agnusde2017’s Substack

Elegn

agnusde2017 — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 01:01:18 GMT

Elegn

Today an afterbirth of autumn leaves
Covers the stripped skeleton of our love’s
Progress. Barren we stand, embracing blank
Space and the ghosts of days we liked to think

Were stamped with leaves of permanence. Our end,
Fruitless and wandering as windtossed sand,
Mocks its makers, yet craves no epitaph
Beyond these syllables which mute my grief.

The pen which wets the womb of poetry
Must also score the crust of memory,
Yielding to the maker a consciousness
Of something bolder, more lasting than loss.

Hence I measure these lines, a testament
To all that is ours and impermanent,
To the daisy that perishes, the snow
That falls and melts, the arc of the rainbow.

I write for them, for you, for me and all
The names of things ugly and beautiful
Which grow under this fatal sheet of sky,
Those heirs to sad, certain mortality

That are the reason for my poet’s song,
The root and stem of all our suffering,
The branch and leaf of all our happiness,
The savage wood through which we each must pass.

----------------------
From Wikipedia:
The Armenian word եղէգն (pronounced eghegn or yelegn in various dialects), which is related to the Greek word elegos ("lament"), literally refers to a reed or a wind instrument made from a reed (like an aulos or oboe). It is not a direct translation of the English concept of "elegance" as a personal quality, but rather an etymological link to the origins of the Western literary term "elegy" (a mournful poem).

This is a very old poem.

It was published in “Lucid Rhythms.”

In the Sixth Month of Desire

agnusde2017 — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 02:00:51 GMT

In the Sixth Month of Desire

Our mountains have not changed, except that you
Are absent, and now I'm trapped by this deadfall
That is crushing my heart. Without you I
Am thrown into fierce desolation, pathless
Wilderness and bitter solitude.
October aspens, crowned in Autumnal gold,

Embrace dense waves of purple shadowed slopes,
And dew-drenched aspergilla wet my grief
With drops of ineluctability,
And my heart is annointed with pure oil
Of sorrow, and the balm of wounded love
Salves fresh scars of insuperable loss.

Beloved, I am offered drugs to numb
This gnawing void -- yes, drugs to flatten sorrow,
But no nepenthe for my crippled heart.
They would cut out my heart and hack the cords
That bind us in this lonesome ache of severance.
They do not know, they cannot understand

That as canyon towhees and thrushes flutter,
And Autumn seeds take flight on passing winds,
And all the world readies itself for Winter
Amid dark, twisted wood of leaf-stripped ash,
It is this grief, it is this pain that cleanses
Memory and binds us yet one to the other.
----------------------------

It is this grief, it is this pain that cleanses
Memory and binds us yet one to the other. Grief and its Gordian knot of pain not only wound and scar, but in a sense they become the final links in that great chain of being which continues to bind us, the living, to the dead.

Hubris Laid Low

agnusde2017 — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:08:59 GMT

Hubris Laid Low

Beloved, how I fought for you, denying
Your numbers, and the nettle wreaths of dying.
I could not save you or buy you more time,
And now, cast down, I cannot even climb
Out of this cloister of amaritude,
Where I tread the black bile of solitude:
A block of carrion for maggot fears,
A fallen lash in streaks of trickling tears.
I saw you take one final breath, a sigh
A quiet sign that told me you would die,
That in the muted glow of the setting sun,
I would walk out into that night alone.
My final kisses would not give back your breath,
Nor could I, humbled, call you back from death.

--------------------------

Where I tread the black bile of solitude: In times gone by, black bile was the humor of sadness and melancholy. The image is suggestive of treading water.

An Autumn Day: Old Tropes in an Old Man's Song

agnusde2017 — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:01:43 GMT

An Autumn Day: Old Tropes in an Old Man's Song

Rugose, I'm cold. The sky is overcast.
In changing light I soon become the past.
In the gray foil sky a wilderness
Of lead cloaks me in loss and bitterness.
This has been the year without a Spring
Or Summer: yet I've heard the thrushes sing
Near where the road-killed squirrel lies,
And the stoic raven tears out its eyes.
Like beads of tumbled jasper, bloody bright,
The squirrel's eyes shine in death's blinding light:
Grief-stains in the ripples of the heart's lake,
Where lovers drown in surges of heartbreak --
Where, yes, I hear the hermit's lonesome song,
Telling me joy is brief, and sorrow long.
------------------------
tumbled jasper: Jasper is polished in a spinning drum that contains a wet aggregate.
the hermit's lonesome song: the hermit's song is that of the hermit thrush.

Migrations

agnusde2017 — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 00:01:21 GMT

Migrations

This morning I looked at long lines of clouds
Over the mountains. As hard as I searched
I could not find the dogs. The humpbacked bison
Had moved to other heavens, and the goats
No longer gamboled through their lapis sky.
No elephants shook the roots of heaven,
And the great crocodile had swam elsewhere.
And the white haired sky-bear had gone to ground.

The peaks seemed a chiseled stone beneath
Heaped-up bolsters of white and steely gray.
The sky, blue, yielded to long granite tubes
That rolled across the basalt-blotted sun,
Smudging a tarnished age of fading gold
With forsaking currents of transience.

Once-teeming sky has been depopulated,
And here, under that foreign emptiness,
Beside a vacant space that once was yours,
I tremble in a psychopompous breeze
That caresses me witn barrenness,
And sharp-edged whinstones of bleak, heartsore loss.

Around me, out of tensioned film, i've blown
A thin-skinned sphere, a membrane separating
Two images beyond projecting flesh.
Outside that incorporeal ball I walk
I drive, talk, smile with affect not too flat,
My hair perhaps a little frowsy, eyes
Sunken puddles in dark, sagging holes.
But on the other side of that refractive film,
In a translucent simultaneity,
In a sub rosa parallel of what
Can only be a shifting insubstantiality,
I am a wounded nerve embalmed in bitter
Amniotic of gall and lidocaine.
I am a one and one diplopia,
An unresolved disjunction and disruption
Of the waves that lap the heart's dark shores.
I am a stone in a drop of vinegar,
Perhaps a gastrolith for some flesh-eating
Scavenger at the doubtful edge of ensoulment,
Where I hear my heart's loon laughing at me,
And I am crushed by loss and finitude.

------------------------------------

The poem hinges on two conceits: the pastime of discerning shapes and figures in cloud formations, and that of blowing soap bubbles.

VII: First Lullaby to Summon Sleep

agnusde2017 — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:01:50 GMT

VII: First Lullaby to Summon Sleep

Come, Sleep, little Lucius, sleepy eyed, coaxes you.
Sleep, come, come, please. Soft Sleep, do not hold back.
Little Lucius sweetly sings to you, dear Sleep:
Come, Sleep, little Lucius sleepy eyed, coaxes you.

Little Lucius calls you to his bed, soft Sleep.
Sugary little Sleep, , soft, tiny Sleep.
To his cradle little Lucius calls you, come,, Sleep.
Sleep, come to the cradle, come, Slneep, please come.
To his cradle baby Lucius calls you,, please, Sleep, come.
Come, please, sleep, come, friend of night, please come.
Little Lucius' pillow calls , his eyes urge you.
Sleep, come, welcome Sleep, Sleep , I pray you, come,
Baby Lucius wants you to hold him, he is nodding.
He nods. I beg you, come. Please,, please, do come.
You'vpe come, good Sleep, kind father of soft restfulness,
You who raise up and heal our troubled selves.
(Pontanus, Naeniae)

----------------
VIII.
Naenia prima
ad somnum provocandum

Somne, veni; tibi Luciolus blanditur ocellis;
somne, veni, venias, blandule somne, veni.
Luciolus tibi dulce canit, somne, optime somne;
somne, veni, venias, blandule somne, veni.
5
Luciolus vocat in thalamos te, blandule somne,
somnule dulcicule, blandule somnicule.
Ad cunas te Luciolus vocat; huc, age, somne,
somne, veni ad cunas, somne, age, somne, veni.
Accubitum te Luciolus vocat, eia age, somne,
10
eia age, somne, veni, noctis amice, veni.
Luciolus te ad pulvinum vocat, instat ocellis;
somne, veni, venias, eia age, somne, veni.
Luciolus te in complexum vocat, innuit ipse,
innuit; en venias, en modo, somne, veni.
15
Venisti, bone somne, boni pater alme soporis,
qui curas hominum corporaque aegra levas

---------------------

In his brief collectiom, Naeniae, Pontano has left us Latin poems fo the children in his life. This is a rare collection, for most of the extant child-oriented Latin poetry consists of epitaphs, grave inscriptions, and laments. Pontano was the learned poet of friendship and domesticity.
Naenia and its collateral form, Nenia, as Pontano used it in his children's poems, is a lullaby or nursery song. The Naeniae are found in Book II Pontano's collection, De Amore Coniugali.

I think that these Naeniae would be a rare delight in any language where one might find them.

The Grave of His Daughter, Lucia Pontana Pontanus is her father, and he grieves at her tomb.

agnusde2017 — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 23:21:07 GMT

The Grave of His Daughter, Lucia Pontana

Pontanus is her father, and he grieves at her tomb.

You left your father, my Lucy, in darkness, after
You, my child, were snatched from light into shadows.
But you have not been snatched into the darkness

Rather have you left that darkness: You shine
In the light of the midday sun. I look on my
Daughter in the heavens: do you, daughter, behold
Your parent? Or does your father grasp illusions?
My child, the consolation of a wretched death,
This grave, covers you: Feeling cannot enter
Into your dust. If any part of you survives,
Daughter, call yourself blessed because you were taken
In youth's first bloom. But we will drag life's weight in darkness
And grief. This is the price I pay for fathering you.

--------------
This is the second poem of De Tumulis Book 2. Pontano and his family lived at a time when childhood was a perilous rite of passage.. disease and injury were constant presences which threatened the passage from childhood to adulthood, and even after surviving this dangerous journey, the sa.e rists, augmented by war and its accompaniments, constituted an ongoing threat to longevity. Pontano's lament for his daughter, Lucia, arises out of this milieu. As in his elegies for his wife, Pontano treads a narrow path between denial and resignation.

You shine
In the light of the midday sun: the word play is on her name, Lucia, and the adjective lucida, both related to lux, light and luceo to shine: et medio lucida sole micas. Micas is a word used to characterize the light, the twinkle, the sparkle of stars and orher heavenly bodies.
call yourself blessed, because you were taken
In youth's first bloom: Cf. the old saying that he whom the gods love dies young.

But we will drag life's weight in darkness: "we" should be understood as the editorial or royal "we," i.e., "I."

----------------
II.2 Tumulus Luciae Pontanae filiae.

Pontanus pater ad sepulcrum queritur.

Liquisti patrem in tenebris, mea Lucia, postquam
e luce in tenebras, filia, rapta mihi es.
Sed neque tu in tenebras rapta es; quin ipsa tenebras
liquisti et medio lucida sole micas.
Coelo te natam aspicio: num, nata, parentem 5

aspicis? An fingit haec sibi vana pater?
Solamen mortis miserae te, nata, sepulcrum
hoc tegit ; haud cineri sensus inesse potest ;
siqua tamen de te superat pars, nata, fatere
felicem, quod te prima iuventa rapit. io
At nos in tenebris vitam luctuque trahemus:
hoc pretium patri, filia, quod genui.

AT THE TOMB OF ADRIANA SASSONE (Giovanni Pontano)

agnusde2017 — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:50 GMT

AT THE TOMB OF ADRIANA SASSONE
(Giovanni Pontano)

What obsequies shall I perform for you, my wife,
When tears and words of grief are not enough?

Yet for ancient duty and bonds of the bed,
Each year my gifts cleanse this mound for the dead:

Boy, you will bring holy water and incense;
Priest, say mass and prayers for eternal rest.

Light holy flames for her. For me you live in death,
And you are joined to me within my breast.

For me you live. Your form takes shape before my eyes,
And with me you make dalliance and delights.

You live, and as is fit, you care for house and home,
My Adriana, at ease, in our bedroom.

You walk with me through well-tended garden greenery,
With me you walk and pass each night and day.

You live and thrive for me, and bless me in old age,
Your death is life for this tired old man's last days.

Such are my thoughts by your bier, yet my mind does not stray
From happy thoughts of us in the coming day--

For now accept these tearful offerings of death;
Adriana, forever mourned, farewell.
------------

I composed this English version in couplets loosely comprised of alternating six beat and five beat lines joined by several instances of homoeoteleuton or assonance, consonance and rhyme.

Priest, say mass and prayers for eternal rest: die bona et aeternos rite precare deos: the Latin is a pagan formula for a christian ritual. Like many humanists, Pontanus purified sacred formulae. I take this one to be a charge to solicit divine intercession for Adriana's eternal peace. Cf. Aeneas Silvius' use, in his commentaries, of ad fontem levare as a synonym for the christian ritual of standing as godfather at a christian baptism. The sacred flames (torches) I take to be the candles at graveside.

Much of the power of this poem derives from a repeated device of Pontano's: the simultaneous denial of and resignation to the death of his beloved. He vacillates between reality and fantasy, through past, present and future. In this way he creates a compelling logic or dialectic of grief.

----------------
XXV PONTANUS CONIUNX

AD TUMULUM ARIADNAE SAXONAE UXORIS.

Quas tibi ego inferias, coniunx, quae munera solvam,
cum lacrimae et gemitus verbaque destituant?
Pro veteri tamen officio, prò munere lecti
annua lustrato dona feram tumulo:
tura, puer, laticesque sacros. Tu verba, sacerdos,
die bona et aeternos rite precare deos.
Rite sacras adolete faces. Mihi mortua vivis,
uxor, et in nostro conderis ipsa sinu,
(viva mihi ante oculos illa obversatur imago)
et mecum lusus deliciasque facis,
viva domum cultosque Lares remque ordine curas,
viva, Ariadna, domi es, viva, Ariadna, toro es,
mecum perque hortos et culta vireta vagaris
et mecum noctes, mecum agis ipsa dies.

Sic mihi viva vales, sic est mihi grata senectus,
ut tua mors lasso vita sit ipsa seni.
Haec ipse ad feretrum ; at tecum mens ipsa moratur,
tecum post paucos laeta futura dies.
Interea cape et haec miserae solacia mortis,
atque in perpetuo, fleta Ariadna, vale.

LX: Pontanus, in Sleep, Speaks to his Wife Adriana

agnusde2017 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:43 GMT

The following is the sixtieth poem of the second book of De Tumulis by Giovanni Pontano. The English version is my personal understanding of the poem and some of its phrasing.

LX Pontanus uxorem Adrianam in somnis alloquitur

Nocte quidem, coniunx, tecum vagor et tua mecum
umbra venit; sic nox luxque diesque mihi est.
luce autem sine te tenebris obversor et ipse
me sine sum; sic lux nox tenebraeque mihi est.
O valeant luces, lateat sol; sic mihi, coniunx,
vives, sic moriar vivus et ipse tibi.

LX: Pontanus, in Sleep, Speaks to his Wife Adriana

Yes, at night, my wife, with you I
wander,
And with me comes your shade. Night and daylight
Pass thus for me: Without you I'm confounded In light and darkness, and I am lost
Here in myself. For me daylight and the night's darkness
Are thus: My wife, may the stars shine, the sun
Hide. For me then you will live, and I,
Myself will live only to die for you.

----------
...may the stars shine: a possible double entendre: valeant luces, Luces can mean the lights of heavenly bodies or the eyes, giving something like may my eyes not fail me.

Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967

agnusde2017 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:58:50 GMT

Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967

I

Evermore

Little cousin, tree rings and crisp, clipped grass
Part us, joined as we are, by an old grief
That chokes us in silence. It will not pass,
Though I grow old, while you, still young, must sleep
Among dark clods of earth and spreading roots
Which claw through the moist soil, but do not reach
Your little ossuary. Thick, tight knots
Of love and memory have bound us, each
To the other, though for you the clash
Of heart and mind does not exist as life
Goes on around your aging grave. The splash
Of water on your stone, the lunar white
Snow against the green stubble, wash
Away those graven images that, wrought
In rock and memory, glimmer and flash
Like a brief raindrop in late Autumn light.

II

Separation

Who are you here behind this drapery
Of closed eyelids? Who did you use to be
Before the broken stones and verdant sward
Severed us with not a single word?

It was September, in a bitter year,
That you were snared in the garth of death's weir.

It was September, and a bitter day,
When suited strangers took your corpse away.

I was in New York then, a bitter man,
Who would never look on you again.
Now I am old enough to sense my end,
And know, in death we'll still not meet again.

III

Alone in Penn's Woods

My child, I cannot think of you down there,
Where the golden sun never shines,
Where you are sealed in final cloth of cere,
In endless darkness and the grave's confines.

You were a little girl with wheat straw hair,
Skin like marble of Paros; but the tines
Of the great Crab, on long, splayed claws, would tear
Your flesh and shave your bones to fragile splines.

It was near Summer's end: your lights went dead,
And your sweet flesh turned as dark as the grave
That holds you fast in your final bed

Of soft, unsullied pillows, which they gave
That you might lay the casket of your head
There in that little niche in death's sad cave.

IV

Let Nothing You Dismay

Yes, dear, I knew you once upon a time,
Before the darkness covered you, when gold
Stubble glistened with fine drops of silver rime,
And our laughter tinkled in winter cold.

Dear child, how I loved to touch, to hold
You to my puckered lips and beardless face.
Joined together we danced and fell and rolled
Across the earth in spurts of shortlived grace.

Bessie, Jack and Sparkie howled as we would chase
Each other through the glistening hoarfrost,
Until grandma would call for pancakes
And hot blackberry jam, and thick-sliced toast.

Those were our days. Fresh flowers were on your breath,
And we knew not the cold hemlock of death.

V

Summer Echo

It is the summer of my dying phlox.
Still-born they dried before they could break ground.
Instead gold ranks of lanky sunflowers abound,
Stretching shadows on soil and fractured rocks.

My dear, a poaching raven jeers and mocks
These nesting doves, whose gentle, cooing sound
Reminds me that you are not here, but bound
Instead under dark soil and fractured rocks.

The sun stood still some fragrant weeks ago,
Marking a new season bereft of you,
Who, dead to birth and death, lie there alone,

Beneath a springy quilt of summer grass,
And an unyielding silence that won't pass,
Even at lost time's final, muted groan.

VI

September Meditation in a Dark Hermitage

You left among the blooms of mid-September,
When the bright August moon no longer shone,
And the star-filled Virgin walked the Summer
Sky, and I learned to pipe grief's flute alone.

From a rampart in a sprawling tree
The mournful elegy of an owl’s moan
Trembles on a night breeze and enters me,
Penetrating deep through flesh, sinew and bone.

My swollen eyes are filled with salt and lead,
Small, fluttering bats circle overhead,
Spreading wide in a sprawling sapphire throng:

Gray moths daub dry my eyes, first stars light
My solitude, and in the flickering night,
Dark crickets calm me with their ancient song.

VII

Spring Passage

This Spring's last snow lingered on the peaks,
And spotted fawns sucked dugs of milk-rich does.
Around them broken ice floes
Ran down through corkscrew turns of twisting creeks.
Loose, babbling coils of silver rills
Circled hummocks of brown reeds
And clumps of bobbing water weeds,
And washed the wetlands with crisp, peppery cress.
Egg-laden songbirds promised brief tomorrows
While April drew to a slow close,
And honey bees kissed the brief rose.
Sleep now: let heavy earth kiss your still breast,
Insensate and unburdened of those sorrows
Which do not gnaw at you in death's repose,
Where neither rains nor bitter snows
Disturb your nothingness, or our dumb griefs.

VIII

Late Life Leave Taking

As the New Year approaches, so does Winter
And the cold solitude of late December.
Striate skies and numbing breezes stir
Leafless branches and stands of whispering fir.

Dark, somnolent spruce boughs, tremulous, churr,
And the dry leaves, fallen, softly purr
As the gray squirrel, alert with tufted ear,
Squeals its farewell to the dying year.

IX

After the New Year

Little girl with wheatstraw hair, soon I'll
Bury eight decades of grasshopper shells
Among the long cascades of motley seasons,
Sixty years of which have passed as you
Have lain alone in earth's cold, lightless bosom.

Your mother too has sunk below the grass,
And after her grandma and your sad father
Who was snagged on sharp hooks of grievous loss.
Once I held you in my arms: drunk on
The beehive fragrance of your baby breath,

I held you close and tight, but you began
To slip through taut knots of my embrace,
And neither strength nor love could stop the plume
Of your fall from my locked arms, and you
Spun and descended on hidden currents,

Until your thin ghost, carried through fine sprays
Of loss, came splashing down in the dark, rippling
Tarn of Hades' sempiternal night,
Where flocks of black swans brushed you with death's down,
And bore your soul on their soft, feathered backs.

-------------------

Parts of this sequence appeared previously in The Hypertexts. Since their first appearance they have undergone revisions, and the sequence has received some additions.

The sequence is an elegiac reminiscence and contemplation on the death of a twelve year old girl.

The image of the falling child was inspired by a passage in the sixth elegy of Tibullus's second book.

...ne tibi neglecti mittant mala somnia manes,
maestaque sopitae stet soror ante torum,
qualis ab excelsa praeceps delapsa fenestra
Venit ad infernos sanguinolenta lacus.

...lest her ghost, neglected, send you nightmares
And lest, as you sleep, your sad sister, stand by you, asleep in your bed,
As she was when she fell headlong from the high window
And, bleeding, came to the lake of the underworld.

After the New Year

agnusde2017 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:01:11 GMT

IX

After the New Year

Little girl with wheatstraw hair, soon I'll
Bury eight decades of grasshopper shells
Among the long cascades of motley seasons,
Sixty years of which have passed as you
Have lain alone in earth's cold, lightless bosom.

Your mother too has sunk below the grass,
And after her grandma and your sad father
Who was snagged on sharp hooks of grievous loss.
Once I held you in my arms: drunk on
The beehive fragrance of your baby breath,

I held you close and tight, but you began
To slip through taut knots of my embrace,
And neither strength nor love could stop the plume
Of your fall from my locked arms, and you
Spun and descended on hidden currents,

Until your thin ghost, carried through fine sprays
Of loss, came splashing down in the dark, rippling
Tarn of Hades' sempiternal night,
Where flocks of black swans brushed you with death's down,
And bore your soul on their soft, feathered backs.

-------------------

This poem is the ninth in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Late Life Leave Taking

agnusde2017 — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:30:50 GMT

VIII

Late Life Leave Taking

As the New Year approaches, so does Winter
And the cold solitude of late December.
Striate skies and numbing breezes stir
Leafless branches and stands of whispering fir.

Dark, somnolent spruce boughs, tremulous, churr,
And the dry leaves, fallen, softly purr
As the gray squirrel, alert with tufted ear,
Squeals its farewell to the dying year.

--------------------------

This poem is the eighth in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Spring Passage

agnusde2017 — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 02:24:01 GMT

VII

Spring Passage

This Spring's last snow lingered on the peaks,
And spotted fawns sucked dugs of milk-rich does.
Around them broken ice floes
Ran down through corkscrew turns of twisting creeks.
Loose, babbling coils of silver rills
Circled hummocks of brown reeds
And clumps of bobbing water weeds,
And washed the wetlands with crisp, peppery cress.
Egg-laden songbirds promised brief tomorrows
While April drew to a slow close,
And honey bees kissed the brief rose.
Sleep now: let heavy earth kiss your still breast,
Insensate and unburdened of those sorrows
Which do not gnaw at you in death's repose,
Where neither rains nor bitter snows
Disturb your nothingness, or our dumb griefs.

---------------------------------------

This poem is the seventh in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

September Meditation in a Dark Hermitage

agnusde2017 — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 01:22:30 GMT

VI

September Meditation in a Dark Hermitage

You left among the blooms of mid-September,
When the bright August moon no longer shone,
And the star-filled Virgin walked the Summer
Sky, and I learned to pipe grief's flute alone.

From a rampart in a sprawling tree
The mournful elegy of an owl’s moan
Trembles on a night breeze and enters me,
Penetrating deep through flesh, sinew and bone.

My swollen eyes are filled with salt and lead,
Small, fluttering bats circle overhead,
Spreading wide in a sprawling sapphire throng:

Gray moths daub dry my eyes, first stars light
My solitude, and in the flickering night,
Dark crickets calm me with their ancient song.

-----------------------------

This poem is the sixth in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Summer Echo

agnusde2017 — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:30:46 GMT

V

Summer Echo

It is the summer of my dying phlox.
Still-born they dried before they could break ground.
Instead gold ranks of lanky sunflowers abound,
Stretching shadows on soil and fractured rocks.

My dear, a poaching raven jeers and mocks
These nesting doves, whose gentle, cooing sound
Reminds me that you are not here, but bound
Instead under dark soil and fractured rocks.

The sun stood still some fragrant weeks ago,
Marking a new season bereft of you,
Who, dead to birth and death, lie there alone,

Beneath a springy quilt of summer grass,
And an unyielding silence that won't pass,
Even at lost time's final, muted groan.

--------------------------

This poem is the fifth in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Let Nothing You Dismay

agnusde2017 — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:30:42 GMT

IV

Let Nothing You Dismay

Yes, dear, I knew you once upon a time,
Before the darkness covered you, when gold
Stubble glistened with fine drops of silver rime,
And our laughter tinkled in winter cold.

Dear child, how I loved to touch, to hold
You to my puckered lips and beardless face.
Joined together we danced and fell and rolled
Across the earth in spurts of shortlived grace.

Bessie, Jack and Sparkie howled as we would chase
Each other through the glistening hoarfrost,
Until grandma would call for pancakes
And hot blackberry jam, and thick-sliced toast.

Those were our days. Fresh flowers were on your breath,
And we knew not the cold hemlock of death.

---------------------------------

This poem is the fourth in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Alone in Penn’s Woods

agnusde2017 — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:30:52 GMT

III

Alone in Penn's Woods

My child, I cannot think of you down there,
Where the golden sun never shines,
Where you are sealed in final cloth of cere,
In endless darkness and the grave's confines.

You were a little girl with wheat straw hair,
Skin like marble of Paros; but the tines
Of the great Crab, on long, splayed claws, would tear
Your flesh and shave your bones to fragile splines.

It was near Summer's end: your lights went dead,
And your sweet flesh turned as dark as the grave
That holds you fast in your final bed

Of soft, unsullied pillows, which they gave
That you might lay the casket of your head
There in that little niche in death's sad cave.

-------------------------------

This poem is the third in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Separation

agnusde2017 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 01:30:20 GMT

II

Separation

Who are you here behind this drapery
Of closed eyelids? Who did you use to be
Before the broken stones and verdant sward
Severed us with not a single word?

It was September, in a bitter year,
That you were snared in the garth of death's weir.

It was September, and a bitter day,
When suited strangers took your corpse away.

I was in New York then, a bitter man,
Who would never look on you again.
Now I am old enough to sense my end,
And know, in death we'll still not meet again.

---------------------

This poem is the second in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will be posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Evermore

agnusde2017 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:30:46 GMT

I

Evermore

Little cousin, tree rings and crisp, clipped grass
Part us, joined as we are, by an old grief
That chokes us in silence. It will not pass,
Though I grow old, while you, still young, must sleep
Among dark clods of earth and spreading roots
Which claw through the moist soil, but do not reach
Your little ossuary. Thick, tight knots
Of love and memory have bound us, each
To the other, though for you the clash
Of heart and mind does not exist as life
Goes on around your aging grave. The splash
Of water on your stone, the lunar white
Snow against the green stubble, wash
Away those graven images that, wrought
In rock and memory, glimmer and flash
Like a brief raindrop in late Autumn light.

---------

This poem is the first in a nine poem elegiac sequence, Some Songs and Sonnets for Patsy
January 8, 1955 – September 11, 1967. The sequence memorializes a twelve year old girl who died of cancer.

Because many readers shy away from longer poems and posts, the sequence, consisting of nine short poems, will bo posted on my substack one poem at a time for nine days. After all nine poems have been individually posted, they will be posted as a single entry, so that anyone who is so inclined, will be able to read the sequence in the form which was intended.

Afternoon Oil Change

agnusde2017 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:32:29 GMT

Afternoon Oil Change

I sit here in the auto dealership.
A faint, wry smile is settling on each lip
As I stare at the thin salesgirls of Spring,
Who click their phones while the young robins sing.

Out in the sales lot it's a lazy day
For auto sales, but not bad for girls' play.
The girls are smiling but there are no customers
For them to lure with smiles and tempting offers.

Their charms are practiced on their telephones
And trying all the new games and ringtones.
Their thumbs twirl with a ballerina's grace,
And not a worry crosses heart or face --

Not one concern for what the future holds,
What some clandestine mortality withholds
In fates not yet revealed as warblers cry,
And collared doves softly prophesy.