Avenue of Poplars

 

The faintest chitter of leaves in the Fall,

The slant auroras beneath the branches,

The blue-gray clouds that are not clouds at all,

But cloudless sky the fading light blanches,

The warmth and the chill I feel on my cheeks

As sunned and unsunned breezes alternate,

Each gust not finding what the other seeks,

And not one beast reaching out to a mate.

Today I walk this ordered avenue

Until the moon tops the furthest poplar.

It's so bright I can't see a single star,

A Milky Way I cannot know, but knew.

I reach home as the shadows slip away.

Only the moon's been moved enough to stay.

Thorns, Sonnet #615

They pierce a clear blue sky

And tear it to tatters.

Blind or with open eyes,

If I know what matters,

I can thrust my fingers

In and leave blood and flesh.

Yet starlings can linger,

Safe in its lethal mesh.

The question is why thorns?

They can protect a rose.

The bull charges its horns.

But why such a tree grows

Long and fearsome spindles

Pierces us with symbols.

Forsythia 2020, Sonnet #508

Because beauty is awake to itself,

We quicken in its consideration,

We take ourselves down from the storage shelf,

We expand like infant constellations. 

Forsythia blooms bright, sun dressed, bespoke,

Before hardly a bud bursts on the oak,

Because all loveliness can’t be present

At one moment in time; it’s hesitant,

And sends stems and blossoms into the air

In portions unsteady senses can bear.

Ugly is an ugly word for absence

Of beauty — let’s call it nothing at all,

And give it modest if any credence.

This is Eden and it will never fall.

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

Gibbons in a Landscape (Sesson Shukei), Sonnet #475

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

A gibbon will stare at your eyes,

The recognition by an ape

Of an ape, and thus appear wise.

They do not clown, yawn or gape.

They don’t exist to entertain

And seldom become furious.

When they’re bored and incurious

They scatter into their demesne.

It’s said some live entire lives

Without ever touching the ground

Even when a typhoon arrives.

I see them then swinging round,

Dodging or riding the gale

That drowns their ecstatic wail.

Bird Garden (Paul Klee), Sonnet #415

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My Human Disguise.







Why does the bird sing before the sunrise?

What is he saying when no bird responds?

Minutes later another species cries

As if to himself, then a third voice sounds.

Does the cardinal talk to the catbird?

That hardly seems likely. Though a starling

Will nag a red-tailed hawk, that’s not singing. 

Just the nuthatch answers a nuthatched word.

But it’s that first bird’s first note and why then,

Which breaks the dark silence like a siren,

I question. Does the robin hope to steal

The pre-dawn’s power and make himself real,

Or does he fear the sun will never rise

Unless his tunes ruin the light’s surprise?

Saguaro (Alice Guerin), Sonnet #413

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My Human Disguise.


















He confronted his brother the cactus

After the decades since he’d seen him last.

Both had changed a little, both had amassed

Enough of themselves to say, “You’re still us.”

He pointed at the sand, the distant sun,

The spider, quail, snake, and the pygmy owl,

Almost extinct, and promised all to none.

He heard in the needles the faintest growl.

The saguaro pointed at the empty sky,

Its six hands fixed each on a different star,

As if to say the universe is dry

And begins and ends not here, but not far

Away, where the fires thrive, where cold hurls back

The flames. He left as the desert turned black.

River in the Plain (Cezanne), Sonnet #411

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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.

An Old Oak Tree Saved, Sonnet #386

For Sister Elise Kriss

When I saw the fence around the old oak,

I thanked the Sister for saving the tree.

“Yes,”she said, “we intend to make a park

Next to the college’s new library.

Someday the two of us will sit under

Its branches and have a nice little talk.”

But on my street city workers sunder

An entire elm grove to make a sidewalk.

I asked the foreman, was it necessary?

He wiped the sawdust from his balding head

And said, “Why the heck are you asking me?”

He had a point — by then the trees were dead.

I told Sister I wouldn’t forget us

Getting together. There’s much to discuss.

Arctic Owl and Winter Moon (Burchfield), Sonnet #383

Having rehabbed injured owls for years,
She thought they only mimicked being smart —
Deaf to no distant sound, acute seers,
Intelligent of senses, dead of heart.
Having fed, flown and loved her birds of prey,
She released them only as night took day.
They always flew strong and straight to a tree,
Perched in plain sight as if they weren’t yet free.
She thought of each one later that evening.
Would it be starving or hot ravening?
A full moon is almost a handicap
When you can hunt in total darkness.
You hover and glide, drop without a flap
Of sound: the prey dies knowing no distress.

On the Edge (Klee), Sonnet #381

Look now, it’s time to stop screwing around.

A crow’s cracked nails clawing the frozen ground,
His ceaseless caw cacking a frozen sound,
Writing sonnets is no merry-go-round.
Our faces seek us again and again,
But there’s nothing but the sun to explain —
No sun, no poem, no rose, no weather vane.
Forget the sun you can’t see for the rain!
Theorems are no more valid than a list.
A rhyme is a lot like a broken wrist —
Both need to knit up if you want a fist. 
Sonnets are lists of theorems with no gist.
So I think of Paul Klee as my brother.
He draws not one right thing, but another.

American Pied-Billed Dabchick (Audubon), Sonnet #379

I once wrote a child’s fairy tale

About birds that didn’t have feet.

Because they could not rest on land

They beat the wind into a gale

Which they coasted, a sleeping fleet,

Coaxing rain from the clouds they’d fanned.

The dabchick can’t fly from firm ground.

Landing on concrete he mistakes

For water, he is trapped, earth bound.

His legs drag behind like branches.

He can rise triumphant from lakes,

Rivers and ponds — when he launches

From the earth, he only stumbles.

So nature exalts and humbles.

General Sherman, Sonnet #378

The “scorched earth” general has his own tree,

The largest living thing on the planet.

(Enough of such obvious irony.)

A man may live to be eighty, ninety,

Be a beggar or a Plantagenet,

Become a name or a nonentity,

While one tree can live two millennia,

Which we claim ours with some insignia.

After surviving its first century

Of insect threat and impedimenta,

Prone to fall to elemental fury,

An imperturbable concentration 

On growing each circular striation

Inside, the tree (like me) does not hurry.

Wood Interior (Emil Carlsen), Sonnet #359

I’ve no more memory for trees,
Can tell a maple from an oak
By the leaves, but the difference
Between others, only degrees
Of shape, height, branch, texture of bark,
I can’t think apart, only sense.
Even when I have learned the name,
I forget seeing similar,
All so alike, but not the same.
Trees are only familiar.
I walk in deep woods with my girls,
Marveling at mushrooms and burls
Growing from trunks (empty of words).
They know the names of trees and birds.

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.

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.

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.