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Sport 34: Winter 2006
Two sonnets
Two sonnets
1.
The line of light along his young clean hair
gone haywire in the bell of his trumpet as if he'd ruffled
a yellow dog there. Collars to be worn on
the evening of. In the school cafeteria—no student
will leave—a swaggering When the Saints was
forced through an aperture, a hole in a hedge, a new world
on the other side. How they love war and cabaret
here, I said and saw him politely empty his condensed spit.
Crossing the bridge on hot afternoons coming from
the supermarket I'd heard him practise. The notes
long-sighted among the shopping. The bridge over the stream
that flooded and washed three parked cars
into the branches of the trees. The trumpet they opened up
at customs revealing its deep blue velvet wound.
2.
as if her notes had formed in the womb like milk
teeth otherwise where did they come from? There were
CDs all about, so many Saturns, but once she heard
a real girl play the actual sound of a possum trapped
in a church hall—wood, copper, hair, rosin—and she wanted
in. Today they played Suzuki Book Four
at the mall—girls an aloha dress, boys ditto shirt—
while tourists shopped and the canal drew
its whole long arm down to Waikiki. Sometimes like the tide
she is sick of it. She laughed when Brian Potiki asked,
Do you learn Kooki Method? In the end it is
something to get through, the restless afternoon
of a childhood illness or ecstasy. The odd pock-mark,
a half-note that will never leave her.