Alexander Confronts The Headless People (The Talbot Shrewsbury Book), Sonnet #469

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My Human Disguise.





A tyrant seeks with tongue or sword to erase

In his conquests every other race

But his own, put defenders to the chase.

He doesn’t have to kill to cut off heads;

He can speak black words of hatred instead.

By doing so, his voice, his anger, bled

Of honor, leaves him only his blunt spear

To throw blindly at what he thinks is fear,

As one by one his soldiers disappear.

The “headless” ones begin to speak of truth

With the insight and energy of youth,

And refuse to accept their headless state:

The tyrant himself, mumbling, twitting, “great,”

And nothing left beneath his balding pate.

The Catbird (John James Audubon), Sonnet #468

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My Human Disguise.


















As if ashamed of its homely feathers,

The cowbird disowns its young in the nest.

In those it didn’t build it abandons 

An egg among the eggs of its betters,

Who raise the cowbird along with the rest.

(The intruder will steal from the small ones.)

Parents who can identify their own,

Catbirds fling the parasites out like stones.

They mew incessantly, then sing countless

Notes per minute — clucks, whines, gurgles, clicks, squawks,

Imitations of other birds but hawks.

Even more than most, the catbird’s restless;

Endlessly curious or vigilant,

It flies — the only time it is silent.

VILLANELLE

The moment passed and I forget

The reason why or what I meant

In the exact instant I let

It go like a blank letter sent

To someone I don’t remember.

Even Now is an old event,

Both a flaming and an ember.

To hold, even touch, is to burn

Like September in December.

It takes but a second to learn,

What no-one else will ever know,

That all I am will soon return

If I stand not still but think slow,

Say nothing, and as if asleep,

Allow myself to come and go.

Instead, I cannot help but leap

Ahead to what’s to come and let

My self reach for what it can’t keep,

Moments I already forget.

The Magic Square (Albrecht Durer), Sonnet #467

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My Human Disguise.

The summer is an empty hourglass

I tumble through like a clump of sand

That cannot, trying very hard, pass

Through the neck and softly land

At the bulbs’ bottom, top or bottom,

Depending on the hour of the turn.

The asphalts and red bee balms burn

And the sun is a single blazing atom.

The bell has been silent, raising hope

(It all depends on squares and magic

And the diminution of the tragic)

That someday someone will tug on its rope,

Awakening the prayed-for lightning storm

That once our angel promised to reform.

David with the Head of Goliath (Artemisia Gentileschi), Sonnet #466

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It was no small stone that struck Goliath down,

But as large as the giant’s hand, sling-flung,

God-guided to strike just below the crown,

By a future king, still innocent and young.

The task yet undone, David severed its head

With the Philistine’s sword, though it took loud

Chopping to get through much gristle and bone.

He couldn’t lift what, so heavily dead,

He meant to parade for the cheering crowd,

So he brandished instead the conquering stone.

Such battles now will never disappear.

The weak and poor are every monster’s prey,

Yet live complacently and without fear.

Goliaths behead Davids every day.

Ghosts in the Tree (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #465

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My Human Disguise.

The old crows fly with a graceless hurry

As if dodging barrages of thrown stone,

Retreat to their darkening rookery,

Arriving limp and sated, one by one.

I’ve seen them, uncountable, roosting

In a dead wood in the flooded wetlands,

The rubbing of their wings a dry cooing.

They hunch like bald men without legs or hands,

Some alone, some in groups of two or three.

They don’t seem to need or want each other,

Though most are uncle, father, or brother.

A ghostliness of camaraderie

Lingers, everything cold and indirect,

Extends the way the bare branches connect.

Song in the Twilight (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #464

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The bass pedals on the old organ don’t play,

Pumping out an old orangutan’s wheezing,

But the high notes sizzle like windpipes freezing

As the clock reminds us of time’s constant delay.

Rolling his shoulders with the beat, our musician

Has the musicality of a mannikin,

And the dolor of a flowering rubber plant.

His pet bat keeps the studio free of ant

And rat, its wingbeats synchronized with the clock.

There are no works of art on the tear-stained walls

And no pattern on the rug but a reddish flock.

Now our musician sings with a raptor’s calls

For blood or flesh or warning of the death of sound.

The bat chimes in on a gleeful two-part round.