Questions for Animals

Through the worlds of cause and effect, forms, and formlessness, echoing the structure
of the shrine Borobudur, this work explores these convergences: Paul Oppenheimer's
argument that the best origin of sonnet is sonitus, the music of the spheres perceived in
this world as a deafening; the experience of Borobudur 's rectangular stone reliefs within
a structure that looks angular but is circular; and a deaf woman's observation that vowel
sounds conflate on faces under the duress of pleasure or pain. The attempt, as the sonnet
moves through the volume, interrupted four times by poems of other types, is to
experience what seems, like stone or path, a most syllogistic of forms, as mandala.
Throughout, the relationship between sight and sound is explored, using homophones,
syntax working with and against parts of speech and lineation, hearkening to words that
keep as unresolved as possible the vowel sounds, as brogues do, and tonal languages.