Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Gauguin), Sonnet #334

A question is meant for the gods.
Only they are made to ask them.
We worry more about the odds
That a fruit will grow from a stem,
Not why, or how a child will grow
When his thoughts are halting and slow.
We know one another too well
And learn to love our loneliness.
The sun and stars our only dress,
We aren't shy, and eagerly tell
Stories that explain everything:
The reason for the spider's sting,
Why a dead man isn't jealous,
And asking is ridiculous.

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Sunrise After Brief Ice Storm, Sonnet #333

The world is made of casual captures:
A rising sun caught in branches and leaves,
Branches coated in quickly melting ice,
The mind held by momentary raptures,
Concatenating chains and nested sieves,
A seeking, grasping, imprisoned device.
The light and time is really all we own,
The owning like the ear processing tone
From cracked oboes to make it musical,
Its fading, if not quick, eventual.
I must capture myself in the ice tree,
Permit no release to fear or distraction
Or the sun will melt waking inaction,
And in my next moment let darkness free.

Plow and Harrow (Van Gogh), Sonnet #332

The plow said to the harrow, "I am not like you.
I turn up and soften the soil and make it new."
The harrow said, "I teach the soil what to do.
It may be a hard lesson, but the soil must learn.
You signify nothing. You only churn and churn."
The plow replied, "It's not the soil, but the seed
That must concern us most, its future and its need."
The reply was furious, "You fluff its pillow,
While I obliterate its enemy, the weed!
The seed would sprout and choke if I didn't harrow
The earth, if I didn't do everything I must
To slash and bite and crush the filthy dirt to dust."
The plow and the harrow lie rusting in the field
And for decades there hasn't been a harvest yield.

Supernova, Galaxy M82, Sonnet #331

A mind goes supernova when it dies.
I have seen it with a telescope --
A vast expansion of light as it flies
Into space still empty of endless hope.
Consider: even when the Milky Way
Collides with Andromeda someday,
Very few stars are likely to embrace.
We are all surrounded by too much space.
Beware failure of imagination,
That sad waste and premature demise.
We must keep looking beyond our own eyes,
Past apathy's deadening radiation.
I lost a friend today and must console
His brother, and search the skies for his soul.

Bare Trees (Van Gogh), Sonnet #330

I came upon an old woman in black,
Holding in her gloved hands an ocre oud.
The leafless trees seemed a mind-twisted wrack
As she passed underneath them with a word
Not a word, which I could still understand.
A branch scratched me with an arthritic hand.
I walked beneath soft shrieking of the elms,
The ancient ruins of defeated realms.
Some trees seemed older, but with memories,
Synaptic limbs full of ageless stories.
(The language of trees muffles in summer --
All leaf, bud and blossom, they turn mummer.)
I listened to rachitic damns and praise
Of those with many, not unnumbered days.

Ornament, Sonnet #329

For Julia Rose and Alice Bea Guerin

Tomorrow is Christmas, the heart’s havoc
With delight. Downstairs, the unnatural tree,
Will, like it does every year, evoke
With molded glass and light, such memories.
Will my daughters quite see this ornament?
Will they see, as I once watched, what seemed
For hours, the orb darkened by tinseled boughs,
Radiating needles, laden and bent,
The improbable crystal spark moonbeam,
Still, silent as time itself? I think how
They might even see the heart that moved hands
To place it there, in the long vanished lands
Of youth and time they now fill, sweetening
The earth and holding back beauty’s fleeting.

Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez), Sonnet #328

We all had nothing but art on our walls.
Tapestries, paintings, were consolation
Against the cold air's infiltration.
We wore overcoats and our women shawls.
The richest of us had painters employed
To make idols of our wives and children,
And to depict us as the handsome men
We weren't before our youth could be destroyed.
We were lords! Little ladies in waiting
Were equally fit subjects for the oils,
The poor things, our little princesses' foils.
The fools felt loved asked to pose for painting.
I myself died, mistaken for a hart,
An arrow in my neck -- a work of art.

Note: Las Meninas translates as "The Ladies in Waiting."