The Circle

In October, we planted irises in a circle,
that shape -- for us -- that most resembles time,
irony-arced and forever bent on blind return.
In the Spring, they'll break the ground and be in being
the moral of our story, reminding our memories
of ourselves and of how our history is still repeating.

Our lives together mimic perennials and history, repeating
the forgotten beginnings of a nowhere-ending circle.
We orbit each other with memories of one another's memories.
We decorate our days with the bruises of bad times.
We forget that a poultice lies at hand, and being
who we are, we to the same old path return.

You have left and I have left and always we return,
not for ourselves, nor the other, but for the repeating
of what we have come to know of simply being.
Again and again we reshape the tired circle;
reformers of a sagging, amorphous shape in time,
of a black hole where no light escapes, where our memories

commune in the ethereal field of all selective memories.
We choose only what reinforces our return
to what we know best, to the mercy of time,
which is not biased and does not linger in its repeating.
If we could march to the noble rhythm of the noble circle
we might find its wholeness in our own being.

But instead we plant irises, surrogates of our being,
metaphors that each year break through our frozen memories
and remind us that we too are part of the circle,
yet removed and sputtering on the outer rim of return,
fated by our faults and by our habits of repeating
failure-doomed attempts to stretch the arc of time.

But can it be that all lessons get learned in due time,
that everything converges with its ideal in being,
that only through the haze of sorrowful repeating
can we find the life that's worth our memories?
Must we remain hurled and helpless in our return
to the force that pins us to this circle?

Let us forget prior time. Let us plant new memories.
Let us opt for being glad of their repeating.
Let us true the circle and greet ourselves as we return.

From Stars to Whiteness to Words

One summer midnight when I was young
(sleeping-bag cocooned in the woods
behind our house), I stared up --
through the silhouetted leaves
of a giant pin-oak --
into the clear, incomparable vastness
of speckled night.

Soon I was falling, falling up
into an enormous carapace of darkness,
pulled bodily away from the earth,
yet crushed as well,
strained through dimensions of thought
for which I was ill-equipped and fearful.
The magnetism of each pinhole of a star
sucked me through the sieve
of countless light-years.

Now as a grown man,
no longer afraid of the dark,
and resigned to implications of the infinite,
I feel the same fear I felt that summer
long ago. The scope of the unwritten,
or the to-be-written, is unmitigated;
too many words and too many choices,
too many stars, and paths replete,
with ignominious doom, too much darkness
like too much whiteness. And worst of all,
where to begin, where to end?

An abyss of whiteness, relative and demeaning,
awaits causation's jab of context.
A page of white light
blinds with its ghost-glow
of long-ago imploded word-stars.

In beginning: if all mass has energy
and all energy has mass,
then the smallest speck of the first letter
of the first word
is incumbent upon what energy,
what mass? Idea, perhaps --
matriarch of all else, swimming
through an ocean of irreducible mystery.

And in ending: all this considered,
how do these words ever get to this page?
Is its whiteness -- like the stars --
the light that glows
from the words that aren't even there?

When Mourning Blooms

Grief no longer bends him in half.
No more does anger spin him around
like a fool. He no longer weeps
at the weekend walls or shakes his fists
at the stupid moon. Gone are his days
of tossing bourbon onto his fiery pain.
Years ago, he spread his wife's ashes in the
woods where he'd often walked with her,
where once they wed and later mused
about "the little time that's left."
Now each spring and summer, she borders
the sylvan paths he walks.
Ashes transmogrified -- like the phoenix
flowering -- she rises anew from the black
mud of winter: in a clearing, beside the
marsh and among the trees, where bird-foot
violets and ironweed once insisted their colors
of sorrow between his memories
of radiation burns and chemo bruises.
Now, the bell-blossoms of leatherleaf and
teaberry toll their knell for him: no cheap rattle
of death, but the breezy sound-dance
of blessed spirits speeding off to Elysium.
So this year, as each year, bleeding hearts
and buttercups, loosestrife and smartweed,
soft rush and speedwell
leave little room in his healing heart
for woundwort and bittersweet
to ever find him mocked again.

^

Biography

John Sokol is a writer and painter living in Akron, OH. His poems have appeared in America, Antigonish Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, New Millennium Writings, The New York Quarterly, and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have Appeared in Akros, Descant, Mindscapes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Redbook, and other journals. One of his stories has been translated into Danish, and, another, into Russian. His drawings and paintings have been reproduced on more that thirty-five book covers. His chapbook, "Kissing the Bees," winner of the 1999 Redgreene Press Chapbook Competition, is available through Amazon.com