The Imp Of The Abstract (Rick Gydesen), Sonnet #588

 

“The abstract is the most we know,”

Says the blind, woodenheaded imp.

“Reality is just for show,

Like a colorful, leaking blimp,

Or eyes painted yolky yellow,

Which see only bye or hello.”

We might ask it, “How can you tell?”

It would reply, “There is no point

To my rejoinder or the joint

Where two knotty blocks form an ‘L.’

You may think you see something All,

A tree dropping leaves in the Fall —

They’re not even a chimera,

Just habit, your ephemera.”

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My Human Disguise.

Broadway Boogie-Woogie (Piet Mondrian), Sonnet #583

 

The music in physical abstraction

Is in the eye that tries but can’t see straight,

A synesthesia, thought and action

Blurring all that is too far and too late.

Cross your eyes and a leaf disappears

Into a something, yes, but a nothing

Too, which will quietly begin to sing

Incomprehensibly to your pinched ears.

The New York City streets seen from a cloud,

All movement among sliding monuments,

Are like sheet music notes without accents,

Cacophonous, unrelievedly loud.

The autumn leaves run after taxi cabs

The old painter creates with little dabs.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase at Amazon. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (Hilma af Klint), Sonnet #452

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:
My Human Disguise.

Behind closed eyes, what’s written I redact —

Such is not just an idea but an act.

I don’t mean dreams, nor the imagined fact,

Like the nautilus, a chambered prison

Of the real, the unreal, and the abstract.

All I see is suspect and misprision.

Then bloom the perfect flowers of the now,

The dance of the ideal shapes, the entr’acte

Between times (those blind-eyed scenes of the show).

Now doesn’t admit even one and three,

Only two, which becomes nonentity

And leaves a shape we only think we see.

It’s all we know, not all we need to know.

The Angry Sea (Whistler), Sonnet #397

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 —

What he called the portrait of his mother.

Yet he named this seascape The Angry Sea.

Abstraction, anthropomorphization

Are how we seek out, how we discover

The single me among the countless we.

At first the crashing rollers were lovely,

Even, ordered, making room each for each,

Until they laved the unwelcoming beach.

Was it the ship that made the waves angry,

Or, to Whistler gave them a cause to be?

He flung himself into the sea and swam

And nearly drowned in the surge of “I am.”

composition-z-viii (László Moholy-Nagy), Sonnet #259

The colors muted, sere, the shapes impinge
On form. Combinations evaporate
Dimension and perspectives derange
The eye. We can't exist in such a state.
I wish I had a ball that bounced higher
Than the point whence my fingers let it drop,
That not even gravity would dare stop.
We know the universe is a liar.
(Science is like the blind man who can take
Out his eye and polish it with a cloth.
He lays it down and someone puts a fake
In its place -- the eye of a cabbage moth.)
Nature abhors perfect circles or lines,
Leaving us to pervert its perfect signs.