On tour last week, I read at the Monongalia Arts Center (MAC), for the first time publicly, the crown of sonnets from QUINTESSENCE known as "The Sonnets of Grace":
Than any spring of deep
earth! Beauty sure!
You are the nature of
passion and peace,
argent angel made
manifest to cure
the sorrows of my brittle
soul, to cease
my greytint memories and
bring colour:
Fields of bright blossoms
to the horizon!
Fed by the cold mineral
water, pure
as a virgin’s first kiss,
a kind reason
to shield the light of
brisant meander
that draws our eyes from
the prize of real joy
to find kindred soul to
inspire wonder
and break open my heart
as an envoy
of fantastic land of
dreams envisioned.
I shall surrender worlds
unimagined!
I shall surrender worlds
unimagined,
to pale the Duke’s gift
to his courtesan.
You are more than flesh
and fantasy, sinned
and again, altar for my
desire, plan
of a seduction to the
royal line.
Temptress arcane and
alabaster, heat
meets a sweet defeat in your
fire divine.
Your flesh is as soft as
angel’s kiss, sweet
and otherworldly. Penetrative promise
and the persuasion of
your innocence,
oil and water heated to
precipice
with the true language of
romance, defense
I tear aside the lace and
silk, false skins,
abdicate my throne and
atone my sins
Abdicate my throne and
atone my sins,
ruling in façade, fallen
force majeure
to make request to test
the truth of skins
in contact to merge,
sacred and impure,
lightning in your mouth,
your lips are prophets
in the desert of all
false lovers’ dreams,
the blasphemy of chalk
oaths, epithets,
the shadow of panthers
and curdled creams.
Ruling from the boudoir,
iron scepter
and velvet throne. Lesser immolation
to sheathe heat against
the pagan specter
that makes mockery of
subjugation.
I would lay aside my red
cassock, sinned
to be within your grace,
to be the wind.
To be within your grace,
to be the wind
that passes through you,
leaving trace eddies
that empower and deflower
your heart, spinned
dust devils riding out
the decades breeze
and cyclone, hurricane
and zephyr blown
from the clouds of your
beauty to summon
all manner of mischief
and legend known
to future generations as
some one
who inspired poetry and
envy, lust
and worship of pale
divinity brought
to life and placed among
us to entrust
us with the secrets of
the holy, taught
in emancipated flesh,
feral skins,
in a desert of barren
bones that pins.
In a desert of barren
bones that pins
you to the ground. The sound of the sorrows
of failed lovers, timid
tale of the sins
of inadequate passions,
tomorrows
cast away for the moment,
yet unmoved
by the logic of the heart
or the touch
of hands and glands that
had not planned unproved
strategies, dependent on
blind luck such
that even the gods laugh
derisively.
You drew me here to make
my sacrifice
on your pale flesh, the
spill of white wine, free
of constraints that might
taint the boatman’s price,
shackled by lips that
kiss and hearts that pound
the bravest and the
boldest to the ground.
The bravest and the
boldest to the ground,
bound and tormented,
rebellion fomented
in the name of a goddess,
an unsound
faith based on predisposed
and demented
oaths of belief, grief
for lost years and tears
shed red in crevices of
memory.
Cinnabar sins, we are yet
crippled by fears
that grind us down like
harpy’s emery,
sharpening the poignant
poniard that will
penetrate more than
willing hips, the rush,
the crush, the flush of
release, little kill
and faint awareness of
endorphin push
through to paramour of
the romanesque,
we are flesh and blood
and the arabesque.
We are flesh and blood
and the arabesque.
Inconsistency, our
consistent trait,
our beauty and grace
conquers the grotesque
remnants of our sod-bound
uprising, fate
and the sound of dripping
wax as time burns.
But your soul is, itself,
beautiful.
Time may mark its passage
in twists and turns
that lay tracks around
your eyes, terrible
demolitions of our bodies
and minds,
cursing us our mortality
and more.
Even stilled and cold, I
would hold the binds
of ancient oaths to your
flesh and heart, lore
of my mythos, passion
will not unbound
in visions from Poe and
Lovecraft, each sound.
In visions from Poe and
Lovecraft, each sound,
darkness lingers,
stingers in the green fields
where lovers would lay,
only to be struck, bound
by dark forces, where
hope to madness yields.
I seek a deeper prick
than mere nettles,
a transient insanity of
blood heated
on and in your altar of
where settles
only the red blood and
white wine, meted
injustice for the soft to
the savage,
a passion play of hungry
religion
taking communion in forms
that ravage
one another, the merging
division
decreed by design, heroes
picaresque
echoing in chilled depths
of souls, grotesque.
Echoing in chilled depths
of souls, grotesque
though our feral
entanglement may seem,
it is not quanta or the
picturesque
pretense of an ardent
virgin’s wet dream,
filled with illusions,
misapprehensions
about how it is all
supposed to work
when we merge to purge
solitude, tensions
uncoiled then soiled in a
three-ring cirque
of your surrender and
your demands, made
and unmade, the linen,
immolative,
consume, itself in shame
for what was said
in the ancient tongues of
lovers, suasive
in both silence and in
eloquence due,
with the malformations we
are heir to.
With the malformations we
are heir to
it is miracle that we
comprehend
the frailest of our
failings, hearts passed through
the baptism of our
saddest times, defend
our cynicism with doubt
and the cold
calculus of our barnacled
souls, hard
as Pharaoh’s damnation, denying
bold
prophecy and the word of
God, long scarred
by our own illusions that
we are fit
to pit wits against the
fates themselves, mad
with our own pain and
gaining no acquit
in insanity pleas, lost
hearts that had
fair hope to re-enter the
grand circuit:
affection and desire, the
live wire.
Affection and desire, the
live wire,
funeral pyre, the spire
of the temple
we throw down from,
fulfilling the desire
to both give and take the
waking, simple
in the equation, but the
prayers are long
and complicated, speaking
in the tongues
old before mortals messed
it all up, song
of Solomon and Kama
Sutra, rungs
of Jacob’s ladder,
electrocuting
inadequate supplicants on
their quest,
their pilgrimage, purging
the polluting
perfume of forgotten
blossoms to test
purest of scalds; skalds
speak our legend, true,
that grounds us to the
beauty we are due.
That grounds us to the
beauty we are due,
and this finds our paths
a laughing torment.
between the poles and
pages we wage new
dogmas: Who we are and deserve, torment
of our inner selves and
shelves of scribblings
of mad philosophies of
God and love
that burn away and give
to the nibblings
of the vermin that infest
us, above
the marquee moments we
aspire to,
demanding our due and
paying our dues
in currency of colding
kisses, true
to our pretensions, our
hearts we will bruise
before bursting into
eloquent fire,
letting slip flip
platitudes of desire.
Letting slip flip
platitudes of desire.
More on my lips than
words, your sweet essence
drips in sated statement
of rutting gyre
as you cry out to prove
that my presence
meets your criteria for
further feasts.
I make no command, no
barter demand
of treasure for treasure,
for heated beasts
do their natures and I
will gladly stand
glad to enter whatever
covenant
you offer me, patience is
the virtue
of the lover. Reticence resident
shall vacate to make room
for me, anew.
Here is proof of my
inspiration, sure.
There is truth in my
eloquence, more pure.
There is truth in my
eloquence, more pure
than any tantalus flood,
a spring struck
by a prophet to
demonstrate the cure
of despair is hope and
prayer, beyond luck
in the toss of the dice,
the price of fools.
Luck is but persistence
in random
models of chaos theory,
dreary rules
describing a universe
near awesome
as the peace of your
presence, evidence
of something grander than
science, the glim
of the less dim options
over the fence
into infinite plains of
daisies, rim
of oceans we swim to,
more sweet and pure
than any spring of deep
earth! Beauty sure!
I shall surrender worlds
unimagined.
Abdicate my throne and
atone my sins
to be within your grace,
to be the wind
in a desert of barren
bones that pins
the bravest and the
boldest to the ground.
We are flesh and blood
and the arabesque
in visions from Poe and
Lovecraft, each sound
echoing in chilled depths
of souls, grotesque
with the malformations we
are heir to.
Affection and desire, the
live wire
that grounds us to the
beauty we are due,
letting slip flip
platitudes of desire.
There is truth in my
eloquence, more pure
than any spring of deep
earth! Beauty sure!
William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
