Eric T. Racher
In which the author zimzumishly attempts, by means of ‘a type of poetry which is mechanically representational of a musical architecture and which is thematically representational of the poet’s sensibility as evidenced in a fusion of conception and image’ (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993, p. 715), to create a ‘space for the self to hold audience with the “inmost” self we may take for granted but often have trouble naming—a psychological and metaphysical entity called soul, mind, the cogito, consciousness’ (The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, 2001, p. xliv), or, On the occult significance of REO Speedwagon’s I can’t fight this feeling anymore considered as an example of Harold Bloom’s notion of tessera inasmuch as it antithetically completes the entire sonnet tradition
Eternal flame! your absence makes the heart
grow fonder, and the fire within my soul
is all ablaze with light. You make me whole,
love of my life! O, we shall never part!
You mean the world to me. It’s true, my love!
The light that fills your eyes is like the moon
that shines so sweetly in the month of June.
I’ll stay with you just like the turtle dove.
I swear I’ll love you like there’s no tomorrow!
I know it’s feast or famine, so I’ll bide
my time till you’ve become my blushing bride,
but leave me high and dry, I’ll drown in sorrow.
And so the sonnet-springes language lays
ensnare unwary woodcocks in clichés.
Eric T. Racher was born in Akron, Ohio and lives in Riga, Latvia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exacting Clam, Berfrois, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, minor literature[s], Literary Imagination, and elsewhere.