Here’s a sonnet I wrote a few days ago.  IF you know anything about sonnets, this one has an unusual rhyme scheme while still fulfilling, so far as I can tell, all the requirements of a sonnet:  One octet followed by one sestet with a volt or turn around line nine.  The subject is unusual and very modern.  Rather than focusing on the exploits of some cruel love, I have taken as a point of departure the crash, or the myth of the crash, at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.  I think of it as a rather sad poem, a little like Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in a certain way, without claiming to be the poet that Matthew Arnold is.  Enjoy, if you will.

 

 

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Roswell

 

O, Flung across the darkness, dust, despair
of starplains thrummed with poison light, you came
so trillions far from world of surging heart-fast  air,
you pilgrims grey; the void expunged your name,
and so you crashed on desert rolling rare
around a yellow sun, its bluest earth
       alight with eyes so heaven-turned, they bear
the hope of twins betrayed,   betwained at birth:
to join again, to build a solar firth.
Instead, you fell from hectic flashing skies,
exploding ship a silver sun eclipse.
O, what is lost, what flashing mortal mirth
betrayed when pilgrim tumbles down and dies?
A silence now:  the void annoints our lips.

A Boot Fantasia in Three Parts

 

 

Boot Fantasia in Three Parts

 

copyright 2011 William L. Houts

United States of America 

All Rights Reserved

 

 

I.

 

There are boots in the desert.

The sun has eaten their laces.

The wind has taken their

high black polish.

In places, their soles are thin.

They stand under sand.

I think there’s more than

a pair of them sharing darkness

between those grains of earth,

darkness like underground sky.

I don’t know how or why the boots

arrived in the desert.

Maybe they fell from above.

It has happened before:

a torrent of stones

like shards of hard heaven,

a blizzard of toads on snoring towns.

The boots could come down,

a plague we never read about.

Some sad magician’s wonder

of boots from a cloud.

Or maybe the people who live

in the desert are prone

to losing their boots.

Riding strange horses

they come to rest at a shady oasis.

They might loosen their laces

And kick off their boots

to bathe and to drink: and drunk

on the clear dark wines

casked in such cellars of the earth,

they ride off again,

leaving their boots behind.

But never mind that.

These boots are all over the desert,

not just oases, and besides,

I’ve heard that people who

forget things do not survive

long in that place.

 

 

II.

 

It may not matter

where the boots came from.

It may only matter

that I want a pair myself,

boots as black as sharks

and twice as dangerous.

In a pair of boots,

a woman or man can

stride the wide world and

never feel the ambivalent

earth between their toes

A pair of black boots

can make fists of your feet;

their shiny heels

strike holes in the ground

with the sound of

clenched fists on a lecture stand.

 

 

III.

 

I have this notion

or dream of the boots

rising up from the desert

and crossing the ocean:

a parade of old shoes,

a triumph of tatters

through our city gates.

They make muttering noises,

as you might hear

a chorus of voices shouting

down a corridor of fifty

or a thousand years.

I don’t know what words

the boots might speak, unless

with cracked black tongues they croak

the verbs which sound the same

in any language.

If the boots came to your door,

would you let them in?

If the boots entered your house,

wouldn’t you put them on?

The Talespin King

 

 

I’ve read a number of Stephen King novels, and in general have been satisfied with them.  The man has been writing for forty years or so  and his paid his dues; even if he did get a six figure advance for CARRIE back at the beginning of a career.  But I’ve recently read what was meant to be his path to novelist glory, the DARK TOWER series, and I fear that in my opinion, it’s not all that he meant it to be.

 

The first sentence of the series is glorious, it promises something classical, grand and hypnotic.  Listen:

 

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.:

 

Who wouldn’t want to find out who this gunslinger and his quarry are?  It’s magnificent.  And the first two books of the novel live up to that adjective.  But he just doesn’t sustain it through the rest of the series.  First of all, he is self-indulgent.  He includes references to other popular novels –and his own—throughout the book.  If he did this once, it would be all right, a bit of hat-tipping, a bit of vaudeville.  But the fabric of the book depends to some extent to these kind of references and it’s distracting to say the least.  King even includes himself as a crucial secondary character.  I want to like it, I want it to pay off, but it only leads to certain novelistic party tricks and a certain amount of sophomore philosophizing. 

 

Now, I’ve got to say something about the Stephen King phenomenon and how I deal with it as a writer.  In general, writers who thing of themselves as doing literary work Hate King.  They thing he’s too rich, they think he’s a hack, they celebrate his nearly being run over and killed a few years ago.  I am not one of these.  Some of his novels are very enjoyable, if you overlook certain flaws.  THE STAND is good if you can overlook the fact that the demon Randal Flagg and his ghoulies are ultimately swatted out of existence by the very Hand of God.  MISERY is a wonderful novel if you can overlook the fact that the imprisoned writer escapes Annie Wilkes by breaking her back with a thrown Underwood typewriter.  And so on.  But let’s not forget THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, which is without any flaw as far as I can see, and is beautiful work into the bargain.

 

But back to TDT.  I think my two biggest complaints about the series are that the Tower itself isn’t really explored.  At the beginning of the series, the sorceror Walter explains that it is the lynchpin of existence, and that to climb the Dark Tower is to ascend through the very scales of being, from the microscoppic to the stellar.  Now, I have no idea how this could be represented, but then I’m not the one who made the brag –through Walter—that he was going to explore this.

 

Secondly, all of the gunsluingers except Roland die before they reach the Tower.  Now, unlike some, I don’t resent the author who kills off major characters.  But it occurs to me that King might have explored the Tower my fully by bringing these characters to it and mounting its steps with their varied psychologies.  But that, I’m afraid, probably requires a philosopher, and Mr. King restrains himself to being a popular entertainer;  a fine enough thing, surely, but, it seems, not equal to the task of exploring Robert Burns’s classic poem through fiction.