The Sonnets of Scott Ennis

Esse est percipi

Soft silk between the warmth of dew is laid
like grass which floats beneath the breeze of time
which slows the breath of lovers. Serenade
surrounds the flowing waters in sublime
intoxicating visions, touched with dreams
where legs of silken stones immerse desire,
where drowning brings to life, where motion streams
its actions by emotions which require
the pain of blood and birth, of blood and death
to feed the rapid rise of love’s embrace.
Where aspiration breathes its final breath,
becomes the dissipation of the grace
of flesh.  Divine in nature, we believe
that that which is is that which we perceive.

That form which forms her flesh and fills her skin
with heat like passion flowing from its source
subsumes convictions deeper than within
her heart, through which her passions run their course.
That form is strength which beauty overlays,
which forms her beauty, strengthening the ties
of trust in solid motions, in the ways
her form responds to that which underlies
her strength.  Her form is beauty: soft and strong,
like reaching for a star beyond her sight;
she trusts her will to move her strength along
that higher path where beauty can unite
dichotomies of contradicting strengths
and love endures beyond eternal lengths.

for Mari

There is no karma, only moving on
to love and beauty, strength and gift.  The day
before today is yesterday and gone,
and yesterday is more than miles away
from how I train; this road will tell you more
than words.  I train this body, bold and bright
while other mediocrities implore
communities of losers to unite
in vanities of words.  My legs do not
hear anything but rhythms of the road
which pound a syncopation you forgot
could make your inner victories explode.
Like whispered gossip words, the distant din
I leave behind; my purpose is to win.

At rest with restless visions of the day,
the day to come when restlessness abates,
I fold the light in subtle shades of gray
behind my resting eyes where vision waits
for that-which-clouds to solemnly disperse
like mist reveals its absence in the lake
as smooth as god removing morning’s curse
or silence in the cries which gods forsake.
I sleep in some precarious embrace
of warmth beneath the presence of the sky
which signifies the darkness I replace
with civil twilight, dreams, and no reply.
Replaced beyond millennia of hope,
I wake into the light through which we grope.

Should my psychosis lead you like a song
remembered from realities of blood
beyond your sacred sanity, how long
would music be the flame before the flood?
What beaten rhythm pounded from your heart
would course through my realities of doubt?
What rising voice could patently impart
divinity with madness or without
the sacrifice of spirit in your veins
which rises from your chest into your throat?
Recall the taste of love when love remains
within the balance of a single note,
when blood becomes the mystery of mind
and music is the savior of mankind.

She waits like perfume lingering within
the softest folds and fabric of the robe
she wore against the presence of her skin;
presented in her patience, time is slowed
like warmth in late November, like a leaf
that feels the perfect breeze yet clings aloft
to barren branches.  Where is the release
of autumn perfume, lingering and soft?
She waits like autumn, waits for me to fall,
full-knowing life will tumble, drift and sway
my brittle soul.  I sense the subtle call
of perfume in the robe she wore that day
when gently she assured my lofty doubt
that she would wait until it all worked out.

for Mari.

Self-satisfied at how her hand has swept
the tarnish from the heirloom of her heart,
she thinks of how she held him, how she wept,
and how she cried when they were miles apart.
So clean, the caustic rub, the gentle rag
has wiped the stain of memory away
from silver cups and spoons kept in a bag,
contained for once-a-year or cleaning day.
Reflection is distorted in the curve
of her perception, held without remorse,
as light becomes a token to observe;
she lets the reminiscence run its course.
Then, satisfied the silver bears no trace
of love, she puts it safely in its place.

Begin as if beginning was the end
of time when muscles rest and skin is dry.
There is no time to hesitate; extend
your will beyond the horizontal sky.
Now pull each stride beneath you as the road
concedes to your omnipotence of grace.
Flow forward like a river and erode
the confidence of time with rushing pace.
Hold on to spirit rising from within
your heart; hold on to spirit like a song
that calls you like a siren to begin
each stride like the beginning; move along
the course as if the world was yours to run
and race the end as if you’d just begun.

What aches to be released is filled with doubt,
constrained by love and faith, contained by time
which in its turn concedes a life without
such weights would be a life beyond sublime.
Take love, like some Gibraltared coast of hope,
unyielding in its ambiguity.
Take faith, like some eternal length of rope
tied off to some obscene eternity.
Now lift your love as high as you have strength
and toss it in the ocean’s shallow tide;
now follow faith along its tethered length
until you find the place where angels hide.
In time both love and faith will be released,
but doubt will be eternally increased.

If this, the road at dawn, becomes my choice
to sanctify my heart with one last glance
into the twilit memories: your voice,
that chair, a song, some final circumstance.
If this, the dusty red that fades to gray,
becomes the time I travel through my doubt
as faith becomes the night, I choose the day
to rest within uncertainty, without
the fear of loss.  This road is marked as well
as memories remembered from the past
when you and I communed but did not tell
ourselves that night and darkness wouldn’t last
If this is life, the spirit of the dawn
releases me and I will travel on.

Each wisp of life that rises with the day,
ethereal and metaphoric smoke
that haunts the morning air, the pall of gray-
not-black, that ghostly spirit we invoke
with every pulse and every breath we take,
each day of days we clarify at dawn
with dreams we chase in sleep and then forsake
to wisps of smokey life, still linger on.
That wisp of insight smoldering in ash
which sacrifices life, a brief decay,
exhales a breath of beauty, seeks to pass
its essence through the dawn into the day
while day inhales the beauty of the night
and wisps of beauty dissipate in light.

Like clumps of grass that molder in the week
between the end of summer and the fall,
I wait for slow decay.  The words I speak
denote the patient mold.  The seasons crawl,
they stop and start, like blades of drifting grass
mowed down by summer’s swift poetic steel.
They linger in the cracks that came to pass
through winters I no longer wish to feel.
Eternal in-between, eternal time
becomes the demarcation of my voice,
progressing or regressing, rhyme to rhyme,
like clippings of the leaves of grass of choice.
Such cracks bear neither peace nor subtle fear,
but hide my words until they disappear.

We close the subtle clarity of night
with days consumed by motes of dusty beams,
with visions of perception where our sight
subsumes the wrath of sunlight in our dreams.
The air exhaled from humid throats is not
the air we welcomed in with subtle hope;
while throats are dry, the words we breathe are hot,
constricted like a hangman’s dusty rope.
Come kiss my subtle mouth with grieving lips
of promises; I’ll pay you for the trick
of light that makes the word which simply slips
into the dusty air, congested, thick.
It’s love, the subtle whore of night and day
who laughs the most as she collects her pay.

One foot betrays the gravel, coarse with wet
communion of the clouds, electric sky.
If god could kill the walker he might let
the path remain betrayed, the right to die
would slip from god’s control into the stream
of footprints left depressed in muddy ground.
Ridiculous is god’s eternal scheme–
ridiculous, eternal fucking round.
One foot, one step compels the walk of one
who lives in bright denial of the night
where dreams compel the fear to overrun
the banks of god’s oppression, wrong or right.
As swift as water roiling toward his feet,
the one will find his drowning bittersweet.

Your tight, thin lips are drawn to kiss remorse,
regret, remiss should I neglect to draw
my eyes, attentive to your grip, of course
you only glance, one chance to see.  I saw
the years of sighs and days of driving home
alone.  So young, so old, so caught between
the lust that makes you stay, that makes you roam
to places where you pray to be unseen.
But 95 is long; July is hot.
I passed you north of Richmond, past the end
of everything expected, which you got:
a stranger’s passing glance, mistaken friend.
The rain is quickly coating both our roads
and miles ahead a thundercloud explodes.

. . . becomes the softest sediment below
the coldest lake of tears as pure as ice
when sanity has nowhere left to go
and drowning is the ultimate device
of metaphoric words which wait, and wait
in solitude of grubby notebook sheets,
the stillness of a rescuer too late:
emotionless, unfathomed, more complete.
She holds my hand as if it were divine
and strokes the skin above my solemn wrist
to signify her yet unuttered “mine”
as I succumb with just the slightest twist,
as rings of water ripple through the scene
while neither lover knows what loving means.

My son, there is a star men use to guide
their ships when other compasses have failed.
My son, there is a maker who’s supplied
the stars by which such men have often sailed.
There is a shore to every endless sea,
a harbor from each never-ending storm.
There is a place where you are meant to be;
in cold and dark, keep faith in light and warm.
In time a voice within will whisper peace
to guide you like a light in heaven’s vast
expanse of possibilities, release
your spirit into present, future, past.
When time and truth converge you will be one
who’s found his heart, my flesh and blood, my son.

It’s life; it’s not some sonnet I compose.
Ironic though, that words align in song
as easily as lying, I suppose.
Still, lies arranged in poems could belong . . .
unless the truth is deeper than the lines,
unless the soul is water in a well,
and poetry, the bucket that defines
the liquid verses drawn to quench and quell
the thirst for love that parches word and voice,
the love of words that sing a lying tune
of depth and sweetness, freedom in a choice
that’s pre-determined; poems end too soon.
But life is not some sonnet to be drawn
from any well while love still lingers on.

Lean back and let me choose another word
from thousands I could choose to warm your cheek.
Ten thousand times my meanings are deferred
into my arms around you as I speak
with poetry of pressing closer still.
A terrifying, intimate embrace
relaxes my locution and my will;
you turn to kiss the silence of my face.
This place was just a table, moved last year
to this secluded, arbitrary beach,
but now that you and I are sitting here
it serves to place our words within our reach.
Lean back into the arms of my intent,
beyond ten thousand words and all they meant.

For Mari.

The waves insist on urging me along
Nantasket Beach, against the blowing sands,
without reprieve, without a siren song.
The wind is more insistent; she demands
my tears in horizontal tracks. My legs
ignore insistent waves, insistent wind.
I listen to the strand which almost begs
to pull me further, faster; I rescind
my ignorance of oceans and their might.
My memories of running on the beach
when I was young return to join my flight
across the dunes and places where I reach
inside my strength, like waves that urge me on;
I run until the wind and tears are gone.

There’s time for one more glass and then one more
as time begins to fade into the taste
of complicated sweetness which we pour
in timelessness, devoid of bitter haste.
Aromas gather slowly in the dim
quintessence of the presence of the thought
of lips that linger lightly on the brim
of sweetness and the essences now caught:
the musk of sunlight captured in the skin
of fruit from fertile vineyards far away,
the tang of inspiration from within
a bottled soul, consumed like night by day.
The soft and subtle glow of nurtured bliss
compels her to release a Riesling kiss.

For Mari.

Let’s float inside this cup of lukewarm tea,
pretend that we’re in love and kiss for hours.
I’ll sing to you and let you sing to me;
add sugar and perhaps I’ll bring you flowers.
I love the pinkish petals of the rose
on that ceramic wall behind your back.
Stay just below the rim so no one knows.
The tea is leaking slowly; there’s a crack.
Stand up and touch the bottom with your feet,
the party’s over; tea is everywhere.
I thought we had it all; we were complete,
but now we’re simply fools with matted hair.
Don’t leave my darling, leaves must still be read.
Come join me for some coffee now instead.

I sense the sheen which glistens on the street,
the path that pulls my spirit through the dark.
Reflections of the bottoms of my feet
form momentary ripples where they mark
the light of timeless memories of grace,
deserving of impressions deeper still
than anything my memories replace
with lightness which my feet and legs fulfill.
I sense the time it takes to press and glide
against reflections, silent as the moon,
which lay upon the mirror where I stride,
revealed to morning reverie too soon.
I sense the sheen again before I run
beyond the dawn into the morning sun.

The strength to walk away is like a gift
of snakes or stones bestowed on any child
who asks for fish or bread.  The pillars shift;
Delilah’s shears were never so defiled
as when you walked away with every word
of faith, with every psalm I ever wrote.
I built on sandy ground, my sight obscured
by every solid beam and dusty mote.
You kissed me for a bag of silver coins
before you knew which prophets I believed.
You tied a girdle firmly ’round your loins;
immaculate, you left, and then conceived.
You’re wise to build your house on solid ground,
and I’m the sheep that’s lost and never found.