35 Sonnets

Chapter 2: I.

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About This Book

These sonnets probe the gap between inner life and outward expression, arguing that the soul resists full translation into words and often presents itself behind masks of consciousness. They shift between intimate anxieties—memory’s preservation of love, the material facts of death, and daily needs that squander creative intention—and broader doubts about identity, fate, and the capacity of thought. The poet repeatedly examines how self-awareness both enables and impoverishes feeling, while recurring images of storms, mirrors, and childhood fear dramatize the friction between desire for action and the paralysis of inaction.

I.

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.