Now, A Sonnet

There's nothing there we haven't seen before,
But not so many times we can afford 
To hustle past. Let's promise each other --
Never commit the sin of being bored.
Besides, so much has changed in just a year.
The sun-rustled air seems even clearer.
The pattern of the leaves left in the trees
(Yes, the postcard days ended yesterday),
Suggests paragraphs full of ideas,
Things we think but never think to say.
The colors play the least part of the scene,
And we must grant each leaf its final bow.
If we could stay to watch the last careen
To the ground, we might settle then at Now.

Sentiero (“The Path” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir), Sonnet #601

No path is inarticulate,

But none reaches a point.

I walk when the day is late

And with silent steps anoint

The dusky air with thought —

Not mine, only that sought

Among the clustered leaves and vine,

Wind-rustled, indecipherable design.

I meet you coming the other way,

With black suit, cane, and bowler hat.

You bow, but have nothing to say,

Because you are neither this nor that.

I walk right through you and smile

At the path beckoning mile upon mile.

Green, Terzata #50

This is all I have to say of green —

Not the perfumes or the taste,

Nor all its nuances I have seen.

Green, not red, is the color of haste,

As with all of life,

Little completely faced,

Yet the opposite of strife,

Which is hope (no, not blue),

The blunting of the knife.

Nothing, nothing is quite true.

We act before a green screen.

I speak and act only for you,

My love, scene after scene. 

Note: This is the 50th and last

of the poems I've written in a

form I invented, the Terzata. Below

are numbers 31to 50 in the blog roll.

The first 30 are here: 30 Terzata

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees (Van Gogh), Sonnet #585

In September, 

                       the first leaves turn,

Then nothing seems 

                       to change for weeks.

Later the trees, 

                       dun or blazing,

Consent to the slow, 

                       ragged burn

Harsh air hard frost 

                       and hot sun wreaks.

The eye blinks and blinks, 

                       erasing.

Oh, how the soul takes it amiss —

Departing summer’s final kiss.

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

My Human Disguise.

 

Cicada (Hua Yan), Sonnet #584

Why do birds and insects sing so

Effortlessly, without command,

As though they don’t care if they’re heard?

They tell us something we don’t know

And never try to understand.

I’d ignore the babbling catbird,

Perhaps, if I knew what he said.

The cardinal says “I am red.”

The cricket can’t seem to shut up

Lest I approach and interrupt.

The cicada’s incessant whir,

Like the blare of a small Klaxon,

Is intense and irregular,

An urgent call to inaction.

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

My Human Disguise.

 

Waterbirds Nesting (Josephine Joy), Sonnet #580

 

The great egret nests in a colony,

In woods not far from a river or pond.

They build thin platforms of sticks, twigs and reeds,

With a distant view like a balcony.

Not many fowl embrace this kind of bond,

Though crows return each night to rookeries.

The egret stands in water still as stone

For hours waiting for a fish or frog

They eat wriggling with a rapier bill.

Patience is the most precious skill they own.

A black mink will leap from behind a log,

Attack, cracking its legs enough to kill.

It’s then like ripping apart a child’s kite —

Broken sticks, torn paper red-spattered white.

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

My Human Disguise.

Deer in the Forest (Franz Marc), Sonnet #571

The woods that spring were misty and the birds

Rarely came near, though we walked many miles.

We saw few wildflowers, many mushrooms —

More than ever, nature seemed absurd.

Foxes trotted with us, bereft of wiles.

Leafless red maples were upside down brooms.

We found hundreds of deer in the forest,

Dozing, dreaming, at rest in makeshift nests.

None awoke as we passed. We petted them.

They sighed as if grateful for our kind touch,

Though, as we thought of it, it wasn’t much,

Akin to repeating, “Amen. Amen.”

The day was not, in a common word, “Nice.”

We were, like every day, in Paradise. 

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

My Human Disguise.

Ice Storm, Sonnet #547

 

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.

Note: Photograph by the author.

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

My Human Disguise.

Lake Storm, Sonnet #528

On my birthday the storm rolls in

Off a roiling Lake Michigan.

Just out of the water my girls’

Hair stands on end from the static

Electricity; a cloud blurs.

An eagle flees on bursting air;

Its wingbeats seem prophetic

Of a sudden lightning bolt scare.

We’re in the house before the rain

And the thunder’s humbling pain.

The air is clear after an hour,

But such upset you don’t forget.

I’m a thunderstorm losing power,

Moving off for a clear sunset.

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

My Human Disguise.

Surf On Rocks (William Trost Richards), Sonnet #520

I know the articulation of waves

As I know the flexing of my hand.

(The big northwestern wind is a muscle

That bashed ten thousand sailors to their graves,

But on the beach can only roil sand,

Turning the inert fleck to corpuscle.)

I used to grow dizzy diving at them,

When my spine rippled and began to twist,

The pain a sweet knotting from calf to wrist —

To wet eyes the sun an exploded gem.

I’d grow nauseous and stumble to the shore,

But the waves, I knew, just wanted me more.
Sucking it into its fat belly’s sway,
The surf last winter stole the beach away.

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

My Human Disguise.

Storm (Sesson Shukei), Sonnet #501

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

The mighty sea is slave to storms

And fishing boats slaves to the sea

As men are enslaved by all three.

The deck, stout mast, and taut sail form

The only threat to fend off death.

The sea drowns beneath the typhoon,

What men call an angry god’s breath,

Waves caused by his stirring his spoon.

A gibbous moon runs through the clouds.

Suns skip among the fog and haze.

In a lull, waves, in rows, look plowed,

Then boil in an unsolvable maze.

The ship sights land, rocky, tree-lined,

Safe harbor for the terror-blind. 

Avalanche in the Alps (Philippe de Loutherbourge), Sonnet #474

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








Each avalanche is renewal.

At times men or whole forests die

When mountainsides shudder and fall

In great slabs and showers of scree.

A single step’s been known to start

A cataclysm, one small stone

Displacing another and one

Larger opening up a fault.

What’s left is a new rapprochement

With gravity, rearrangement

Of the ageless, immovable 

Granite face and tiny pebble.

Never, though, is any grandeur

Made — all things go through the grinder.

Autumn (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), Sonnet #431

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

Almost past its prime, my fruit falls, bruises,

Before the harvest has even begun.

Pears and peaches are picked up in the end —

Even though they rot, they’ve other uses.

The burning bush, ignited by the sun —

The apple trees, whose burdened branches bend

Almost to the grass — are both flaming red.

They’ll soon be stripped of life — barren, not dead.

My grapes tumble into the wine presses,

Where pulp turns to juice from urgent stresses.

The Argiope spider in his web still

Hungers, before hard frost, for a last kill.

My summer mate gone, I am gourd and leaf,

Nothing more. Winter will bring cold relief.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Audubon), Sonnet #422

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


















It was said you could catch but not keep one.

A farmer once tied a male to a chair,

Which soon was kindling and the rope undone,

And, instead of a door, nothing but air.

Just one could rip apart a ten inch branch

In minutes, and ravage an entire ranch

If it was built of bug-infested logs.

Its crazed cackle once filled forests and bogs,

But today it’s feared the Ivory-billed’s extinct.

I’ve watched its cousin, the Pileated,

Hammer a limb with its head into dust

And thought, does such an addled creature think,

“I too could one day be uncreated.

There must be Ivory-billed left. There must!”

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

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







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.

River in the Plain (Cezanne), Sonnet #411

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









The river’s over its banks — four days’ rain

Draws from its pebbled bed a ruddy stain.

(My dreams flood like this and fill up my brain —

Hypnagogic between shores of the sane.)

I slowly wade downstream and a white crane

Flies over, followed by an entire skein —

They pass me by with a clacking disdain.

I know I should fish upstream but the pain

In my bad hip will ceaselessly complain

If I try to challenge the surging strain.

The river always divided the plain,

Low at times, or high, as now, it will drain,

But some level of water will remain.

It has a life and purpose to sustain.

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.

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.”