. But that will be a fault
Corrected, and that I am quick with tears,
And gay; and the intemperate assault
Of life will be defeated by the years.
And starkness has its rapture, and the peace
Of saints who feel their stripes and are at ease!"

V
She strode a wintry way with stinging light,
Treading snow-flurries softly into the air.
And she was warm and free, and had no care
For anything save that the fields were white;
And laughed to think that men debated right,
Spoke sagely of women, thought they were aware
Of sin. Now fools and erudite were bare,
For sudden as fools she saw the erudite.
And this was good and this alone was good --
That the air bodied deftly her clear breath.
"This hardened earth is in creative mood,
Is sharp with life, inimical to death!"
And she stood pleased, upon a shining hill,
That all the roads could lie so clean and still.

VI
She named him fiercely alien, would redeem
Her charted self, remembered a remorse . . .
Yet is he intermingled with the force
Of darkened being, beats within the dream.
Whence is the stream, whence the entangled stream!
What birds drop thickly, brood above its course!
And where the hidden, the uncertain source,
Bearing the glance and whirling of the gleam!
Now dimly does she strive to disengage
Herself from him and phantasy of him,
And shaken with the Dionysian rage --
The drowning face, the breath, the rhythmic limb --
Suddenly finds the centre of all light,
Blind in creative immanence of night.

VII
She sought the park, the restaurant, the street,
Purposed a solace in the busy ways
Of minutes documented into days,
Of dolls that urge a metronomic beat.
There is a meaning in the moving feet --
But what? she said -- and light creates a haze . . .
Perhaps she'd like to see the newest plays --
And there are effigies of friends to greet.
She wondered at the plans of women and men,
Desired to feel what this one thinks or that,
Knew a sweet choking at the throat . . . and then
She stared through glass at a most rakish hat,
Remembering there was something to remember,
As she stood furred within the month December.





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