a certain indefinite number of Petrarchan “sonnets”: №159

Ordinarily I don’t publish so much poetry at Theoria-press, and instead try to provide mostly essays with an odd poem or sonnet occasionally interspersed among them. But the Muse’s visits have outstripped my ability to keep pace with prose pieces so readers who prefer essays should peruse the archives of this site, which are replete with them. Also, I should acknowledge that the formal aspect of this “Petrarchan sonnet” is liberally conceived so it’s unnecessary to alert me that at “Petrarchan sonnet” with 19 lines and an unorthodox rhyme-scheme is like a quartet with 5 members, though reproof is always welcome from anyone who feels so moved.

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THROUGH HALF-LIT corridors, your course you steer,
which open out to rolling autumn fields 
by premonitions led, to which you yield,
and led by wishes to escape your fear;
aloft a lantern by whose light you peer
but still the land is by the twilight sealed
like so many letters to your eye concealed
their presence sensed and yet they don’t appear 
a folded page, a voice you cannot hear,
whose meanings to your mind refuse to yield
yet all that’s hidden shall be soon revealed:
there is another world, but it is here
there is another time, but it is now
and silence the eternal womb of sound
and so when with your hand you drive the plough
and leave new furrows in the ageless ground
the Earth is parted as by tight-bound prow 
look not behind you: nothing will be found
for everything that happens happens now

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