Anthony Opal

Sonnet [everything is off and I am the snow]

everything is off and I am the snow
bombed a job interview and saw a dead
finch next to the bus stop almost cried for
what Ginsberg called “the soul of the world” or
Merton’s agonia fine the Metra
is late which is okay with me because
I feel clear and clean as the rain that’s
mixing with the snow I look down the road
and see the bus in the distance and
remember how I’m always waiting for
the next thing my father died when I was
sixteen and then again when I was twenty-
three as the flakes swarm all Fibonacci
and I open Kant’s Logic for the last time
​

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Sonnet [I used to write lines about it raining]

                                          
I used to write lines about it raining
far inside the body or about pain
as the shadowed insides of a pine tree
but now refuse to write such things
as speaking of rain inside the body
is poetry and poetry just like
theology must never be itself
if it is ever going to point to
something else successfully and so I
ask what is a successful question
anyway I ask myself questions like
was he holding an invisible rifle
or was he just clutching his heart waiting
​as a child in the doorway to speak
​

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Sonnet [god's violence held to the diving bell as]

god’s violence held to the diving bell as
snow fell onto the upside-down bowl
of your body through the window I be-
held a sudden bird of sunlight a sudden
fox of fire skimming the earth’s surface
below the downfall of leaf-spires spinning
invisibly drawing Fibonacci
sequences in the air as your hair moves
in patterns unknown to even the bright-
est theologians I touch your small hands
and watch you stand as one dimension or
another among the others the falling flakes
the elements and the cars the people
passing us in the wake of which I wake


 


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Anthony Opal lives in Chicago where he is chapbook review editor for TriQuarterly Online and a grad student at Northwestern University. His poems have most recently appeared in Boston Review, Notre Dame Review, Harpur Palate, Permafrost, and The Greensboro Review.