Three Worlds (Escher), Sonnet #291

The Koi sees, as we do, what's there,
Not the water, nor we, the air.
He hates the acid stink of leaves,
And how they choke his house's eaves.
Someday they will all disappear;
With one world gone, two seem clearer.
I count five kinds of leaves, or six,
But the trees have similar sticks.
I blame the wind for having blown,
Adding the errant to the known.
I see four worlds, though, not three;
Yes, the leaf, the pond, and the tree --
And the wakefulness of the Koi.
When he looks up here, he'll see me.

Knight Vanquishing Time, Death, and Monstrous Demons (Philips Wouwerman), Sonnet #290

The hourglass-helmed soldier with a pike
Stabs the fetlocks of the knight's white stallion.
That motherless bastard will always strike
From behind. His eye a peeling onion,
His heart and lungs a single ganglion,
He's more fearful than a death or demon.
The knight takes on all enemies, evil
Or not -- even the ovum and semen
Embedded in the bones of the just dead.
The crown an angel holds bears his free will,
Though he would sooner wear Time's severed head.
When all is vanquished and night descends,
The corpses rise -- spinning slowly, spinning still.
With nothing left to slay, the knight's life ends.

Fateful Hour At Quarter to Twelve (Klee), Sonnet # 289

The waxing quarter moon, a pendulum,
Swings from eleven ten to forty-six,
Its math always slightly wrong in sum,
Its path a leaning gravity can't fix.
We stand beneath the clock-faced obelisk
And with tiny leaps try to grasp the disc.
I knew a witch once who wore sunglasses
When the hour's two hands approached midnight.
She said it had nothing to do with light,
But the way the dark turned to molasses.
She feared nothing more than the coming day,
Except its damn'd tendency to stay.
We're sleeping now with no time to time out,
Or a moon to wane, or a dream to doubt.

Creation of the Birds (Remedios Varo), Sonnet #288

The owl's facial disks concentrate sound;
Her deep-set eyes see darkness as daylight.
What she eats is terrified to be found
And will starve itself to stay out of sight.
How can she be the creator of flight,
Of song, wood, and water birds, and raptors?
She writes with music and paints with the moon,
And tolerates a mechanical goon,
Because it soothes her destructive raptures.
From the condor to the tiniest wren,
All fowl suffer the tattoo of her pen.
An idea she can't set free, she captures.
On her breast rests an ancient violin
With strings that sing only in Avian.

Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird (Miro), Sonnet #287

Personage! Oh, you personage, you.
Beluga-pale, belly button-eyed bonze.
You deep. Your lipless brains all tempered bronze.
What you won't do to be no parvenu.
I know, the hot sands blister your five toes,
And where the other five are no one knows.
A shoe, a tie, a scrap of clean clothing
Might mitigate universal loathing
Of your base beginnings and low learning
And quell your bowels' insistent churning.
Now don't, I warn you. I know you have heard
Desperate deeds oft undermine men's minds --
Wiped clean, they eagerly embrace all kinds.
But we'll hate you hard if you stone that bird!

Northern Harrier Hawk (Audubon), Sonnet #286

The Red-tail tracks the field mouse by its pee
With eyes that see inside nothing to see.
At one hundred and twenty miles an hour
It dives from great heights to clutch and devour.

But the Harrier doesn’t hunt by surprise.
She intimidates and terrorizes.
I've watched her, the golden chest and white rump,
Wings broad and balletically whirling pump,
Cross and cross low the same small field of grain,
Crash to the ground, then hunt the field again.
I first saw her flying straight at my eyes.
She must not have seen my human disguise.

Steering around me as she would a pole,
She dropped behind me and swallowed a vole.

Night Fishing at Antibes (Picasso), Sonnet #285

The Spanish mackerel and the flounder
Are not deceived by the fishermen's globes.
Let's ask if they seek to die by the spear.
Raging, the spinning hot moon founders,
And the old Mediterranean sphere
Of dead tides rolls as scaly fish disrobe.
The old Neptunian fraud has blown his top,
While two young ladies lick their lollipop.
Of course, they have a cycle for escape,
And it's water, not men, uproar, not rape.
They seek the tingle trill of the near miss,
A bad man's rough caress but thrilling kiss.
They bike off when all goes drowsy and still.
The fishermen sigh . . . return to the kill.