Among The Jumbled Heap

Looking at journals as I prepare to move, I came across this sonnet I wrote some time in ‘97 or ‘98. Forgot I used to write sonnets.

Twenty tippled years from today, sitting
On a rough hewn and slatted porch, musing
With a mason jar in hand and sipping
Gin with a ragged smile, grown more puckered
By the years of smoke filled neglect and kisses
Stolen between odd jobs assigned to me
By my comrade, my patron, Saint Golious,
Twenty tippled years and I will think about you.

Twenty years of liquid truth will not wash
Away the remembrance of things past and thoughts
Marcel and Billy would both be proud to own.
Thoughts of hard laughter, hard drink, hard times.

“Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

~Andre Dubus, “A Hemmingway Story” from Meditations from a Movebale Chair.