One Hundred and Fifty-Five Sonnets - 77. this old place

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Sonnet No. 153

The tarpaulin is spread upon the floor,

And our meager dinner comes from a box –

Yet stillness rules from roof to corridor,

While we share our bagels, cream cheese and lox.

You chew, and I recall our trudging home

With paint cans, and a new color we approve,

To make this old place not mine, but our own,

And this moment’s beauty we can’t improve.

For sometimes the greatest intensity

Comes not from the strongest of exertion,

But from the ordinary banality

Of a quiet moment in full immersion.

Love in climax is no different than now,

Where in candlelight your features endow.

Sonnet No. 154[1]

Content like the partners where they reside

Within Steven Walker’s loving paintings,

You and I find the peace where we confide

The dignity of low-toned acquaintings.

His men are settled within their own space,

Where the everyday world stops its pressure;

Where spouses create their own state of grace,

And the love they live spreads out fresh and sure.

So different from David Hockney’s landscape,

Where men in pairs seen never more alone,

And more desiring of an escape,

Because to self-hate, I guess, they are prone.

The world we make is one of solemn promise,

Soft-eyed to imbue us, and the world, with bliss.