Robert Thomas: “Sonnet with Purgatory and Scratch”
SONNET WITH PURGATORY AND SCRATCH
Just once you let yourself go, just enough
to let me know what I was missing all
the other times. The you you let go flowed
out of the you who let go; the jazz band
leader cued the alto sax to solo,
take all the time she wants. You played the hell
out of that tune, turned it into a blue
velvet purgatory more beautiful
than any heaven’s harp plinking a fugue.
That once, you did it to my percussion.
You dovetailed my rhythm. It was my snare
drums and cymbals, my steel pans, my woodblock
and windchime, my glass harp and gutbucket.
To my brush and scratch you kept such smooth time.
Robert Thomas’s first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham University, and his second collection, Dragging the Lake, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Thomas has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Field, Iowa Review, New England Review, Poetry, Southern Review, and many other journals.