Tungsten Inert Gas

So I’m not sure what I’ve accomplished this month except weld together twenty-five pseudo-sonnets experimenting with various tricks and ruses and discovering that I really enjoy writing pseudo-sonnets so I’ll think I’ll keep on keeping on in September. Remembering Jack Gilbert’s warning that to risk delight is to lessen others’ deprivations, today I speak with two tongues. One prays for Katrina’s victims and the other thanks the gods for this summer. And all summers.

Sonnet August Twenty-Five

It’s like those first few months you’re falling in love,
and every touch is heat-affected, while
below the fusion zone, two liquid hearts
eliminate their interface and arc
together underneath a substrate pool,
annealing into solid states of welded
transformation, a single microstructure,
crystalline and diamond iron-willed.
That’s what summer does to us northerners.
It binds us to this earth with all its lush
seductive days and naked sun with river
warm embracing through the midnight hour
until dry ice and storms from cold beyond
fail to break apart our August bond.

~Son Rivers 2005