Strong Dream (Paul Klee), Sonnets #471 and #472

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My Human Disguise.

















#471

I ask myself, who dreams the dream?

In real time “I” experience

Oddities and “life.” Like a beam

Flashed along a picket fence,

“I” find in each gap an event —

From where inside me was it sent?

“I” play a game of pool and lose.

“I” feel the loss, see the table.

Who changes the scene? “I” didn’t choose.

Now “I’m” flying as if “I’m” able.

There is another I in the “I” —

Stage manager and audience.

It’s stronger than “I.” This dreaming eye

Sees “me” seeing the picket fence.

#472

He dreamed the sun devoured by the moon.

He dreamed the moon deflowered by the sun.

The stars blinked their tiny eyes at the ruin.

His slinging guitar became a shotgun

And with one blast picked off every star

Then turned back into a slinging guitar.

He took off his wings when he went to sleep.

They kept him as warm as the woolen sheep

Of old counting — that didn’t work at all.

So warm his feet and face had turned brick red,

He rode into a lukewarm waterfall

On a black mule, back as wide as a bed.

I saw all this through his closed eyes, not mine,

Yet he wrote this goggling, every line.

View From The Dunes (Piet Mondrian), Sonnet #470

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My Human Disguise.









I asked my youngest why the grains of sand,

After millennia in roiled water,

Grow only so small and no smaller.

(Wouldn’t gold dissolve if endlessly panned?)

“Maybe they’re too tiny,” said my daughter,

“To be abrasive anymore.” Last year,

A storm raked off ten feet of grassy dunes,

Leaving jagged walls and crumbling wounds.

The long-buried sand was the same as here

On the upper ledge, unchanged under tons’

Gravitational grinding of eons.

The waves, gale-wind-whipped, tip over and drop,

And even in the stillest air never stop.

Each grain of sand changes less than the suns.

Alexander Confronts The Headless People (The Talbot Shrewsbury Book), Sonnet #469

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My Human Disguise.





A tyrant seeks with tongue or sword to erase

In his conquests every other race

But his own, put defenders to the chase.

He doesn’t have to kill to cut off heads;

He can speak black words of hatred instead.

By dong so, his voice, his anger, bled

Of honor, leaves him only his blunt spear

To throw blindly at what he thinks is fear,

As one by one his soldiers disappear.

The “headless” ones begin to speak of truth

With the insight and energy of youth,

And refuse to accept their headless state:

The tyrant himself, mumbling, twitting, “great,”

And nothing left beneath his balding pate.

The Catbird (John James Audubon), Sonnet #468

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My Human Disguise.


















As if ashamed of its homely feathers,

The cowbird disowns its young in the nest.

In those it didn’t build it abandons 

An egg among the eggs of its betters,

Who raise the cowbird along with the rest.

(The intruder will steal from the small ones.)

Parents who can identify their own,

Catbirds fling the parasites out like stones.

They mew incessantly, then sing countless

Notes per minute — clucks, whines, gurgles, clicks, squawks,

Imitations of other birds but hawks.

Even more than most, the catbird’s restless;

Endlessly curious or vigilant,

It flies — the only time it is silent.

VILLANELLE

The moment passed and I forget

The reason why or what I meant

In the exact instant I let

It go like a blank letter sent

To someone I don’t remember.

Even Now is an old event,

Both a flaming and an ember.

To hold, even touch, is to burn

Like September in December.

It takes but a second to learn,

What no-one else will ever know,

That all I am will soon return

If I stand not still but think slow,

Say nothing, and as if asleep,

Allow myself to come and go.

Instead, I cannot help but leap

Ahead to what’s to come and let

My self reach for what it can’t keep,

Moments I already forget.

The Magic Square (Albrecht Durer), Sonnet #467

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The summer is an empty hourglass

I tumble through like a clump of sand

That cannot, trying very hard, pass

Through the neck and softly land

At the bulbs’ bottom, top or bottom,

Depending on the hour of the turn.

The asphalts and red bee balms burn

And the sun is a single blazing atom.

The bell has been silent, raising hope

(It all depends on squares and magic

And the diminution of the tragic)

That someday someone will tug on its rope,

Awakening the prayed-for lightning storm

That once our angel promised to reform.

David with the Head of Goliath (Artemisia Gentileschi), Sonnet #466

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It was no small stone that struck Goliath down,

But as large as the giant’s hand, sling-flung,

God-guided to strike just below the crown,

By a future king, still innocent and young.

The task yet undone, David severed its head

With the Philistine’s sword, though it took loud

Chopping to get through much gristle and bone.

He couldn’t lift what, so heavily dead,

He meant to parade for the cheering crowd,

So he brandished instead the conquering stone.

Such battles now will never disappear.

The weak and poor are every monster’s prey,

Yet live complacently and without fear.

Goliaths behead Davids every day.