poem

=**BLANK SONNET** = **George Elliott Clarke**
 * From:** //Whylah Falls//, 1990.

 The air smells of rhubarb, occasional  Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,  Undulant hurt, so body snaps and curls  Like flower. I step through snow as thin as script  Watch white stars spin dizzy as drunks, and yearn  To sleep beneath a patchwork quilt of rum.  I want the slow, sure collapse of language  Washed out by alcohol. Lovely Shelley,  I have no use for measured, cadenced verse  If you won't read. Icarus-Iike, I'll fall  Against this page of snow, tumble blackly  Across vision to drown in the white sea  That closes every poem -the white reverse  That cancels the blackness of each image.