"My Human Disguise" is a work of sonnets that will ultimately be 600 in total. This work will be finished by January of 2022. The first 200 sonnets, or Vol. 1 of "My Human Disguise," was published by my Vocame Press in 2018. It is available at Amazon: My Human Disguise. All 600 sonnets are "ekphrastic sonnets," meaning they are based on images -- paintings, photographs, sculpture, prints, drawings and other images. Combined with the images, these sonnets provide an immersive experience. In most cases, each image is only a stepping off point for each poem. In other words, the sonnets aren't often "about" the images, but rather are inspired by them. Below are six sonnets, all, except the first, from Vol. 1. This blog's blog-roll contains all of the sonnets completed to date, more than 545.
The Truth Coming Out of the Well (Jean-Leon Gerome), Sonnet #543
Both the truth and its liars are hidden
And will not come forth to speak unbidden
By necessity’s will or convenience,
Unless called for by fakery of sense.
Only at the bottom of a dry well —
Half way, the easy half, from here to Hell —
Where nakedness — dear Truth — shivers and sighs,
Does Emptiness stitch gorgeous clothes of lies.
He emerges to strut in his glory.
Every sentence he spouts is a story.
His opposite, her body cleansed at least,
Climbs out to the reception of a beast.
They beat and rape her, drag her by her hair,
Throw her back into the well, her dark lair.
Question, Sonnet #200
For Michael Antman
1
My daughter brought these stones from New Zealand.
At first we arranged them in a circle,
The white veins touching, mostly, band to band.
They seemed to me a kind of miracle,
Holding everything we know inside,
And all we don't brought in from far and wide.
But soon that seemed too pat an arrangement,
With a history, yes, and silent, but,
However Zen-like, it didn't hit my gut.
The circle must be cut open and bent,
As the thing it did not contain, allow,
Was questions (the world just is, here and now?).
The stones, like this 200th sonnet, speak,
And answer with a question what we seek.
2
To ask or not to ask, that is to be.
No answer has been satisfactory.
I can't know the secrets of my own soul,
Because, like Richard Wilbur's star-nosed mole,
I can only pass by the graves of men,
Whose own souls, if at last revealed to them,
May be whispering, like wind in the grass --
Language meant only for the dead en masse.
Instead, I'll ask for nothing but the sun
To answer with its rising tomorrow,
And listen to cicadas, one by one,
Respond with obliterated sorrow.
I love you all. That's an answer for now.
Someday I might learn more. I'll let you know.
The stones were collected as a gift for me by my daughter Alice Bea Guerin.
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.
A full moon and a gibbous moon in the dawn sky
Shiver like arrowheads that just struck the bull's-eye.
The stars show us everything since the beginning,
Until we close our eyes and discover nothing.
We ask "Is that all?" The given answer is "Why?"
To appease us, the gods have granted us longing,
Desire for what we can't have, see, or know,
Since the future, like a broken frame of stained glass,
Is all that's left of all the moments we let pass,
And sheds upon the now only a splintered glow.
Some say time's arrow is just consciousness at play,
That duration flies as swiftly in reverse,
Mending all but the present with no delay.
Try reading this poem, again, from this last verse.
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