Women Diving for Abalone, from "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets" (Hokusai)

#100*

Tidal surges shorten the diving day.
Though strong and skillful swimmers, the women
Fight being thrown upon the coral reef.
Those taking a rest seem resigned to stay
Uninvolved until they resume swimming,
Brief oblivion their only relief.
An arm reaches up with its precious find
To men in a boat, not evil or kind,
Who, themselves not in any danger,
Think of that arm as one of a stranger's,
Or a breed of sea creature or goddess
Of good fortune and generosity,
Though she's merely a village wife half-dressed,
Bursting lungs from hungry necessity.

* For this, my 100th sonnet in 99 weeks, I chose this print by Hokusai, because it is No. 11 from his late series of 100 prints and drawings, published in 1830, called, variously, "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets," and "The Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse," (evidently meaning "by a nurse to children"). Each artwork illustrates a poem. The poem, by Sangi Takamura, which accompanied this stunning print, reads: "O'er the wide, wide sea,/Towards its many distant isles,/Rowing I set forth./This, to all the world proclaim,/O ye boats of fish-folk." Many of my sonnets have taken the artwork simply as a stepping off point. In this case, the sonnet is a verbal illustration of the print, which is a visual illustration of a poem. The symmetry of that seems appropriate for Sonnet #100.

The Astronomer (Vermeer)

#99

We know no more than he knew then.
We see farther and imagine numbers
Larger, but the same old infinities
Confront us, we still count to ten,
See through mirrors dying fire's penumbra,
Envision alien cities,
And watch for asteroids to come too near.
Like him, we are empty of fear,
Assume the universe is like a globe,
To be dissected and mapped, lobe by lobe.
He touches the heavens and says a prayer,
Not for insight, guidance, or grace
(Though he longs to pierce the layers
Of darkness), but to transcend space.

Shawl (Ruth Diamond-Guerin), Ad Parnassum (Klee)

#98

Though there's no such thing, a perfected fate
Would lie in details, not some pinnacle.
Our occluded sun irradiates
Each imagined fleck and bright circle
Scarcely noticed in the mounting moments
Among our numberless joys and torments.
If we fail to see the thread in the weave,
The speck of blue gold in a lover's eye,
Look closer and ignore all reasons why.
It's more important to see than believe.
Don't wait, for in the accumulation
And remembrance of every colors' rhyme,
Each patterned and cascading emotion,
There is a pyramid worthy to climb. 

Dream City (Klee)

#97

I've lived in nine cities, but dream of only five.
Perhaps where I lived as a child were all dreamed out
In anxious ecstasies, like a bee's in its hive.
I've remapped the five over the years with new routes
Through collapsed avenues to ruined homes
And maze-like schools, to workplaces with all doors locked,
Churches painted green inside and out, and bedrooms
Where the rain leaks through cracks that won't be caulked.
I often dream the same city night after night,
Which then fades for a time from hypnogogic blight.
I run and walk and crawl these streets, and sometimes fly,
So often cityscape replaces memory,
And new rooftops erase the blackboard of the sky.
At least the me who lives these dreams is always me.

View of Fuji From the Rice Fields in Owari Province (Hokusai), Sonnet #96

The craftsman cuts the rough edges from the circle
With a curved blade and pure disregard for mistakes.
He makes none -- his ring of space rounder than the sun.
To make a thing from nothing is no miracle.
It's what his brain does each day, sleeping or awake.
He knows nothing of quantum dream stuff or neuron.
He once travelled to Mt. Fuji and walked its paths.
He admired the trees; they would make good laths.
The crater's unevenness irritated him,
And the view toward his province was nice, but dim.
Looking through a finger-thumb circle, he found
Sharpened sight. He spent hours, thus, looking around.
When he died the universe collapsed to a quark,
Even when his son took up his father's work.

Day and Night (Escher)

#95

Geese land in the pond like hours in time,
Unconsciously tuck wings under and glide
In sequential and unwavering lines.
After flying day and night they've arrived,
With a few turning back along the way,
Only to reach the same pond the same day.
Each bird starts a ripple in the water
((They're not quite aware of at that moment))
That wind nor rain but only shore can stop,
Though each ripple will each ripple alter.
Each perturbation of the pond is spent
In the moment one goose flaps wing and hops
Toward the sky, frantically seconded
By the flock, as though all futures beckoned.

The Scoop Tree (Julia Guerin)

#94

Each bare tree is all that's left of today
And those with leaves will vanish soon enough.
My daughter paints what we call the Scoop Tree,
Home of a squirrel who never ran away
When nuts could be scooped up, frantically stuffed
In his cheeks, ignoring my child and me.
I wrote a story about the squirrel,
Read it to her often when she was young.
Now that she's no longer a little girl,
She's painted what the tree's been all along.
There is as much of life in line and ink
As in the existence of tree or tale.
Fail to see or to concentrate (don't blink!),
And what counts will dull, memory will fail.

Note: The day before I posted this sonnet, my daughter Julia
posted the following on Facebook. Her timing couldn't
have been better:

What a great day! I love days with little moments of awesome in them. All of my moments involved people, food or lights. First moment of the day was meeting a woman who seemed so sweet, loving, and wonderful that I couldn't help but smile. She has taken on 3 kids as their new foster mom. As she walked out of school, she swung the little girl that was with her over her shoulder and the girl looked at me with the biggest, most true smile, and waved as they walked away. What a difference this woman is making. 

The food was ice cream brought to me by one of my trouble students and sushi given to me by a customer at my other job. The lights were when the legs of the reindeer lights on Bluffton Road matched up with the beat in my music, and when I was dancing in my car at a stopped train, the car in front of me pumped their break lights in time with me dancing. Fun moment between me and a faceless stranger.
The best moment of the day, however, was when the chef at the restaurant came out and sang for the birthday girl. He belted out happy birthday in his language but in opera style. I didn't expect that at all. His voice was so beautiful and the gesture was so genuine that I almost cried. I love it when people surprise or wow me. Today was filled with moments that make me love humanity.