Musing

To listen to a selection of poems read by the author, click Read Online above.

Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience. The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholar Gordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked the evolution of Hart’s poetry. Of Musing, Teskey writes: “These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels.”

About the Author

Jonathan Locke Hart’s poetry has appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems have been published in Estonian, French, and Greek. His recent books include Dream China, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.

Table of Contents

Index of First Lines

1. A certain happiness exists despite 86
2. A Romanesque bridge joins one hill 65
3. All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed 8
4. And yet the morning light held you, the cuts 47
5. Another poet scoffed when I said 72
6. Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher 14
7. Daughter, you are more delicate 18
8. Dusk falls over a land cut and crossed 66
9. Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way 54
10. For him, there is only one poet: his wife 93
11. Freezing to death is not an act of love 52
12. Girders and glass roofs extend at round 77
13. Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode 33
14. How to keep the deep fluster and rush 108
15. I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr 56
16. I have a whole cache I will one day 62
17. I have washed too many I have watched 38
18. If joy could screeve from lung and marrow 23
19. Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul 16
20. In your eyes along the streets can I see 64
21. It is not as if the sun and I 90
22. It would be as the wind, but some force 49
23. It’s not custom to begin with the couplet 40
24. Just when it seems she will sing deport 45
25. Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend 32
26. Love is a Stonehenge, virtual to some 100
27. Made of systems? Love and justice have lost out 74
28. My heart is even lonelier than my face 80
29. Nostalgia and utopia, past and future 68
30. On an outcrop in Central Park, we talk 76
31. On the brink of simile I faced 98
32. Our whatever is an asymptote and not 89
33. Pain like bread breaks and tears, and in France 88
34. Palm trees came to France in 1864 51
35. Remember our mothers who bore us 83
36. Ropes, planks, cups, lines, buckets, tiles, fieldstones 87
37. Roses are more gorgeous than us: we are as birds 82
38. Silent devotion at first light, wind 59
39. So much depends on the glibness of words, 55
40. So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me 10
41. Something rebarbative lives in this life 94
42. Son, you were allergic to filberts then 17
43. Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger 11
44. The absence of your breath heats my marrow 42
45. The angles of the moon over, through those trees 41
46. The aspersion she cast cuts deep: the times 15
47. The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died 109
48. The boughs lay withered beyond the brow 1
49. The cars on the rail line are stacked up 71
50. The closer to the ground, the more fictional 58
51. The clouds lie over the land near Avignon 70
52. The country is not pastoral: it was 67
53. The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park 13
54. The dead stars rise over the ridge, the garden 79
55. The dog beyond the gate barked, as if 22
56. The embarrassment of words abandons us 43
57. The fen stretches out like prairie, the canals 6
58. The garden in the ruined abbey brims 4
59. The Georgian calms the world about, hills slant 102
60. The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice 44
61. The hills are burial mounds: the oaks drape 101
62. The nuclear power plants smoke over the land 69
63. The renitency of the will opposes all 26
64. The scree on the beach was lost in your breath 25
65. The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape 27
66. The season of our wooing, a stillness now 84
67. The shadows of the evening still across 92
68. The sparrow on the trough is world enough 3
69. The speculation of music has 103
70. The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road 20
71. The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard 28
72. The warehouses, spills, heaps, strews, broken waste 75
73. The way trains move, poetry moves 61
74. The white cliffs above Cassis 91
75. The wind was slapping the water, and the surf 105
76. The winds rise over the plain outside Paris 35
77. The windows of the moon have cast 29
78. The winter of our breath was the blue 9
79. There was a window on the stars, the cusp 31
80. There was jazz playing in a room away 34
81. There were stones there were knives 39
82. There’s something about a train that is like 97
83. These eyes, joints, gums ache with an age 95
84. They married looking out to sea, the west 7
85. They were quartering us in these streets 30
86. This harvest is the sap that moves in us 21
87. This night, like the vanity of death 50
88. Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones 60
89. Through the threshold the pollen draws, the light 46
90. Till we fled Calais these two terrains 36
91. Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves 19
92. We rose from dust on a day not of our 104
93. What is not said in the garden 2
94. What of the furtive thief of love stealing 106
95. When I was young the world was young: you know 48
96. When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed 57
97. Who would hear me above the surf, the remains 78
98. Why is it the poplar leaves turn in the sun 73
99. Window night-frame time of the moon 37
100. Winter has its verges, not a green snow 81
101. World, breath, disinherited us, even 85
102. You don’t have to be Richard the Third 107
103. You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect 12
104. You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude 24
105. You see before you a man more ridiculous 63
106. You watch the dying light after the star 96
107. Your arms are not a trope, and hyperbole 53
108. Your face was the chalk in these hills 5
109. Your heart is knapped flint, or is it mine? 99

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