9.13.2024

IN DIRT

Living in the underground house, we didn’t notice the dirt walls.

The dirt on Barthes: he said (grim joke) some countries produce refugees

the way others hit pay dirt mining for copper and cadmium.

In bombed-out cities you have refugees all the way down. And dirt—

enough dirt, rubble and ash to stopper the mouths of the dying.

(Neruda, Residencia en la tierra: that’s “living in dirt,”

if you don’t mind a quick-and-dirty unauthorized translation.)

Anyway, how could we notice the dirt walls when we were wading

through mud up to our white collars? The dirt had dissolved in the wash

of cash—from dirtbags, true, but why notice what we were paid not to?

It’s a business older than dirt. You can tell me those walls were soil,

not dirt, and should have been saved. Well, not my circus, not my monkeys.

Social media stars make dirty deals, and a ton more money

than dirt farmers. Love that Instagram monkey with her pet bunny!

---

CRAFT NOTE: This poem is a sonnenizio, an innovation from Kim Addonizio, my longtime teacher and a master of nonce forms (sonnet + Addonizio = sonnenizio; by the way, Kim’s new collection, Exit Opera, is available now for preorder, with an official publication/shipping date of September 17). To begin a sonnenizio, you borrow any line from another poet’s sonnet. In the remaining thirteen lines of your poem, you use one word from the chosen line (for fun and variety, try using that word’s derivatives). End with a rhyming couplet. I took my opening line from “I’ve lived with death from the beginning,” by Diane Seuss, first published in the Kenyon Review and later included in Frank: Sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021). Because Seuss’s line has sixteen syllables, I also used a sixteen-syllable line.

---

---

If you like my work and are looking for the sweet spot between following and becoming a paying subscriber, you can buy me a coffee, with my thanks and appreciation.