Hypnotic scales that seem to be the sea.The pianist plays identical notesa dozen times, evokes a dozen shadesand shifting harmonies, as the sea turnsin its bed transposing ordinarywind into dragons. Meanwhile I’m a one-note wonder, my earnest tug chug-chuggingthrough the harbor while the sky scrolls and scoursitself for stars, hard to find as sailorsin a typhoon. How fortunate they areto die that way, drowning in God, while thoseof us still here plink-plink and go unheard,as the child’s cry was unheard on the ark,lost in all the mating howls and bellows.
Sonnet with Ark and Tug
Robert Thomas
Feature Date
- March 9, 2024
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“Sonnet with Ark and Tug” from SONNETS WITH TWO TORCHES AND ONE CLIFF: by Robert Thomas.
Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press on February 21, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Robert Thomas.
The poem originally appeared in Nimrod International Journal, and then in the book published by Carnegie Mellon.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Robert Thomas’s book Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff was published by Carnegie Mellon, like his earlier book Dragging the Lake. His first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham. His novella Bridge was published by BOA Editions and received the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction. He has received an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, and lives with his wife in Oakland, California. You can find him at https://robertthomaspoems.com
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Carnegie Mellon University
"A formally constrained poem that brilliantly manages to sound anything but. A paean to longing, to the mysteries of love and time and distance, 'Negligee and Hatchet,' as its title suggests, is full of contraries and surprises—swamp pop and Mick Jagger, grotto and tomb, Aphrodite and caramel corn... the poet's language turns and dazzles with every line."
— Kim Addonizio
"Irrepressible, seemingly inexhaustible in invention, this exhilarating poetic tour-de-force demonstrates that if you couple things that don't go together at all, the sparks of their friction can set the mind on fire. Every sonnet night-dives off a different cliff, torches in hand——one more brilliant, observant, sardonic, intimate, provactive, hilariously meek, than the next; each a metaphoric misalliance creating fresh discoveries, including the infinite ways in which 'no one is ever loved as they deserve.'"
— Eleanor Wilner
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