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.
The boar hound killed the hart;
The elk fooled him — ran free.
Our traps were empty.
The snow buried our cart.
We hauled the meat, left the skins.
While we risk death to survive,
The wealthy go skating!
Yea, they pray for their sins,
As we do just to stay alive.
It is very hard, not hating.
Our women, spiritually dead,
Will pay off all we owe
To those princely anointed,
While we hunt again tomorrow.
We shouldn’t ever pluck them —
They endure so few days.
Their rows bow each stem
Just how much love weighs.
My wife’s come from a garden
Her mother tended for years.
She would beg your pardon
To say: “Not like blood, but tears.”
I watched my daughter draw
This picture for Mother’s Day,
Obeying her own inner law
To paint what only she can say:
Three mothers’ hearts in one
Sweet flowering of passion.
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.”
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:
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
We used to talk of divine afflatus,
Now no more— dubious inspiration
Led us to the corruption of desire,
Turning each individual to Us —
A collective of alienation
Satisfied with cold ashes and out fire.
I will instead take to my red balloon
And, rising above all that troubles me,
Seeking what only I call destiny
In the apposite hours, late and soon.
The cold wind, hidden sun, and burning gas,
Earth turning to images as I pass,
Undoes the fears and tremors my being
Held too dear, as seeking loves believing.
There’s expectation in her face
Even though she’s dressed in mourning,
But for a bonnet of white lace
And white cuffs and a wedding ring
Half-hidden by a kerchief gripped
So tightly it might have ripped.
Her straight chair sits on a gray rug,
Shoes on a padded wooden rest.
Silver threaded curtains hug
Gray walls as if they hid a guest
Once welcomed and now departed.
I wonder how her son started —
Arranging the grays and blacks square
Or with his mother’s haunting stare.
The vagaries of thought,
Less what is than is not,
Impossible windows,
Into, out, no wind blows,
And no light pierces lights,
But open gates of nights
Where, like a crystal jar,
Spins only one bright star
Placing all in its place
In emptiness of space,
(I am a meadowlark —
I don’t sing in the dark),
Where all’s in good order
Outside my own border.
It’s too soon to write about it.
I prefer Spinoza’s spirit,
Its embodiment of rainbows,
No holier than house sparrows.
It’s all perhaps a point of view,
Nothing is preternatural,
Just perpetually new,
A pride before there is no fall.
I stand inside an open door.
Indirect sunlight suffuses
The hallway with its sweet odor —
Even motes of dust have uses.
Outside a statue of mother
Asks, “Are you you, or some other?”
for Jeffrey Strayer
Extreme effort to frame:
What’s seen with or without
Enclosure takes the same
Circumambient route
Into the dark pupil.
Mountains and valleys spill
Beyond the circle’s span,
From rainclouds to brainpan.
They say it’s a hard climb
To reach the stone circle,
Yet, everywhere I’m
Found, the same miracle
Completes figure and ground:
A nearly perfect round.
The snow in the back yard rusts like a plucked white rose,
Rutted with the tracks of rabbits and raccoons,
Leaf-pocked and stained with coal ash the wind blows
From factories on the river — a field of runes.
Couples skate, boys race, a man falls through the ice,
Though no one seems to see. Two drunkards play with dice.
The drowned body won’t be found until the spring thaw,
With no consideration of conscience or law.
The air is bitter, unignited by the sun.
The wind stings the cheeks, blinds the eyes, numbs the ears.
It hasn’t been this damned cold in a year of years.
Yet the day is a festival for everyone.
For now, winter distracts women, children and men.
The next snow storm will wipe the world clean again.
Most of my dreams are black and white,
A sickly world lit by moonlight.
Golden wheat under setting sun
Igniting quickly fades to dun,
To dim, to shadow, then to black.
A full moon won’t bring colors back.
Night is no dream, but serious.
Even if it hinders vision,
We can’t become delirious —
We’ve no excuse for misprision.
Fear is something other, the end
(Not of meaning or misreading,
The touch of warm flesh, or needing)
Of sight only the sun can mend.
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.
