Canal by the Moonlight (Koho Shoda), Sonnet #575

 

We walk along the canal at moonrise.

I ask you, “Is the moon stupid or wise?”

“Ask the moon,” you tell me. The moon replies,

“Ask a lightbulb or the sun. My light lies.”

We wonder how bright it is on Saturn

When here each summer the forests burn.

For now, the evening is cool and dry,

The canal, silent, still, reflects the sky,

The nighthawks don’t know how to whir or fly,

And nowhere is there written the word “why.”

It’s said time is what happens when nothing

Else does, but I think all’s a spinning ring,

Invisible sound, a silent seeing,

A tiny moon dangling on nervous string.

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Rose Bushes Under The Trees (Gustav Klimt), Sonnet #572

 

For Ruth

We are two rose bushes

Growing beneath the elms.

We bloom at the same time,

Daubed by two paint brushes,

Yet outside human realms,

Even the gasps of rhyme.

We stand slightly apart,

Touching, turning petals —

Untouchable to art.

The odd leaf falls, settles,

Not a thing we miss,

The swooning of a kiss.

The elms embrace, hover

Above — sweet shade, my love.

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Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm (J.M.W. Turner), Sonnet #541

 

An avalanche exists in the abstract,

A violent snow and ice cataract,

Content without shape, without content,

A proliferation of the absent.

A blizzard wipes the air empty and white

And confuses real things with closed-eye night.

(Formlessness is a natural order,

An extremity without a border.)

The thunderstorm exposes the mountain

With splintering intensity; fountains

Of light define the crag, the slope, the tree —

Revealing only momentarily.

These words (also abstract) erase all forms

From the blankest page — revealing more storms.

With thanks to Jeff Strayer for the Turner suggestion.

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Sanskrit Character—Fudo, The Demon Queller (Hakuin), Sonnet #481

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My Human Disguise.

The character knew he could not kill

But only quell the demon within,

Only drive his foot into its throat

And not let up even when it grew still,

As he knew that was its rictus of sin

(Less potent when, silenced, no gloat

Assailed the air like a black-winged kite,

Its head and eyes deceptively white

Circling harvested fields, hunting soul),

His leg beyond strength, aging to stone,

A numbness, cold as unfired coal,

The marrow seeping from his ankle bone,

He thinks he could surrender and free

The evil that, laughing, wouldn’t flee.

Library (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #463

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My Human Disguise.









The library is every room in my home.

Books paper the walls; teetering stacks on the floor

Can threaten me if I’m not careful where I walk.

I won’t tell you that I have read every tome.

It’s the yet-to-be-read books a library’s for —

A near-endless resource — reasons why I don’t talk.

Oh, to have them all in one room and organized

By author, genre, or ranked according to size.

The endless hours I've spent looking for one volume

And not finding it — it’s like exploring a tomb.

I know a man with one hall as big as a church

For his collection, bequeathed to him by his Aunt —

Every book by or about Immanuel Kant.

He only uses it for his cockatoo’s perch. 

The Cave at Enoshima in Sagami Province (Utagawa Hiroshige), Sonnet #449

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A sacred wave chases men from the shore

A sacred tree survives the wind and wrack

A sacred root clutches a rocky crack

A sacred cave with silk smooth walls and floor 

This all exists because I stand outside,

My eye less a lens than a picture frame.

My mind shutters, cannot close, opens wide

Dying to give everything a name.

Three men venture slowly into the cave,

Carry one lamp they will light at the nave

Where the sea’s voice is echoic and grave

And the light is not particle or wave.

They bring nothing else, no prayer to say

In this mouth opened by ancient sea fray. 

Friedrich Nietzsche (Edvard Munch), Sonnet #446

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He stands as if on the opposite rail —

On the same old circumambient bridge —

From the man with two strangers on his trail.

His forehead is a rain-carved granite ridge.

Though he seems composed, thoughtful, hands steady,

He might be going insane already.

The other’s panicked cry doesn’t make noise,

While Fritz shadows his pain in equipoise.

They say his sly sister Elizabeth

Let his mustache grow to cover his teeth

And tongue that in a mock rictus of death

Would twist and grind, never ceasing to seethe.

He called himself a nitroglycerine

Antidote for no god, if not for sin.

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais and The Tree of Tule, Sonnet #444

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Say that not all works of beauty are willed.

For centuries freemasons tried to build

A spire 500 feet into the sky,

Which collapsed three times and was abandoned.

They settled for the real, but had to try —

Just one of the lessons it taught Rodin.

The Tule tree has the same architecture —

Chthonian, with buttresses, gargoyles,

All the result of a wild conjecture

And intent and the fruit of endless toils.

In truth, there’s nothing that’s not beautiful,

Nothing not made; even nothing is willed.

Everything is essence, blind, dutiful,

Perfect if at times imperfectly skilled.

The Thinker (Auguste Rodin), Sonnet #443

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A problem with the “hard problem” —

How can this muscle mass and bone

Topped off with a refulgent shell,

Medulla and a tapered stem,

Obliterate being alone?

Thought isn’t thought in a locked cell.

Until we see eyes see, tongues talk,

Our eyes and tongues are chunks of chalk.

Rodin meant us to see an act.

His Thinker is an angel fact,

A nothing without us to see, 

Though it’s hard for us to believe.

No, it’s we think, we are — we weave

Each thought from you and you and me.

Fall of Rebel Angels, detail (Pieter Bruegel The Elder), Sonnet #428

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Did each cease to be an angel

The moment he or she rebelled?

What creatures were they when they fell,

Who spewed and farted, bled and yelled?

A kind of dead, not devils yet,

Before the rest of time in Hell,

They must endure a monster’s spell

In payment of their Master’s debt.

So men today learn to betray

Themselves and all they ever knew

As truth. They haven’t lost their way,

They’ll say. “We’re just making things new.”

The air is full of monsters’ lies

Falling like newly wingless flies.

Pikes Peak (Albert Bierstadt), Sonnet #427

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I lived on Custer, a white hood

Filling my living room window.

On a June afternoon I stood

On the summit in blooms of snow,

An hour later in sun below.

The peak was seldom where you were

And never where you were not sure

A great presence of white and pink,

As if by thinking, made you think.

The Utes called it “Tava” or sun,

As if there must be more than one,

Needing light close enough to touch,

To take away, but not too much,

Or soon the mountain would be gone.

Two Women Chatting by the Sea (Camille Pissarro), Sonnet #414

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Even today, humid, with a warm breeze,

The sea, calm as ice right up to the shore,

Is a place they can’t love and can’t ignore.

It’s a canard that the horizon frees

One’s wishes until they are all one sees.

The water is only the place where breath

Stops, where a man can’t walk or even swim

The distance between disaster and death.

The beach is a sand glass filled to the brim

With liquid you can’t drink without dying.

How much of sand is crushed bone still drying?

The women chat of things both gay and grim.

They’d scoff at the idea of the sea’s gift

And fear most the daily threat in sea drift.

The Virtue Wagon (Paul Klee), Sonnet #412

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The wagon was a hit in the Virtue Parade.

Men and women (we couldn’t tell apart) costumed

In various stages of address and undress,

Depicted what we all lust for and none evade —

The self-righteousness that cannot be self-consumed.

The wagon dragged an anchor; why?, we couldn’t guess.

We marveled how the actors laughed but couldn’t smile,

Flinging candied hearts to the crowd mile after mile.

They tasted sweet and dour like sugary chalk

And gave no joy to boy or girl of true virtue

(Each of us knew ourselves to be one of those few).

The wagon was now full of nudes — look at us gawk!

Underthings, pants, and dresses came showering down.

A bald man in the crowd donned a harlequin’s crown.

Koi And Turtles (Hokusai), Sonnet #407

The Kishwaukee River was polluted

When he wandered its mud banks as a boy.

A gray iron foundry’s whistle tooted.

An ice cream company poured colored waste

On Thursdays to the carp and suckers’ joy,

Though peppermint didn’t seem to their taste.

In Japan they breed ornamental koi,

But here carp are held a pesty junk fish

And though his Dad smoked them — a tasteless dish.

He fished them because an eight pounder fought

With fury, gasping on the grass when caught.

He dragged in snapping turtles with stout line,

Chunks of bass. Dad axed their necks and made fine

Soup — until his fingers went from ten to nine.

Horseman Attacked by a Giant Snake (Henry Fuseli), Sonnet #403

The marauding giant snake isn’t there

In spirit, his eye askance, as if bored,

Though it tries to swallow the horse head first.

The man, trotting by without a kid’s care

(He seems to be a knight or princely lord),

Will soon have his vitals torn out or burst

By his horse’s hind hooves or the snake’s tail,

With no one to heed his nearly choked wail. 

If I came on this scene what would I do?

There seems to be no spear, arrow or blade

On the ground, and I’m no David who slew

His giant with a stone. An enfilade

Of rocks pelted by my two-armed army

Would just turn the snake’s other eye on me.