582 Love Sonnets to the rock: 14

With all the day poking out
Of its shirt like a rib, I wish
To set myself on fire, I wish
To drown in pure air, I wish
To condense to limestone
To prove an argument about
History’s movement. I imagine
Back flipping into a frying pan
Like a clever sun beam,
Severe in a lifefriendsisboring
Way heating like Saturday -
People passionately believe it’s a moral hazard to burn a weekend,
To debate its visitation rights, to bury it in rumble -
People are passionate about a lot of bullshit.

-C.S. Henderson

582 Love Sonnets to the Rock: 12

Let’s not spend too long
with the whirlwinds of light,
or the visions behind curtain fissures,
fine corpses wound around our fingers
when all the while, really, we’re beyond the idea
of a tomb. The fog had our prints on it,
us alumni of transfiguration, rewriting
the vernacular of islands and anything
surrounded by a sea. I close my eyes and

imagine us on a spicy plain, fires bursting
through in lines drawn as a mesa -
I’ll try not to wake you, forehead resting deep against
the sky, until the stars are taut with gold
chains, dripping immensely with fruit.

-C.S. Henderson

582 Love Sonnets to the Rock: 11

The sea explodes, turns around, bathes in pale
semblance of an opening in the cell’s corner,
sees suffering in a vision carried generations away.
Bull shit, Ma’am, there are no whispers there,
you know, lost and alive and colorful and drawing
themselves in all looming ebbs.

I suspect the mountains
are watching; I suspect their desire;
I suspect it’s true and will remember itself upon
the recapitulation of the wind shine when it burrows
through the street. It came to me,
Ma’am, in vowels shifting to one note,
exalted and tiny, an untipped
cup, by happenstance, held out to me.

-C.S. Henderson

582 Love Sonnets to the Rock: 10

It started in false stains and a network
of scratched off evolutions —
a marrow-drying love
that instead stayed dry.

Like a chip-toothed clown
I blushed when I sank
my teeth into the glaciation
and went for a ride.

The rough caricature of nausea
built a chasm between the
comparison of sign-to-sign,
turning, wakefully, me against
the soft erasure in clouds
until only the bruises of a rock remained.

-C.S. Henderson

582 Love Sonnets to the Rock: 9

In the obscure cathedral I dream
of wires, parcels of light double
entendre’d into stalagmite thighs
extending to the indefinitive bellow

and thunderous ivy-crawl of sky.
I realize I’ve been making out with the caldera’s
echo for years and clapping for it’s punch
against my clap, a detonation

of tandem twilight bruises
on a bronzing sun. Judgment
might be parallel to praxis
in waking up as a new man,
the techne whittled into
an oblong duck for the mantle.

-C.S. Henderson