Earthlings we are, so clouds we keep making
last in the sky as long as the light,
thoughts tracing the same thoughts at flight
in the afterglow of an undertaking.
Say some man leaves his wife. Say she leaves.
Said man sees the sun set through winter smaze,
though no orb sinks into distant waves,
it is the spin of the earth he perceives.
Despite quakes and slopes plants grow straight
up on this planet. We walk about, change spheres,
gravity keeping up and down athwart
and mooring the sun as the solstice nears.
Aren’t there decent grounds to celebrate
when bodies slip their bonds and fly apart?
*
The seminal event for this sonnet, the psychological instant which engendered it, took place in Berkeley in 1982. It belongs to a series of #divorce poems, attempts to transform an incontrovertibly leaden personal experience into even scrapings of compensatory poetic gold.