----- Original Message -----
From: "Halvard Johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 12:40 PM
Subject: Sonnet: The Jinx Is On
Sonnet: The Jinx Is On
I still feel like I’m in a dream. Misdirection and other
anxieties overtake me. Americans in Erbil arrest
Iranians at an increasingly rapid rate. The jinx is on.
Space probes on Mars, they say, are looking for
the wrong forms of life. Good dreams, not nightmares,
for the first time in years. Everything here is alive.
I’ll try less clonazepam and more of the other stuff.
Sentenced in absentia for crimes against pizzeria
managers, he took refuge on Mogamigawa, a Japanese
oil tanker soon to collide with the USS Newport News.
Zoo animals on Prozac, it’s been found, still chase
their tails for hours on end. Lawyers representing
detainees at Guantánamo, now on a federal hit list
despite good faith efforts to have their names expunged.
Hal
Halvard Johnson
================
Halvard, I like this better than any of your previous "Sonnets." More open
texture, more assimilable. The different facts - subjective and objective,
different areas and magnitudes of being - are made to float at the same
level, like toys in a bathtub. The poem seems to be about impending
collision, but the one that occurs ("Sentenced in absentia" etc.) seems
easy, graceful. And then the emotional center of the poem, the image that
remains, is that of chasing one's tail. Excellent poem, disturbing, not
only because of its timeliness.
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