Mountain Brook (John Singer Sargent), Sonnet #626.5

 

The brook ran through high mountain pasture

From failing glacier to pool to pond to lake,

Between banks limned with moss and aster

Rooted in cascades of shattered igneous flake.

I straddled the water running slow over stones,

My boots precariously gripping boulders

The water’s rilling shaped into hipbones.

Further up hunched matching shoulders.

I found a head and rolled it in, midstream.

The shallow, muttering water, unperturbed,

Flowed around and on like a vanquished dream.

Provoked, I left not a rock undisturbed

And rolled them in -- the addled stream burst

Banks and drowned the mountain pasture’s thirst.

Pine Forest (Gustav Klimt), Sonnet #616

There’s no edge to the pine forest.

We’re always within and without.

It’s neither a question nor test,

Because there’s no room here for doubt.

Its mixed scents purify the air

And its shades rarify the light.

I decide to touch each column,

Which soon urges me toward despair,

As though mine is a hand of blight

That renders the living bark numb.

Without navigable details,

One can get lost in woods — not these,

Whose needled floors delimit trails

Some, not all, follow with ease.

Mushroom

It appeared beneath our yew,

A large puffball that grew 

Unseen. Then there were two.

Soft, bleached skulls without holes,

Less like the dead than souls.

I picked them up — their spongy skin

As alarmingly soft as sin.

I was frightened of what grew within.

Magpie

A man shot a magpie on the wing.

It fell with a broken wing.

The nock snapped the bow’s string.

The man gave the bird to a priest,

Who nursed it to be released,

Then decided to keep it in a cage.

To release its gale force outrage,

The priest split the magpie’s tongue,

Expecting to hear a terrible song.

Instead he heard nothing but words,

The speech of Man, not birds:

His own prayers and curses,

And profaned Biblical verses.

The altar boys taught the magpie

To ask of everyone, “Why

Weren’t you shot from the sky?”

There

The nuthatches and chickadees

Are here, but are never there.

No twig, no arm of a lawn chair,

(Nothing their little claws seize)

Remains a perch for long

In each bird’s pursuit of song.

In movement they find flying.

They cannot be still for trying.

They pause only for sustenance —

The suspension of cadence

Taking air from the vibrating beak.

That is a bird’s life — to seek.

Turtle

A neighbor taught me “trout-lines,”

Said they were named after trout

Having been gone for centuries,

If they ever were here to be run off 

By poisons more filthy than death.

(Even he, in his sixties, didn’t know

They were actually called “trot-lines.”)

Still some species of hardier stuff,

All ugly (why does ugliness survive?) —

Carp, suckers, bullhead and catfish —

Seem to thrive in a watercourse

The sun cannot pierce or illuminate.

The trot-line is for the lazy “angler,”

A stout length of cord with a big hook

Baited with a small fish and weighted

With a heavy lead sinker and thrown

Out as far as possible and left.

I would check mine every few hours.

Often when I was rod fishing I’d be

More intent on the trot-line because

The hope was to catch something big.

Day after day the line would droop,

Swaying in the Kishwaukee’s current.

Then the line went taut and walked

Upstream. Dad was mowing the lawn

Behind me. I shouted but he didn’t hear.

I pulled and it didn’t seem to resist.

Its head became visible by the pier,

A visitor from prehistory, carapace

Ridged with green diamond shapes.

I tied off the line, went for my Dad,

Who helped me haul the monster up

Onto the bank. “Snapping turtle,”

He said. “They can be dangerous,

But they make great turtle soup.”

He tied it to a tree and ran away,

Leaving it to wander, but thwarted,

When it came close to the river.

Dad returned with a hatchet and stick,

Offered the stick to the turtle’s snout,

Which grabbed, crunching on it.

“You’ll see. He won’t let go,

No matter how hard I pull.”

He meant to chop off its head,

But the beast did let go and bit

My father’s pinky. Blood everywhere.

Dad did take its head, swearing,

Breathing hard, then he threw

The turtle, head still biting the stick,

Hatchet, trot-line, all into the water.

As he walked away, he shouted,

“No more trot-lines. They’re too

Damn dangerous for a little kid.”

I told my neighbor, who said,

“I’d call him a damn fool, wasting

Good turtle soup, but I don’t say

Things like that to a neighbor’s son.”

SKY

We grew up in a small town

Near the smoke, dirt, and rust

Of the factory across the river,

The mud and coke-filled waters,

The drowned dead Dutch elms

Fallen away from rooted ground,

The century old iron trestle

Fenced off from foolish divers,

Floating carp and suckers,

Still gasping, twitching,

Unable to just drown and die.

A mountain of discarded tires,

Seeping sulfur, so slow-burning

They hissed streams of boiled air.

Such we’ve done everywhere.

Look up. The sky, cloudy or

Cloudless, storm-clouded,

Or spiked with myriad lightning,

Transfigures all into a paradise.

Nest, Terzata #48

The owl fell from its nest

And cringed among roots

Yards away, fanning its breast.

We couldn’t hear the hoots

Of his mother. He made no sound,

Afraid of raptor brutes.

He was lucky he’d been found.

I took off my shirt.

We wrapped him round and round,

Carried him to his tree, unhurt,

And let him loose. He didn’t rest —

Rising on claws, he girt

The trunk with wings up to his nest. 

Tending, Terzata #47

The oak limb in the yard, bending,

Close to breaking,

Required careful tending.

Upon my waking,

The tree was on the ground.

I hadn’t felt the earth shaking

Or heard its falling sound.

In a few days it was gone,

Its thick stump ground.

I planted another one,

A sapling depending

On me like father to son . . .

Already ascending.  

Casting (Winslow Homer), Sonnet #539

 

When I cast the world disappears —

The rod, the reel, the line, the fly,

And the river cease to exist.

Even disappearance clears,

Leaving only motion. I try

To reach beyond the blazing mist.

The trout are only a waiting,

Still beneath endless cataracts,

Oblivious of my baiting.

Sand and pebbles stipple their backs.

When I leave with an empty creel,

I’m empty too, my wrist is sore.

Though I again begin to feel,

There is nothing lost to restore.

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

The Sheltered Path (Claude Monet), Sonnet #538

The old man plods toward senescence

On the sheltered path of his thought.

He thinks only what he can sense,

Senses only what he's been taught.

The trees on the path were planted

Decades ago as a windbreak.

Their trunks have been slightly canted

By dumb and insistent breezes.

Always more asleep than awake,

He follows that path, coughs, wheezes,

And nothing much occurs to him

He hasn’t sensed a thousand times.

Revelation would be a whim

Of these trees, these rustling chimes.

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

My Human Disguise.

 

Comet NEOWISE (Veronica Doland, NASA), Sonnet #525

Thick dusk air and city lights occluded

Our vision and the comet went unseen.

(Ignorance is easily deluded

When what will be is only what has been

And the knowing is only a guessing.)

Long ago I’d have thought it a blessing:

I stood upon a high rock and chanted.

Crickets, night-wings and big cats descanted

In harmonies I sang louder to drown,

As the comet thrashed in the slow river.

I danced, daring not to look up, but down.

O, flying light of the night, O, Giver

Of tomorrow, because tonight you take,

I pray to you for my only sun’s sake.

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

My Human Disguise.

Joshua Tree (Julia Guerin), Sonnet #516

The Spanish called it the “desert dagger,”

Isote de desierto — Mormons

May have given it the biblical name.

One name implies a dangerous swagger,

The other a religious leader’s palms.

To the tree they are one and the same.

A desert, already half dead, can die.

It needs frost and water, but not too much.

I walk from tree to tree to tree and try

To reach high up enough and lightly touch

The dark green tapered and serrated leaves.

I often prick fingers, sometimes draw blood

(The pain doesn’t know and yet it believes) —

A drop in the sand releases a flood.

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

My Human Disguise.

Evening: The Red Tree (Piet Mondrian), Sonnet #513

I have never dreamed of the tree,

Though I believe it dreams of me.

Leafless, as if empty of thought,

It blushes in the setting sun,

Emotionally overwrought,

Blossoming caught out of season.

It’s inner branches, clotted, dark,

Hide the almost asleep catbird,

(Inventor of the millionth word),

Whose claws are locked on ragged bark.

The red tree stretches to the sky.

Beneath, I sleep and dream of love,

Or old battles — sometimes I fly

Under the sun, sometimes above.

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

My Human Disguise.

Mount Pinatubo, Sonnet #396

I lived near the shadow

Of Mount Pinatubo

Before it blew its top,

Awakening to stop

The sky with hot ashes,

Scar itself with gashes.

In days a typhoon flood

Buried the land in mud.

Sleep is not a muscle,

Though it stretches, tightens,

Can toss around Pluto

Like blood a corpuscle. 

Dream-bursted, it frightens

Like a blown volcano.

Cicada (Ruth Diamond-Guerin), Sonnet #370

The cicada shifts the air like a loom.
Its sizzling klaxon rises in repeats,
Insisting on filling the summer’s room
Even as it winds down in lazy beats.
A pause. The shuttle shifts, then starts anew,
Reaching a pitch of pure intensity,
As if sound is the proof immensity
Of seething essence from which all life grew.
In September we see them fly around
Aimlessly, as if they want to be found
And later we do find them, on the ground,
While yet back and forth a few weakly sound.
The patterns in the late October leaves
Are what the now silenced cicada weaves.

A Screech Owl Being Petted (Julia Guerin), Sonnet # 349

The first eastern screech we took in was healthier,
But not enough to be released into the wild.
He'd hoot twice when I came close, as he perched
On my wife's glove, and at first I thought it was fear.
I wasn't wrong. It was the distress of a child
As if unsure he was to be scolded or birched.
My wife encouraged me to pet him. I deferred
That to her -- what could pets' pets mean to a wild bird?
Our second screech (the first found a home in a zoo)
Was badly hurt and required medicine and time.
Often he bated, broken wing flapping, and flew
Straight down to the end of the leash, then climbed,
With my wife's gentle coaxing, back onto the glove.
Petted, eyes closed, tufts up, he accepted her love.

Note: "Bated" is a term from falconry, meaning the raptor's
attempt to fly off the gauntlet or glove, in this instance when
tethered.

Sunrise After Brief Ice Storm, Sonnet #333

The world is made of casual captures:
A rising sun caught in branches and leaves,
Branches coated in quickly melting ice,
The mind held by momentary raptures,
Concatenating chains and nested sieves,
A seeking, grasping, imprisoned device.
The light and time is really all we own,
The owning like the ear processing tone
From cracked oboes to make it musical,
Its fading, if not quick, eventual.
I must capture myself in the ice tree,
Permit no release to fear or distraction
Or the sun will melt waking inaction,
And in my next moment let darkness free.

The Night Wind (Charles Burchfield), Sonnet #284

The night wind turns the yard chimes into knells.
The chimney will topple into the yard.
The air the wind strikes, permanently scarred,
Seeks the oak knot where the screech owl yells.
The night wind lull lasts for hours, humming
In the pines and fooling crows into sleep.
The squirrel cringes in his leafy keep,
Ready for the coming vast summoning.
The night wind turns all windows into eyes,
Blindless and staring at the nothingness,
Invisible until it caresses
(Like light) a thing -- a branch that screams and sighs.
The night wind beseeches me to come out
To play with him -- still nervousness and doubt.

Orion in Winter (Charles Burchfield), Sonnet #281

Tonight the stars sleep with their eyes open --
The only way they can see each other.
Orion hunts with eternal hoping
As he was taught by his Gorgon mother.
The stag was belly-shot miles back and stares,
The constellation swirling in his eyes.
No one stepped out beneath the winter skies
To follow his blood beneath its bright flares
To end his agony with guns. He dies,
Ascends to run with lions, wolves, and bears.
Furious Orion ropes nearby stars
And lashes up his celestial car.
He'll drive it hard to the home of his birth
And hunt to death every man on earth.

Note: In Greek mythology, Orion was a gigantic, supernaturally
strong hunter, born to Euryale, a Gorgon, and Poseidon (Neptune).
It is said he once boasted that he would kill every animal in the
world.