Bare Trees (Van Gogh), Sonnet #330

I came upon an old woman in black,
Holding in her gloved hands an ocre oud.
The leafless trees seemed a mind-twisted wrack
As she passed underneath them with a word
Not a word, which I could still understand.
A branch scratched me with an arthritic hand.
I walked beneath soft shrieking of the elms,
The ancient ruins of defeated realms.
Some trees seemed older, but with memories,
Synaptic limbs full of ageless stories.
(The language of trees muffles in summer --
All leaf, bud and blossom, they turn mummer.)
I listened to rachitic damns and praise
Of those with many, not unnumbered days.

Rainbow, Sonnet #325

The arc of broken light, an extension
Of the eye. Thought is the fifth dimension.
Does "only what we know exists" make sense?
It would take a metaphysical stretch
To think the oath of this shimmering sketch
Was kept. All the floods of evanesence,
The drowning waters of time, death and hate,
Pour down and ravage and evaporate
Each day -- leaving behind only rainbows.
How days are made only each of us knows.
The beauty there is the harder question.
We are not mocked and there's no suggestion
Of imperfection -- we see only love
Made of light, not here, not here, but above.

Note: The rainbow was the sign of God's promise
to Noah that he would not flood the world again.

Spider, Butterfly and Sun (Burchfield), Sonnet #311

No spider ever trapped a butterfly
With joy. Their tasteless wings are a nuisance,
And, thrashing, rip up and clutter his threads.
They take the turning of the earth to die.
The thorax he sucks isn't sustenance,
Not like a caterpillar's juicy breads.
He labors to disentangle the shreds,
Fling them to the wind and throw new weave;
Thus, sun to sun, he can't stay still, deceive
New prey, who run from the trembling web.
He damns the Monarch as his powers ebb.
At last, his lair is ready to receive.
That night a stumbling, great green luna moth
Destroys it with wings of savorless cloth.

Le Pointe de la Heve at Low Tide (Monet), Sonnet #305

The moon pushing oceans around like that?
Like the wind stripping your head of your hat.
Something a quarter million miles away
Drains our inlets and beaches twice a day,
And pushes oceans out fifty feet higher
To leave rocky steps not dry, but drier.
We walk the muddy flats. Bulbous seaweed
Drapes rock like wigs, hiding crabs, and tide pools
Trap octopi and little fish who feed
Ravenously while the evening cools.
The seagulls plucked the stranded hours ago.
Exhaustion precedes the tide's inward flow.
All is waste and bare, a weak memory,
Soon to be drowned by weaker gravity.

The Black Brook (Sargent), Sonnet #278

No one knows where the brook begins.
The mountain is granite and gneiss,
Agate and quartz, covered in moss.
What does she think about? What sins
Or fears? The brook and melting ice?
Perhaps she sees there constant loss.
The drier stones are not as black,
Though her shadowed silk is darker.
No taint of evil could mark her,
At least before she must go back.
She listens to the black brook's song
Until it's all that she can think,
Until there is no right or wrong.
She tosses stones that cannot sink.

Great Horned Owl (Audubon), Sonnet #277

You were envious when two friends and I
Surprised one in woods just a mile from home.
He lit on a branch; his tufts against sky
At dusk were proof and reason for this poem.
As stirring as it was to see the bird
In the wild, my only thought was of you,
That you weren't there with me to see it too.
Well, my love, not the first time that the word
Has to substitute for experience.
You've been captured by the magnificence
Of great fierce eyes and the raptor's plight.
And when they're injured, rescued and healed
(I've shared your joy returning them to flight!)
By your caring, your lovely heart's revealed.

Clouds in Late Fall, Sonnet #276

I have never seen anything in clouds
But a mirror of my unruly mind.
Up there, my interior is being signed
By the gestures of blind and deaf-mute crowds.
There is nothing I do not recognize,
Yet can't name, or vaguely realize,
Because the mind is only a disguise.
I'm not a thought or feeling. I am eyes.
So why did I choose these raked clouds, the skies
Beyond visible, irises blind and blue?
Where I stood the too-close cars rushed past.
The camera trembled, a cold wind blew.
I couldn't find what I'd stopped for -- the view
Had changed -- so I took what was left and last.

Hunters in the Snow (Bruegel), Sonnet #275

I waited in the car for my mother,
And said the words crystal spark moonbeam.
The deep snow, banked to the boughs of the pines
By the church, wasn't mine, but another's.
I could only take with me what might seem
Mine, the words I would one day write, these lines.
The night sky shined and the snow ignited,
A new snow, untouched by shovel or tracks.
Was I meant to wonder, be delighted?
Was such beauty a deliberate act?
I was four -- the image never left me,
And not once since has snow-light seemed the same.
The hunters return, leather sacks empty.
Tonight, in high-banked fires, they'll taste game.

Pileated Woodpecker in Flight (David Mintz, photographer), Sonnet #273

They say his lost cousin, ivory-billed,
Once chopped down a sycamore and when locked
In a cabin with a bobcat, he killed
The beast with a stab, flinging splinters, knocked
A hole in the door and flew. Man, he mocked.
I don't believe his laughter is extinct.
The pileated's eternal drumming
Is always distant, like tiny thunder.
He's flown right over me. I flinched. I blinked.
His loping flight, black and white wings strumming
The forest light, is the end of wonder.
Here he's caught, head turned around and under,
Flying, crest upside down -- impossible.
Yet, a thing of feathers, flesh, blood, and bill.

Two Water Sonnets, Nos. 256 and 257

Seascape (Sargent), Sonnet #257

The former troop transport sails west,
Back to the Philippine Islands,
Now with a family of nine.
I clutch at the rail as each crest
Breaks and falls. I struggle to stand,
Looking at the horizon line.
I am six. The sea a billion.
Both of us younger than the sun.
Flying fish and porpoises leap,
As if to lead us past the deep.
The Deep, from which the waves, dark, wild,
And cold, grasping, thrust up, and flail
Like the hands of a drowning child --
And through them ships serenely sail.

The Cascade of Mingxianquan at Mt. Hutouyan (Shitao), Sonnet #256

Like arrows shattering when they strike stone,
The rivulets off Mt Hutouvan mist.
Shredded by the air, they cease to exist,
Voicing their fall in a moaned monotone.
Each trace has drifted over time, leaving
Long scars (now covered by lichen and moss),
The whole like portions of the human brain.
Now beyond the stone, the waters, weaving
In an updraft, are perpetual loss
Restored above by perpetual rain.
We stand enshrouded in moist air, blinking
And cold by a pool beneath the cascade,
Watching each other as we slowly fade,
Ideas worn thin by too much thinking.

Moon Jelly, Sonnet #249

The moons of Earth and Jupiter
Move in space pierced by meteor,
Comet, radiation, asteroid.
All dead things exist in a void
Full of other dead things that fly
Day by day at infinity.
One cannot love the moon jelly.
They're as empty as the word "why."
Instead, we fill them with ideas,
Those bits of us we understand,
That drift along in conscious seas,
Never once in sight of land.
They vanish and then reappear,
Vestiges of another sphere.

The Black Tree, Sonnet #247

I saw the black tree from a gravel road.
I could not help stopping to stare.
I saw clearly, believed it was not there.
It hid, a mystery, all code.
Were its branches burned, kindled by lightning,
Or blighted by some insect borer,
Choked of light by foliage tightening,
Or stripped bare by some unknown horror?
I opened the window hoping to hear
Loud birdsong, joyous, unconcerned.
The silence fumed like gases slowly burned.
How could a dead tree evoke fear?
I took this photo, quickly drove away.
I will climb down from it someday.

With The Eagle (Klee), Sonnet #241

He can be only the smallest part of our lives.
Over the years I've watched him not even a day.
In spring, circling a pond near leafless woods, he dives
And, skimming the water, dips his talons -- his prey,
A small bass. He lands on a dead tree and devours
All in seconds. Motionless, he'll rest there for hours.
When the trees leaf out he is much harder to see.
A nest, big as a pram, disappears, and his mate,
Whom he uxoriously trades nesting duty,
Will fly off to hunt for herself what he just ate.
The eagle sees me more clearly than I see him.
He doesn't care for me, so I remain a dim
Apparition he never completely ignores,
From caution, a mystery he never explores.

Spring (Jean-François Millet), Sonnet #238

The winters harden these years, and the snow,
Feet of it even in March, melting slow
In tepid, foggy air, washes our dregs
Into the broken river. The aging
Magnolia in the yard, stung by frost,
Still blossoms, only a few petals lost.
Now begins the long-deferred uncaging
Of sun and sex and bud and leaf and eggs.
My Ruthie and I walk the park most days
And notice, after thirty years, it says
What it always has, that it's merely ours
To wander and watch and never to touch.
Inside a log a young kit fox cowers;
Above, the barred owl's talons shift and clutch.