The Christopher Guerin Photo Suite

A number of the sonnets in the work, My Human Disguise, are based on my
own photography. They are collected here. In all, there are more than 600 sonnets,

all but a few of them that are not "ekphrastic," meaning, poems based on

images. The 600 sonnets can be found beginning on the blog page dated

January 7, 2022, then (due to the nature of blogger) working backward.

Blue Note, Sonnet #619

I took a photo seven times —

A thick grove of dark spindly trees

Backed by a bright December sun —

And a small turquoise dot shines

In each — the camera lens sees

Images where I think are none.

I continued my walk by a pond,

Looking for mink and waterfowl.

Hawks circled each other beyond,

Their screeches in the wind a howl.

From deep hoof prints I knew a deer

Had trod this path, now nowhere near.

I stared at the sun — a blinked tear

Painted the trees with a blue smear.

Thorns, Sonnet #615

They pierce a clear blue sky

And tear it to tatters.

Blind or with open eyes,

If I know what matters,

I can thrust my fingers

In and leave blood and flesh.

Yet starlings can linger,

Safe in its lethal mesh.

The question is why thorns?

They can protect a rose.

The bull charges its horns.

But why such a tree grows

Long and fearsome spindles

Pierces us with symbols.

Then, Sonnet #603

Then we were what we are not,

Our only vestiges of characters

Who long ago ignored the plot.

Within the high branches of factors,

We’ve continued climbing down,

Never touching a limb we've known,

Except what swiped at our backs.

The undone things one never lacks.

Some like to remember, some forget

Intentionally: “Those I never met.”

If and then! We cannot choose which;

If we don’t unblindingly recall,

Then it just becomes a mental itch —

Then after the present’s fall.

Swallowtail, Sonnet #609

The tiger swallowtail settled

In our Gomphrena Fireworks

Yesterday afternoon sipping

From dozens of pink blooms.

It became crazily nettled

And flew in wild fits and jerks

When a spicebush swallowtail, tipping

Its wings among the blossoms,

Exiled the tiger from its lair.

The wind pushed black wings apart

So wide they ceased to be a pair,

But held fast until the gust died.

The tiger landed like a dart,

But, like the wind, was again denied.

Ice Storm, Sonnet #547

The insistence of freezing rain

Can darken an entire town,

Bringing a million branches down,

Taxing the chainsaw and the crane . . .

Or it can glaze limb and berry

So lightly it melts as it grows

And only the frailest twig bows . . .

This, the weight we all carry.

This ice vanishes in an hour,

Once the sun ceases to hide,

But before the bushes have dried

Great murmurs of starlings devour

Without desperation or greed

Every trace of flesh and seed.

Lake Storm, Sonnet #528

On my birthday the storm rolls in

Off a roiling Lake Michigan.

Just out of the water my girls’

Hair stands on end from the static

Electricity; a cloud blurs.

An eagle flees on bursting air;

Its wingbeats seem prophetic

Of a sudden lightning bolt scare.

We’re in the house before the rain

And the thunder’s humbling pain.

The air is clear after an hour,

But such upset you don’t forget.

I’m a thunderstorm losing power,

Moving off for a clear sunset.

Wind Storm on Lake Michigan 10/12/18, Sonnet #429 

The waters are the solution of time,

(I’m not the only being to have said),

Forever stirred in its lake or sea bed

By wind or current; in its essence, prime,

Like 2, 3, 5, 7, or 11,

Or in some quantity, 97.

After all these many eons, “years,”

The solution is not nearly resolved—

Duration hasn’t thoroughly evolved

To nothing. Let us be content with tears.

Today, gale winds beat the waves to a moil

That tore the sand from the beach, turning

The water brown as the next wave’s recoil.

Threw back the sand into the hour’s churning.

Forsythia 2020, Sonnet #508

Because beauty is awake to itself,

We quicken in its consideration,

We take ourselves down from the storage shelf,

We expand like infant constellations. 

Forsythia blooms bright, sun dressed, bespoke,

Before hardly a bud bursts on the oak,

Because all loveliness can’t be present

At one moment in time; it’s hesitant,

And sends stems and blossoms into the air

In portions unsteady senses can bear.

Ugly is an ugly word for absence

Of beauty — let’s call it nothing at all,

And give it modest if any credence.

This is Eden and it will never fall.

Dust In Light, Sonnet #484

Have you ever watched motes

Closely, drifting in sun-

Or lamplight, tiny boats,

Rudderlessly, as one,

Ever shunning the dim,

Floating within the shaft,

Bouncing back from its rim

Until caught in a draft?

In quiet air the dust

Moves slowly, rises, turns

In a secret pattern

Closer to will than must.

Angel, Sonnet #409

Light is invisible until it hits

An object or penetrates the pupil.

No effort of intelligence or will

Can else know illumination’s spirits.

Real angels, it seems, are almost the same.

She can’t exist at all until I name

Her, with sounds I can’t think, and she appears,

The breeze from her wings allaying my fears.

She carries a small bouquet of flowers

And her raised right hand is empty, no sword

Or torch — hers are the powerless powers

I dare not test with even a whispered word.

Her wings buffet me — she rises to go.

I finally speak: “Stay.” Her smile says “no.”

Olen Pond WWI Memorial (Frederick Hibbard), Sonnet #408

She was created in nineteen thirty.

Six decades later someone took her head.

The artist made it hard to take her arms.

The flowers she holds are “Uncertainty.”

She’s called “Memory” for the Great War dead,

Whom she salutes with her physical charms.

She stands in a park by a middle school,

The bad dream of each child — poet or fool.

My dear, I do not need to see your face,

Or know the name of who modeled for you,

To describe yours as intelligent grace —

You know all war dead are less right than true.

When new your limestone breasts were pure and bold —

Unlike you, stone flower, death won’t grow old.

Old Farm Implement, Sonnet #399 

Few men remember their names any more,

Or could say what job they were meant to do.

The farmers who could own them weren’t poor,

And sat on them with pride when they were new.

For years these implements, burnished with rust,

Could be seen abandoned everywhere,

Behind old barns or at the edge of fields.

What did they once do? Harrow, raise and thrust

Soil aside, thresh, reap, seed, or flay land bare?

What were these dead contraptions richest yields?

Today they’re posed on front lawns like sculpture,

Humbler remnants of Ozymandias,

The disintegration of ideas

In an unrecognizable future.

A Near Infinity, Sonnet #393

A near infinity away a rock

Lies on the surface of a blasted moon.

No one will ever see it, but it’s there.

An asteroid will slam nearby — the shock

Will leave only a crater or a dune,

Slowly cooling in its star’s blinded glare.

In every sky scraper a fire escape

Stacks thousands of risers and treads of taupe

Or sage, sometimes both, lined with painters tape,

And handrails of pipe never gripped with hope.

Millions of miles of stairs on our planet

Made just in case, which men will never see.

Four dimensions count the hidden quiet,

Fill the near infinite with the empty.

An Old Oak Tree Saved, Sonnet #386 

For Sister Elise Kriss

When I saw the fence around the old oak,

I thanked the Sister for saving the tree.

“Yes,”she said, “we intend to make a park

Next to the college’s new library.

Someday the two of us will sit under

Its branches and have a nice little talk.”

But on my street city workers sunder

An entire elm grove to make a sidewalk.

I asked the foreman, was it necessary?

He wiped the sawdust from his balding head

And said, “Why the heck are you asking me?”

He had a point — by then the trees were dead.

I told Sister I wouldn’t forget us

Getting together. There’s much to discuss.

Euphorbia (African Milk Stripe Plant), Sonnet #380

For Ruth on Our 40th Wedding Anniversary, 11/27/77

I bought this for your 21st birthday

In September 1975.

It was just one slender emerald stem —

Our wedding still two years, two months away.

Not only did your care keep it alive,

There are now more than a dozen of them

Inside our home, grown as big as the first,

And yet more — all cut from the mother tree —

We’ve given to our friends and family.

They need little water and do not thirst

For much but light — yours and that of the sun.

The plant has spines more hurtful than a rose,

But I’ve never been pierced by one of those.

So much life, love. You are the only one.

The Figure-Ground Illusion, Sonnet #373

Nothing is only one thing. Nothing.

An egg is both a womb and a prison,

A screech owl a hunter and great horns’ prey.

Funerals are gatherings and parting,

A thought both an act and a vision.

The sun is the start and the end of day.

In this shadowed bark we see a face,

Stern, discerning, a bit oblivious,

Contemptuous of all that’s obvious,

Stupid, loveless, cruel in the human race.

I see a bat fleeing a predator,

A cat or weasel nipping at its tail

(The eye being a restless editor) —

The man smiling because his cat will fail.

Stone Formation, Sonnet #367

The experience of enlightenment

Is the arrangement of a few beach stones

On an old wooden deck, not an event,

Not a vision, not a handful of koans.

Ikkyu had this moment of insight

On hearing the song of a soldier's slight

That drove two girls into a nunnery,

Leaving their general his gunnery:

“Sixty blows from my master’s stick would serve

As well to achieve what I don’t deserve.”

These four stones have been carelessly arranged,

Each chosen for its one flat edge to rest

And have in wind and rain remained unchanged.

In their presence I’m an unwanted guest.

Note: Much of Ikkyu’s life is apocryphal, though

the story of his enlightenment upon hearing the

blind man’s song about two women ill-treated

by a general is a central part of his legend. The

quote I attribute to him is consistent with the
legend, though partly my invention. 

The Cricket Eclipse, Sonnet #365

He chirps beneath our crabapple tree all night long.

The cricket’s krrrr is a two, three and four beat song,

Random and loud. He stops when a voice from afar

Seems to answer, rasping the same note bar for bar.

(The cicada’s bright buzzing in the August sun

Is lovelier, but isn’t meant for anyone.)

I do not understand the cricket’s existence,

His urgency, or his athletic persistence.

He fills the humid summer night with his griping,

Yet stops at the first pre-dawn robin’s sweet piping.

I’ve never heard him make a sound during the day,

Until today, when the air went from light to gray.

As the sun’s eclipse spread its mockery of doom,

I heard all the crickets in the neighborhood boom. 

Tiger Lilies, Sonnet #304

For Ruth

They lined the country roads in Illinois.
Great banks of red-orange blossoms, green stems,
And pale pink tubes waiting to splay open --
Our courting flower, this remembered joy.
I drove those roads to see you most weekends
In the battered Mustang I had back then.
Fifty miles of lily-lined road before
I reached the highway, with fifty miles more,
Until I kissed your lips and took your hands,
And walked with you on Lake Michigan sands.
Now the lilies open every July
In our back yard, and up and down the street.
They are one answer to our loving's "why."
Their scent is faint, but unearthily sweet.

Note: The spelling of "unearthily" is not
strictly speaking correct; I'm combining
"earthy" with "unearthly."

Ars Poetica, Sonnet #300

For Michael Antman

Here is one way others might have put it --
Others, each most certainly a poet:
"A poem is not voice, not It, not words.
A visage stuck on a tree trunk with eyes
That see a face in every disguise,
A barking, one more ring of the absurd."
This face of wood had a blank beginning,
But I see him in the middle of things,
Resigned, but not unconscious of his state.
The light in his dark eyes says, "I am here,
I and no other, and I've seen my fate,
So I have something to say, come nearer."
MacLeish: "A poem should not mean, but be."
No, a poem should be a beam of me.

Note: The Ars Poetica, or poem about The Art of Poetry has a long
tradition going back to Horace. The most famous 20th century
Ars Poetica is by Archibald MacLeish. It's a lovely poem in many ways,
but I've always hated the concluding couplet. I wonder how many 
bad poems have been written and published because of those two lines. 
A well-known critic recently said, by way of advice to poets, "What you
have to say is rubbish. It's how you say it that matters." Rubbish. How 
you say it is important, but if you have nothing to say, or nothing worth 
saying, or what you say is rubbish, then what's the point?

Mr. Burl, Sonnet #292

I call him, comically, Mr. Burl,
A cancerous growth on an ancient oak,
And though he's funny to my little girl,
He is an alien evil. No joke.
For millennia the trees have captured
Invaders and frozen them in bark
And cambium, (their faces enraptured
Or agonized), inescapable arks
For all creatures from the limitless dark.
Sometimes an arm or ear is all that's left,
Arrested by constricting branches' cleft.
The oldest trees are often body casts
Of whole monsters, stifling their vicious blasts --
Our sentinels while the invasion lasts.

Clouds in Late Fall, Sonnet #276

I have never seen anything in clouds
But a mirror of my unruly mind.
Up there, my interior is being signed
By the gestures of blind and deaf-mute crowds.
There is nothing I do not recognize,
Yet can't name, or vaguely realize,
Because the mind is only a disguise.
I'm not a thought or feeling. I am eyes.
So why did I choose these raked clouds, the skies
Beyond visible, irises blind and blue?
Where I stood the too-close cars rushed past.
The camera trembled, a cold wind blew.
I couldn't find what I'd stopped for -- the view
Had changed -- so I took what was left and last.

Oak in Snow Shower, Sonnet #274

The oak won't grow straight or narrow.
Its parsing of three dimensions
Is like an exploded arrow
Or skeins of galaxial suns.
Time is the drifting down of snow.
Some men cut down a dead willow.
For the first time I can now see
The oak out of my front window.
It beckons to the breath in me.
I once compared bare trees to screams.
A stupid metaphor. "Spacetime,"
Too, renames what is with what seems.
Look closely. The oak's branches rhyme
With all we are, as we sublime.

Moon Jelly, Sonnet #249

The moons of Earth and Jupiter
Move in space pierced by meteor,
Comet, radiation, asteroid.
All dead things exist in a void
Full of other dead things that fly
Day by day at infinity.
One cannot love the moon jelly.
They're as empty as the word "why."
Instead, we fill them with ideas,
Those bits of us we understand,
That drift along in conscious seas,
Never once in sight of land.
They vanish and then reappear,
Vestiges of another sphere.

















The Black Tree, Sonnet #247

I saw the black tree from a gravel road.
I could not help stopping to stare.
I saw clearly, believed it was not there.
It hid, a mystery, all code.
Were its branches burned, kindled by lightning,
Or blighted by some insect borer,
Choked of light by foliage tightening,
Or stripped bare by some unknown horror?
I opened the window hoping to hear
Loud birdsong, joyous, unconcerned.
The silence fumed like gases slowly burned.
How could a dead tree evoke fear?
I took this photo, quickly drove away.
I will climb down from it someday.

Wildfire Sunset, Sonnet #254

In Canada, wildfires have burned
For weeks, staining the sun with ash.
The drear boatman Charon has earned,
Demanding the obulus, cash
Payment for transport of the dead.
What can I buy with suns so red,
Molten gold poured into a mold
Of sky, minted without a date,
Because sun and I are too old
To have value at a fair rate?
The fires to the north are a hell
Of sorts, but I will not go there.
I've pocketed the sun, our share
Of the day, which none ever sell.

The Wave, Sonnet #253

I dove and dove into the next crest;
Then, dizzy, with my spine wrenched, I floated,
Face down, standing when sand brushed my chest.
Each wave yearns, its will pure and devoted
To reaching the afterlife of the shore.
As it thins to wash, there is nothing more.
I've thrashed and pummeled the waves, throwing
Myself, breast and head first, for an hour,
Unthinking with laughter, gulps of knowing,
Loosing myself into the wave's power.
I know, not every one dies on the beach.
Those farthest out tip high and flatten out.
I swim well, but they're beyond my reach.
New waves will rise and peak beyond doubt.

Gibbous Moon at Sunrise, Sonnet #226

Change speeds. No scales, no balances remain even;
They tip, totter, weighing innumerable me's.
A morning so cold I wonder if pupils freeze.
The waning moon runs from the invisible sun.
A bare tree passes on its light from limb to limb,
Chipping away the orb's disintegrating rim.
I stop to take this picture (though I'm late for work)
Of a moment when, through clutter of trees and murk,
The exhausted, retiring moon beckons and winks,
Before, like reversed syntax, into earth it sinks.
Two days later, at precisely the same hour,
I returned -- the sky empty, the air ancient cold.
You must, I thought, do everything in your power
To stop the need to see clearly from growing old.

















The Eye of Light, Sonnet #184

The eye of light is a spectrum of irises
With two dilated pupils, like binary stars,
Slightly blind, in need of Man's eyeglasses,
Its cornea a matting of translucent scars.
Light is a god, as consciousness is a god,
Illuminations we require to survive,
And each is useless, like a cracked divining rod,
Without the bird in flight or a bee-boiling hive.
The eye-beam that threw a rainbow on my ceiling
The sun sent minutes ago to find a prism,
Like the brain turns sensation into feeling,
Near purity, a benign astigmatism.
A man is godly then, in part, without being
A god, though he can often go blind with seeing.






















Crystal Pyramid, Sonnet #154

A crystal pyramid, faceted creation
Of pressure, heat and imagination,
Frozen purity, a trap for light with five sides,
Where reflection upon infinity resides.
In total darkness it sleeps in oblivion,
But a single candle ignites a refraction,
Carving light into color in serrated planes,
Only as rigid as the stillness of the flame.
But a camera flash, like a blast of insight,
Will bury color at its heart and leave a blight
Of vacant lines as each facet locks to the next,
Like pages in a closed book obliterate text.
Let the sun burst it red, orange, yellow and blue,
Then open your eyes, take your time, and think things through.

Broken Oak, Sonnet #120

I

Am I what I think more than what I see?
An obvious thought and pernicious truth,
It seems; thus, we have made a mess of things.
A broken tree is just a shattered knee.
The logic of zealots, rampaging youth --
The loner's automatic weapon sings.
The smaller trees surround the fallen trunk
Like children appalled by their father drunk.
We teach them to love our wide-eyed blindness,
To rationalize even one's kindness.
The painter's tree is no truer than mine.
We see the same, sad ending of a life.
But all of his splintering is a sign
Of unnatural and murderous strife.


II

If a tree falls in the forest....the old saw goes.
That cliche has become the source of all we know --
The answer being the answer is no answer.
Our consciousness is a kind of benign cancer,
Creating forests by invading their silence;
By dying we wreak universal violence.
Consider the wreckage where each tree broke apart,
The sundering of sinew, the breakage of bone,
The surrendering of structure to mere air, blown,
By what, all in the creation of works of art.
To see, to think, to know, to make, and then unmake.
To discover, to climb and fall, and then to break.
The happiest man revels in uncertainty.
We are the tree-makers or we are the tree.

The Kraken Tree, Sonnet #168 

My daughters called it the Kraken Tree
And said it had dived from deep space
To make a new home of rich earth
Being fed up with the bottom of the sea.
Its tentacles, both thick and frail as lace,
Were thrust aloft by its mantle's girth.
They claimed it snapped at voles and moles
With its beak and had plenty to see
Peering into burrowing animals' holes.
In summer the beast is covered in leaves
And becomes a home to nesting birds.
I ask if either daughter still believes
In the Kraken. "Dad! It's not just words!"

So, I find the Kraken Tree on my daily walk.
Sometimes the naked trees around it look like shrieks;
In frigid cold the rubbing of the branches creaks.
A rookery at dusk, here a hundred crows squawk.
The tree stands next to a frozen river that floods.
When it recedes it leaves shelf ice around the trunk.
It's March and the tentacles begin to grow buds.
Suckers sprout just above where the squid's eyes are sunk
Into grassy, leaf-scattered dirt, blinking and blind.
The swaying of its appendages stirs the breeze,
Playfully: the sea creature has some game in mind.
He'd have me believe he's just one of many trees.
I walk on, unconvinced, for I have touched his skin,
His living bark, and sensed the consciousness within.

Elemental, Sonnets #161 and #162

There's an idea (fake as this pyrite ball is gold),
That these shapes possess some elemental structure --
"A pyramid breaks into triangles and square."
My New Math teacher once, patiently, told
Us a plane held infinite points. I wasn't so sure.
I asked, if I take a sharp pencil to paper
And make a million dots the paper won't turn black?
It's a concept, he answered angrily, not fact!
Cube, sphere, prism, octahedron, and elliptic
Palm stone -- some machine cut, some grown, some nature-made --
Arranged on my highboy, formulate a cryptic
Code of concepts curiosity can't evade,
Though we examine them without penetration.
Their rigid simplicity mocks contemplation.

Simple. Elemental. Basic. Fast. Essential.
Are these the bricks and mortar of the universe
Or the toys and pastimes of a collective mind?
It's true, some find them holy and reverential,
Expressions infinitely eloquent, yet terse,
Or like paintings, not quite finished, though signed.
Do lines along two axes meet only to end
Or pass on into a negative world designed
To balance everything, or do all lines there bend
And nothing here is ever perfectly aligned?
The mind, like gravity, tends to make things rounded.
Ideas are circuitous; words circle, spiral.
Convictions are light trapped in a mirror-lined ball,
But no line stops a line; no thought is unbounded.

Harvest in the Black Hills, Sonnet #102

I've wondered how they kept the blades that sharp
For such cutting when they struggled with scythes.
Hay is tough, dullness only plucked it like a harp;
Why some men left the harvest to their wives.
Today, machines can cut and bale a field
Within hours, but can't increase the yield.
The flung bales crush the serried rows
Of severed stalks, but scattered straws
Defy the yield like impudent scofflaws,
Yet to be turned under by the plow.
We keep our distance, merciful and shy,
And dare not bend a stalk with shoe or eye.

In memory of Lucien Stryk, poet, teacher, and friend.

Natural Sculpture, Sonnet #82

The sphere predominates the Milky Way,
As gravity shapes the interstellar clay.
But on the earth it's relatively rare:
Birds' eye, the water droplet in mid air,
Eggs, scat, and pebbles on the beach,
All oblate; less so the orange and the peach.
But what to make of these sculpted stones?
Sentiently, Noguchi could have carved each one.
I found them, years apart, on the Michigan shore.
In summer I waste hours looking for more.
What two hands with a few tools could create,
Took wind, fire, earth, and water to generate.

 The Whiteblood Vine, Sonnet #26

By this cinder track, a whiteblood vine
Entangles a towering sycamore
In mockery of human error.
The parasite winds the tree’s spine,
Cleaving to rigidity it lacks,
Like a mind, faithful to facts.
From rooted stem, slim tendrils twine
Up and around every limb,
Grip a higher twig and climb—
Twig to limb, then twig, in stair-step line.
The creeper spreads its mesh;
Greenery sags, desiccated flesh.
The vine and sycamore combine
To create what they undermine.