IX. Sonnets for Dancer

I have always depended on the shyness of dangers

to obscure moments of heavy-handed beleaguering

of heavy-hearted heroines, unassailably strangers

to anger or vitriol, my impalpable fevering.

Alas, I am not a dancer of seasons

as nature demands or Vivaldi appeases

since I sickle up snapping detritic reasons

to thresh under mills of somnolent breezes:

Even under latch, the gelidity seeps

to thaw thunder’s flow into your flow’ry veldt,

easing the lark for whom summer weeps:

spurned, tongue-play in our febrile swelt.

I am sorry for that passing: the hail and the clash;

but know that Bacchus pours freely in our Autumn, at last.