Sweet treatises upon your auburn hair,
Encomiums on dinner, dance and dress,
And epigrams let fall from each caress:
These are the tributes, love, I daily bear.
Deploying every stratagem of craft,
I use (perhaps abuse) internal rhyme,
The syntax torture into sense sublime,
While metaphors weigh anchor fore and aft.
Alas, you find it all too intricate,
Declaring that, with each succeeding verse,
I only make the situation worse:
It isn’t you I love at all, but wit.
Yet hear me out. I cherish wit, I do,
But that’s because it bubbles just for you.
| Copyright © 2023 by Eric Meub Eric Meub is a California poet & architect. |
Eric, this sonnet, of all the sonnets you’ve written, might be the main one scholars in future years put on a pedestal along with Shakespeare’s best. I need to find some rich vellum on which to calligraph its lines and a frame and glass to fix it for mounting in an entryway. I wish David Lance Goines were still alive to do the calligraph, for the version to be hung in a San Francisco art museum.
ReplyDeleteMorris, you are too kind! I used to love Goines' beautiful graphics. I lived directly behind Chez Panisse in Berkeley in the 70s, whose posters he designed. I could smell the most enticing aromas from my balcony. Every month or so, I would scrape enough money together for an actual meal there. Thank you, as always, for your encouragement!
ReplyDeleteI am literally thrilled to learn you lived very near Chez Panisse and enjoyed Goines’ posters even before we discovered them (however it was, exactly, that we did discover them).
DeletePlease tell me (either by public comment or private correspondence) about your years in Berkeley. Were you for example, a student? UC Berkeley? I can identify with a student’s “scraping money together” – it was a grand day for me a decade earlier when I’d go to Yale Station (the university post office) and find an envelope from my parents containing a couple of $10 bills.
"The syntax torture into sense sublime," IS sublime!
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