A Poet's Devotions Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

I sit here with a cup of tea
Trying to unwind the twisted mystery
Of a sonnet written in another age
During another plague
When a solitary sage,
Misanthropic cynic that he was,
Found himself in love
With a patron.

The first dozen sonnets,
Dry in their propriety,
Turn rather suddenly
Into something wonderous:
A man well past his first blush
Falling thrallingly in love with
The subject of his flattery.

The artist who would be both art and frame
Becomes instead a cage
In which the hidden image stays
Perhaps forever unrevealed for fear
That for once his honeyed phrases
So often majestically displayed
With a player's unaffected touch
Might this time crack open his uninspected soul
And trick him into saying something so honest
That he shatters himself in his vacillation
Between emotion and control.

In visiting each station of the Sonnet's Crosses,
As often as not I find myself lost
In their antiquated conceits and layered meanings.
But sometimes after struggling to ascend
Through an especially treacherous cycle of sentiments,
I come upon a view so open and golden
That the dust and bugs and heat
That had left me footsore and disheartened
Become sufferings offered humbly
As the devotions of pilgrim poet.