Sonnet for trying (and failing) to escape the sonnet
By Claire Buck
Why is it that I always come back here
to fourteen lines of interlocking rhyme
in steady rows of iambs. Like the fear
(or is it love?) that draws me, every time
I visit home, back to my childhood church
the sonnet pulls me in. Is form the tie
that binds the spheres in orbit or the lurch
of black-hole gravity where crushed stars die?
And sometimes I think if I could crack the pattern open, plunge
into it with my fingernails and dig out the pit and toss it aside, I would find
that there really was no order beneath it all, no reason
for roadkill and hurricane wreckage and war and the nights I lay staring at the uneven paint
where the wall meets my bedroom ceiling while sadness sat
in the center of my chest, but even then, my heart beat out the same quiet meter, even now,
though I resist it, still my spirit finds
there’s peace in pattern even as it binds.
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