Procession of the Autumn Insects (Matsumura Keibun), Sonnet #479

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My Human Disguise.

The crickets sing ceaselessly every night.

Are they warning off or chirping the dark?

They’ve a neutral effect, like a chalk mark

On an old slate blackboard, more gray than white.

I walk out into the back yard. Silence.

A crescent moon slides behind a thick cloud.

I shout “yes!” once and shatter night’s nonsense.

When I go in the crickets’ answer, both loud

And incessant, scolds me for my pretense.

I realize they are not scared, but proud.

In autumn, some crickets sound all day long,

As they regale the sun in regal state.

In moonlight, they whisper, winter can wait.

Soon the first frost will extinguish their song.

Print Gallery (M. C. Escher), Sonnet #478

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My Human Disguise.

To look through windows, that’s my task —

Through pupils, then my eyeglasses,

Then all framed images, unmasked

By fixed or widened apertures

(Bound as eyes are by eyelashes),

But what I see (I’m not quite sure)

Always changes all the same.

Too much is hidden by the frames.

I take what’s there and make sonnets,

An old form, adequate, fishnets

For ideas the images hook,

My own kind of print gallery.

I ask you not to read, but see

What I have written. Then, please, look.

Stone Henge (Thomas Hearne), Sonnet #477

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My Human Disguise.






What confronts us always hurts us,

Duration that doesn’t endure —

An articulate susurrus

In language absolutely pure

Of meaning, yet the understood

Plucking of a stringless oud.

These settling stones are no older

Than my standing here among them,

Though I will sooner grow colder —

The builders having meant “amen.”

I said “hurt” — I don’t know what kind.

The muscles clench and doubts impinge

On leanings and knowns of the mind.

It’s not a stone but a time henge.

The Red Jester (Jan Van Beers), Sonnet #476

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My Human Disguise.

“Now, my dears, keep watching the ace.

My favorite card — it has no face

And just one itty bitty heart.

Hee, hee! It can’t squeak out a fart

The way the queen of spades

Will call to her some dainty maids

To please her king of diamonds

With one who has a showbiz mons.

Now, see? Your lazy eyes don’t peel

On the ace! It has disappeared!

Where’d it go? It’s as I feared,

Some joker has stolen the deal.

Why, that’s me! I rule the whole deck.

Every card’s at my call and beck!”

Gibbons in a Landscape (Sesson Shukei), Sonnet #475

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My Human Disguise.

A gibbon will stare at your eyes,

The recognition by an ape

Of an ape, and thus appear wise.

They do not clown, yawn or gape.

They don’t exist to entertain

And seldom become furious.

When they’re bored and incurious

They scatter into their demesne.

It’s said some live entire lives

Without ever touching the ground

Even when a typhoon arrives.

I see them then swinging round,

Dodging or riding the gale

That drowns their ecstatic wail.

Avalanche in the Alps (Philippe de Loutherbourge), Sonnet #474

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My Human Disguise.








Each avalanche is renewal.

At times men or whole forests die

When mountainsides shudder and fall

In great slabs and showers of scree.

A single step’s been known to start

A cataclysm, one small stone

Displacing another and one

Larger opening up a fault.

What’s left is a new rapprochement

With gravity, rearrangement

Of the ageless, immovable 

Granite face and tiny pebble.

Never, though, is any grandeur

Made — all things go through the grinder.

No Image (Memory), Sonnet #473

An insomniac, I wake, remember

My life in vivid, unchosen eras,

(Not so much the fly but the amber),

All real, rediscovered chimeras.

Often it’s place that sets the revery,

What happened each day when I lived somewhere

Decades ago. Names and faces vary

From what they are today to what they were.

Like swimming, eyes open, under water,

A certain fearlessness is required —

At any time the vision can falter,

The eyes go blind or sting, become mirrored.

I can choose a time, but sometimes it’s blank,

Then my eyes water and I blink and blink.