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A Sonot at Easter: “Come out of the cave…”
Back in the early Nineties of last century (!) when I wrote this poem, the fashion among many Canadian (at least) poets was to write sonnet sequences. By chance, one day, I wrote a poem (“I know the Aurora Borealis” in Grand Gnostic Central) that happened to have fourteen lines. That chance (which to my ear happily rhymes with ‘chants’) occurrence began an ongoing, half-satirical series of accidentally-fourteen-line poems I called variously over the years “soughknots” (literally “air-knots”) and here “sonots” (so not sonnets!).
Its being Easter Sunday brought to mind the opening line and title of another sonot from Ladonian Magnitudes, “Come out of the cave…”, a poem marked by if not marking the emergence of sociality with the warmer days of spring. Of course, now, with the social distancing imposed by Covid-19, getting out into the warmer sunshine is more delayed than it was in 1992, but, then, the poem wanders through art and memory, too, where we can all sojourn until we emerge from this present staid-of-emergency.
“Come out of the cave…”
Come out of the cave
Spring’s first cold night
After an afternoon on the Thing with George
Embryons desséchés and six Gnosiennes, followed by Sonatine bureaucratique and Le Picadilly in the air
This time the third
I think of the natural periodical ecstasy
We call sleep
And consequently dream
Washing and drying the dishes
After the red cabbage, letcho, and potatoes sour-style
Everything put away in place for tomorrow
I pour the hot milk into the yoghurt jars
Remembering measuring solutions in Chemistry
Certain of the results
For the love of Dante
Filed under: poems | Tags: Dante, poems, poetry, poetry recordings
Comments (1) Every Easter I read through Dante’s Divine Comedy, and when I’m teaching, the Inferno holds centre spot in a course I try to give every Winter term, “Go to Hell!”.
That love for Dante and the Commedia makes its way into my poetry, too. A reader sensitized to this fact will fill a big basket of easter eggs reading through my books, published and unpublished.
Rarely, my love for his work is expressed outright, like in this short poem, “The book I can’t read closed beside me…”, that you can hear, here:
Of course, you’ll get even greater pleasure reading through the Commedia outloud over Easter week: the Inferno, Good Friday through to Easter Sunday morning; the Purgatory, from Easter Sunday to Easter Wednesday; then begin the Paradiso Easter Thursday and ascend at your leisure!
You can hear the Commedia in Italian and English translation, at the Princeton Dante Project, here.
Poeta Doctus 