My Human Disguise, Parts One and Two, Sonnets #599 and #600

With these two sonnets, this sequence of 600 ekphrastic sonnets, My Human Disguise, is complete.

 

My Human Disguise, Part One, Sonnet #599 

Dear friend, do not forget what is hidden

In both the interstices and behind

The ears and feet and fingers of the mind

Cannot ever be revealed unbidden. 

I’m not the human, this disguise you find.

You must call to something else inside me,

A me even I think a mystery.

Both of us stare into the mirror, blind.

Each image we see is pentimento,

The colors laid on increasingly thick,

But like aging time, erring, erratic,

An offering of Now as memento.

I don’t understand “my human disguise.”

I never have. Is it wisdom or lies?

My Human Disguise, Part Two, Sonnet #600

It’s time to put down “My Human Disguise.”

Take off the mask, erase the images.

Enough of playing tyrant with my eyes

To creations of painters and such sages.

At times these acts of synesthesia

Have restored the blank page’s amnesia.

Then I remember I’m not a being,

But only its disguise, a seen seeing . . . .

   “He draws aside the brocaded curtain

     As if to reveal an intimacy

     Tantamount to an indiscretion,

     Though it is just to allow us to see.”

Notes: 

1. The concluding quatrain is

from the beginning of Sonnet #1,

“The Art of Painting” (by Vermeer),

from “My Human Disguise.”

The Art of Painting

2. Since this is a blog, the sonnets are

presented in reverse order. The reader

can start here for the first four sonnets:

My Human Disguise Beginning Sonnets

Click here for the next seven sonnets:

Next Seven Sonnets

After that, click on "newer posts"

at the bottom of each page.

3. The drawing for these two

sonnets is by Alice Guerin, titled

“Hands and Feet,” and appears as

the cover of the book containing

the first 200 sonnets of “My Human

Disguise,” published by Voca Me Press

in 2016. It also appears with Sonnet #40.

Fort Wayne, 1/15/22