Colorful Meal (Paul Klee), Sonnet #527

Are there allegories of the artist

Worth harkening to? We hardly exist!

Paul Klee tried with his “Colorful Meal.”

The table’s set with manikin and cat,

Cognac and deviled egg and phones for chat.

There’s gruel in a bowl but it’s not real.

An umbrella dries and a flag can’t wave.

A table fork has one too many tines.

(I write these words with diminishing lines.)

After lunch there are leftovers to save,

But will sooner or later be thrown out.

The diners had nothing to talk about.

In the cluttered emptiness they persist

In creating, though they scarcely exist.

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My Human Disguise.

 

Tree Roots (Van Gogh), Sonnet #526

For years we thought Vincent Van Gogh’s

Last painting was “Wheatfield with Crows,”

With its dirt road lost among rows

Of autumn grain that wave and glow,

Crows flying wild, a beckoning

Toward dark skies and reckoning.

And now? These gnarled tree roots, exposed

By wind and rain, gripping the soil,

Image of the ageless, unposed,

Riotous like his mental moil.

His vision turned to the abstract,

The canvas stabbed with daubs or smears,

As though more paint would reveal fears

Clutched inside against his final act.

Note: For many years, Wheatfield with Crows

was considered his final painting. Recent

discoveries have indicated that Tree Roots

was in fact his last work. Though there are 

competing theories, the Van Gogh Museum 

in Amsterdam's official conclusion is that 

the painter committed suicide with a pistol

soon after completing Tree Roots.

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.

The Laughing Fool (painter unknown), Sonnet #524

A man isn’t a man without being a fool,

At least that’s what the Fool learned in idiot school.

He began a money-infatuated ghoul

Chomping on the corpse of another greedy mule.

He soon grew morbidly obese on such fuel,

Then capered on to Fame’s self-deluding gruel

(Which turned half his tiny brains to stiffened stool).

All that power, women, and riches made him cruel

And he began to see all of life as a duel.

“Never lose, say ‘sorry,’ or forgive, and you’ll rule,”

He said, “Remember, your world is my private jewel.”

Then smiling men of stratagems made him their tool

And wiped his chin when he’d rather frequently drool.

Their hots for him have only just begun to cool.

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

My Human Disguise.

The Garden in Hot Weather (Paul Klee), Sonnet #523

The incinerate sun scorches

The grass, now dormant, and chases

The shadows past moveless spaces.

The chipmunks dart beneath porches

To nibble at the last winged seeds. 

Each of us has incessant needs.

I wait for the redemptive rain. 

The garden wilts, its petals drop.

The leopard slugs’ single feet flop. 

Though I have caused a little pain,

We’re all culpable as we grasp,

Dance to the cicada’s mad rasp,

The cricket’s rip, katydid’s grind.

We envy their having no mind.

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

My Human Disguise.

The Night Cafe (Van Gogh), Sonnets #521 and #522

#521

Philosophers say you can’t prove

That two balls in a game of pool,

One struck by the other, will move —

That there’s no reliable rule.

There’s no assurance that today

What happened every time before

Will be repeated any more,

Just because it’s always that way.

I have to ask, how could they know?

Birds in flight could drop like rocks.

In a heat wave we could have snow.

Mountains could fall like building blocks.

My left ankle could turn to wood.

I’ll take my “will” over their “could.”

#522

Not pool, a game of billiards:

A ball struck a ball, two rails, 

And another ball kissed —

Then money changed hands. 

The fool stares at the chalky bed

Where his future sleeps.

Two men rub their ears, 

Hunched beneath vague hats;

Elbows banging the table,

They want their cold beers.

A thief with a glass weeps,

Overhearing old lovers;

When he has downed his gin

The murdering will begin.

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.