Sonnet for Alice N.

By Jack Collom b. 1931 Jack Collom

Why & what is sweetness all alone?

Either that or it becomes, alas, fleeting,

Which actually helps, because of rhythm.

& there’s a pale intensity to truth, no matter

How pale it is on the levels we receive on.

I mean, the minute you invent a time interval

The more it seems to “jelly out” the excitation

Of accidents; zum Beispiel, “Saginaw, Michigan.”

After a while, we almost expect him or her

To inveigle us into a cafe without bay-breasted warblers.

It’s almost like we have a streak of orange-smell

Which nobody’ll pay for because they can’t talk to it,

Although that’s probably all wrong, or at least falsified

By its very mention, like gravity. Do you agree?

Jack Collom, “Sonnet for Alice N.” from Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000, published by Tuumba Press. Copyright © 2001 by Jack Collom. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000 (Tuumba Press, 2001)

Biography

Jack Collom was born in Chicago. He joined the US Air Force and was posted in Libya and Germany before returning to the United States. He earned a BA in forestry and English and an MA in English literature from the University of Colorado. Collom started publishing his poetry in the 1960s; his more recent publications are Entering the City (1997), Dog Sonnets (1998), the 500-plus page collection Red Car Goes By (2001), and . . .

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