Eric T. Racher
Sonnet in search of Francesco Petrarca, by way of Wyatt and Surrey
love acornstart embodied emergentacornproperties of brains
reigns then dendritically axonally and dwells heartresidence
thence armed reveals itself its dwelling upon the face
place placed standard raised there encamped
stamped the mind upon the brain upon acorn love and suffering taught
thought-besieged will reasonshamereverence restrain
painladen stain desire’s heart’s acornstart livehope liveburn stillborn
scorneth and displeasure taketh nerve audacity in us there
wherewithall love flees forestfulls frainetto on robur rootstock heartroot rootheart
start love leaves our acornstart trembles cries
lies there with him hiding does not appear
fear yes does love what I
but lie him in extremis live fight die do
who loving dies is acornstart heart bends well ends ends of
Two sonnets in memory of George Oppen
1.
If poetry, much like philosophy, when genuine, as Bunge said, should lighten and enlighten (That, shared quiddity, perhaps), not burden and obscure, your silence was a poem. Cabinet-maker’s hand along the grain. The wood that’s worked does not reveal itself in poems. Ampersand & horseshoe, symptom, symbol, sign, love-fraught
and meaning-haunted, show themselves (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι.), & indicate what’s not (But kin?). Flesh and rock and hunger (Here, appearance.), there beyond the window… Here within—a moment: still and quiet angel, terse, limato, measured ratio, a curse.
2.
In limine. Pine desk. Pine chair. And from this distance thinking toward you. Clear, the night. Wood grain. The name refuses to become an icon. Trembling flame. Its light seems slight. Recalcitrant, the world refuses to enter language. Silence. Silence, thus. Late February, 2022. A silence hovers in the air. In us.
A missile intervened. And now that misremembered quote: ‘Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still [And this:] itself among the rubble.’ Still. A thickening. The riddled sonnet strives to bore the drift. O what will bring us back to shore?
On the ideology of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence considered as languages, or, that Man [sic] as a rhizomatic animal desires those multiplicities which are his (im)perfection
Let us define a language, ℒ, as such:
a semiotic system made of 1)
a set of signs, the composition; 2)
the environment of ℒ, which is the set
of natural and social items that
expressions in the language may refer to;
and 3) the structure of the language, thus
the set of all relations, which includes
syntactic and semantic ones, as well
as others both internal to the system
and interfacing with the wider world
of nature, culture and society.
And yet the tongue’s possessed of such quick fire
as turns to ash abstractions of desire.
Eric T. Racher lives and works in Riga, Latvia. He is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Five Functions Defined on Experience: For Jay Wright (2021).