The Starry Images You Can't Resist: An American Sonnet, as introduced within a public-private correspondence
Dear far-off friendly one,
the incidently fiery one,
the verbally inspiring one:
Today I started writing you,
but I could not get one word through
without this public-private sonnet coming into view.
What can I do
but send it now to you,
while seeking public critics for a competent review?
I will omit your name from it, of course,
so only Fay (my patient wife) and I will know
you are this poem's fertile, primal, muse-like source
as words to you persistently inside me grow and glow and flow.
I hope, perchance, you like the work, in any case,
because it represents, perhaps, my fervent chase
to meet Your Grace's likely graces face-to-face
outside the not-so-innocently glaring, staring, blaring marketplace.
The Starry Images You Can’t Resist
An American Sonnet
Like starry images you can’t resist but wish you never saw,
because they strap adrenalin and suck it through your straw,
your current picture haunts me, taunts me, starlight, day and night:
what can I do to reach you, teach you starlight in daylight?
Not what I barely know, bestowed into your star-lit sight,
but toward you breathing teething wind beneath your star-lust flight,
as helplessly again I feel you suffer, buffer tougher gain
when starlight moves through daylight back to twilight’s subtle pain.
But starlight cycles both reveal, conceal, and often smother
the images employed, enjoyed, decoyed to-ward each other:
Should I pretend to be . . . your friend, another son, or father?
Or you, for me, . . . a sister, daughter, or another mother?
I dare not touch your picture texture lest it shed a tear,
and my be-lov-ed vintage image linkage smudge and smear.
Max Havlick
Friday morning, December 6, 2013
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Copyright 2013 by the Max Havlick School, Villa Park, Illinois 60181-1938, all rights reserved,
"both valuing and treasuring each person's life
as if it were a vice-less, priceless work of art."