Three Poems

Sonnet for Owls

I am surrounded by a triangle of owls,
And a deltahedron of owls surrounds them;
Here the forest grows darkest with them
To scare off would-be Lowells.

And though they at some point must move,
This fact with so many facets is difficult to prove;
But I know they have set on every limb,
So I know that they must move.

They are the only letters of the forest that we can understand,
The rest unmetered trees and limbs;
Though here the hoots sound more like howls,
We know they are simply the sounds of their shapes,

Of triangles and circles; and the pattern all ways echoes:
The calls of their symmetrical vowels.
 



Sonnet for Insects

No one I know ever cured an insect,
Save for my grandfather who fed a bee;
But at the start of life’s finality
They all were born almost broken-necked.

Pull the shower door open and inspect,
Step outside in the summer to see,
And sing me a song if you can tell me
How crying has told you what to expect.

A swarm of bees was the sound of sex,
Not the sound of sailors, songs, or seas,
Not the sound of water on tiles or trees.

A life is as long as the bee it hears last.
A fear of songs is a fear of the past,
And a fear of death is a fear of insects.




Roundel for the Moon

The Moon washes on an armpit like soap,
And runs half a day faster than June.
She ceaselessly says one word. Elope.
The Moon.

She is mercury elapsing into a mercury spoon,
A thermometer that travels with a moth-like grope,
An underarm that hides a cocoon.

Imagine her arms upraised like an antelope,
While her light white foot deserts the dune,
With the innocence of a silver-handled jump-rope,
The Moon.


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Tom Will lives in Tennessee. His latest collection of poems, American Cats Are In a Big Country, is available from Farthest Heaven.