For two weeks, Monday through Friday, we’re publishing daily, piece by piece, the sonnet sequence “The Death of Argos” by Nicholas Pierce (Photo), presented by Mary Jo Salter.
What new thing can be done with old forms like the sonnet? One answer comes from a new poet. In his first book, In Transit, Nicholas Pierce invents an especially devilish rhyme scheme for an eleven-sonnet sequence, “The Death of Argos.” The sequence is also an elegant narrative, an affecting love story set in contemporary Greece, while calling up The Odyssey. Inspired by a blank verse sonnet sequence by the late Claudia Emerson, which unspools as two tercets, a central couplet, and two more tercets, Pierce goes Emerson one better by rhyming aba, bdb, bb, dbd, ebe, every time. Yes, that’s six b’s per fourteen lines. And a rhyming couplet “turn” in the dead center, another radical move. — MJS
Today we reprint the first and second sonnets and add the third, in which the speaker looks to his journal of a trip to Greece for memories of his ex-lover.
1.
A few key seconds haven’t yet come back,
if they ever were recorded. Who can say
why the dogs didn’t, finally, attack,
much less what would’ve happened if they did?
On foot, defenseless, we were easy prey
to start with—then my cousin and I slid
into a ditch, scrambling to get away.
The footage skips ahead when I replay
this moment, picking back up with his leg
already broken and the dogs at bay—
or nowhere to be seen, at least. Less vague
is what came afterward: the brief but none-
too-gentle ambulance ride, the X-ray
revealing that the break was a clean one.
2.
The incident put me in mind of S.,
whom I’d been trying not to think about
for a few months, not wanting to address
how cruel I’d been when I abruptly stopped
texting and calling her back; stopped without
so much as an excuse, letting her opt
both of us out. Of course, our falling out
wasn’t what I reflected on en route
to the hospital. Rather, it was her own
encounter with a dog, which left no doubt
a deeper scar than the two running down
her chin, down from the edges of her smile.
She told me that she didn’t run or shout;
was, when the pit bull lunged, still in denial.
3.
Still in shock, sleep all but impossible,
I read the journal from my trip to Greece
after returning from the hospital;
read long into the night, about the night
when, meeting for a drink, we found release
from loneliness; about how S., despite
knowing me all of an hour, felt at ease
enough to share how many surgeries
she’d had to have in the last year, her face
still not quite hers; about the binding lease
that forced her to recover in the place
next door to where the pit bull went on living;
about its owner, who refused her pleas
to see the dog put down; about surviving.
Nicholas Pierce is pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Utah. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. His first book, In Transit, won the 2021 New Criterion Poetry Prize. “The Death of Argos” appeared in that volume, published by Criterion Books.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
