Elemental (Sonnets #161 and #162)

#162

There's an idea (fake as this pyrite ball is gold),
That these shapes possess some elemental structure --
"A pyramid breaks into triangles and square."
My New Math teacher once, patiently, told
Us a plane held infinite points. I wasn't so sure.
I asked, if I take a sharp pencil to paper
And make a million dots the paper won't turn black?
It's a concept, he answered angrily, not fact!
Cube, sphere, prism, octahedron, and elliptic
Palm stone -- some machine cut, some grown, some nature-made --
Arranged on my highboy, formulate a cryptic
Code of concepts curiosity can't evade,
Though we examine them without penetration.
Their rigid simplicity mocks contemplation.


#161

Simple. Elemental. Basic. Fast. Essential.
Are these the bricks and mortar of the universe
Or the toys and pastimes of a collective mind?
It's true, some find them holy and reverential,
Expressions infinitely eloquent, yet terse,
Or like paintings, not quite finished, though signed.
Do lines along two axes meet only to end
Or pass on into a negative world designed
To balance everything, or do all lines there bend
And nothing here is ever perfectly aligned?
The mind, like gravity, tends to make things rounded.
Ideas are circuitous; words circle, spiral.
Convictions are light trapped in a mirror-lined ball,
But no line stops a line; no thought is unbounded.

Love at the Fountain of Life (Giovanni Segantini), Sonnet #160

Beside the fountain a stunted, misshapen tree
Is about to take the lovers' testimony,
One secret word the woman will laughingly carve
Deep into its flaking and lichen-mottled bark.
This is long before the ages when men will starve
In deserts, murder prophets, need to build an ark.
An angel dutifully guards the fountain; bored,
Lonely, she hardly notices lovers approach.
She remains unseen until the word is scored,
A blasphemy deserving the sternest reproach,
Which, alas, it's not given her to deliver.
Her wings shield her own eyes from their eternal shame.
"Drink here," she says, "from this fountain, this life-giver."
With a sip each lover forgets the other's name.

OUR NATURE (Sonnets #158 and #159)

#159

Barred Owl (Audubon)

Late last night, the owl settled on our shepherd's hook
Outside my bedroom window. A feeder hangs there --
Mice and chipmunks burrow below and filch the seed.
I watched him for an hour. His head bent down to look
For prey, three times he lifted his pale face to stare
At me, but I was nothing compared to his need.
His head pivoted three hundred sixty degrees,
Slowly surveying the snow-covered yard and trees.
Otherwise, he was still; his art was vigilance,
Like a sailor in a crow's nest looking for land.
Then he crouched and bobbed and dropped, his patience
Goaded. A moment later his great wings fanned
And lifted him to a limb where he ripped apart
A mouse and devoured its still trembling heart.

#158

Wind God and Thunder God (Tawaraya Sotatsu)

As children we feared the thunder,
Though the wind willed us to wonder.
We were such small receptacles,
Anything that caused emotions
To overflow were spectacles,
Like typhoon-tormented oceans.
A clap of thunder convinced me
Our house would collapse instantly,
But I could lean into strong gales
And laugh, arms outstretched like taut sails.
The gods don't always indulge us,
Like these fiercely smiling fellows.
They are about their own business --
The boom of death and hell's bellows.

The Fall of the Rebel Angels (Bruegel), Sonnet #157

There's no reprieve. The angel falls out of its soul,
Becomes a creature of the earth, a splitting toad,
Blowfish, shark, naked soldier, or blind vole.
From eggs grow butterfly wings and white tails,
Reptilian, self-constricting. Calm angels goad
And herd them with blackened swords, spears, and flails,
Their wings edged with dried blood. A pustulant strumpet
Dances to the wailing of a thousand trumpets.
This is the great war of faith, so nothing must die.
One angel, still robed, tries, but can no longer fly.
Nearly blinded by the sun, it can't choose between
What it once believed in and what its eyes have seen,
And, crashing, becomes Belial, verminous beast.
His diseased tormenting of man has never ceased.

Trees in the Snow (Caspar David Friedrich)

#156

We cut down dead oaks to reopen the old mine,
One hundred years abandoned, a collapsed shaft,
And no promise the old diggers hadn't been good
At their work and found every nugget worth a dime.
My partner wasn't afraid of the dark and laughed
When I said, you go first beneath the earthen hood.
That was twenty years ago and old Caspar died
Before a single shovel was turned. "Christ!" he cried,
And, running from the shadows, impaled his right eye
On a six inch nail jutting from a rotting beam.
Having pulled him from the ruin, lantern held high,
I entered the darkness to see what he had seen.
There was a mirror there, neither real nor a dream.
I saw my self -- or at least myself if I'd been
A few hundred years old -- pluck out my eye and scream.

The Reach of Time (Julia Guerin)

#155

All the clocks drowned in the gutter of time,
In wax melted from a trillion tapers,
The hours from face to face no longer rhyme.
Lady Gone, her head done up in papers
(She turned blue when her capillaries froze),
Buffs the planets on her thigh with a rose.
Our red Lady of Soon, pregnant with love,
Runs and with her hand reaches above
The horizon to push the moon away,
And instead erases its ageless gray.
The sky behind leaks through. Her baby's birth
Will be ballyhooed with a lunar frown
And Gone will steal the infant for her own.
No matter. Soon is soon pregnant with Earth.

CONTEMPLATIONS (Sonnets #153 and #154)

 #154

Crystal Pyramid

A crystal pyramid, faceted creation
Of pressure, heat and imagination,
Frozen purity, a trap for light with five sides,
Where reflection upon infinity resides.
In total darkness it sleeps in oblivion,
But a single candle ignites a refraction,
Carving light into color in serrated planes,
Only as rigid as the stillness of the flame.
But a camera flash, like a blast of insight,
Will bury color at its heart and leave a blight
Of vacant lines as each facet locks to the next,
Like pages in a closed book obliterate text.
Let the sun burst it red, orange, yellow and blue,
Then open your eyes, take your time, and think things through.

#153

Two Men Contemplating the Moon (Caspar David Friedrich)

We can see the moon, but not its eclipse.
We drink the coldest stars with little sips;
Venus, a tear on the horizon's cheek;
Mars bleeds; the Dipper, wan and weak,
Contains an empty trapezoid.
The Milky Way flows nowhere from the void.
This night, we want nothing to learn.
Our regrets leak from a cracked urn
Of lust and yearning we fling at the stars.
Shattered, it forms constellations of scars.
The lunar eclipse, the earth's one moment
Of triumph over the universe's intent --
We grow no brighter by dimming the sun.
We leave chastened. There's so much to be done.