Eros (Paul Klee), Sonnet #395

The elemental urges are equal

To triangle, pyramid and diamond,

Constructs stacked neatly, an inverted wall,

Sterile, without a fructifying bond.

There can be love and sex without eros,

The wall of urges dashed with blunt arrows.

The source of the erotic is mental,

As dreams remind us with fleshless chaos,

And barred owls hoot in their ecstatic throes.

We decide love will be wild or gentle.

The eros of the imaginary

Turns lust into love, lovers to quarry.

Only the lovers’ minds can satisfy

By overwhelming the orgasmic lie.

The Rhinoceros (Durer), Sonnet #394

The rhino, armored like a knight,

With two weapons — his sheer tonnage

And the horn sticking from his snout —

Will never hesitate to fight.

The least intrusion sparks his rage.

He’s a bully, a brute, a lout. 

He stalks my back yard foraging

For greens he pulls with toothless gums.

The songbirds, opportunist bums —

Chickadees, titmice, and waxwings —

Blanket his back all day for free,

Though he’s kept bug-less by the bee-

Eaters. I’ve learned to dodge my fears.

Each day I scratch behind his ears.

A Near Infinity, Sonnet #393

A near infinity away a rock

Lies on the surface of a blasted moon.

No one will ever see it, but it’s there.

An asteroid will slam nearby — the shock

Will leave only a crater or a dune,

Slowly cooling in its star’s blinded glare.

In every sky scraper a fire escape

Stacks thousands of risers and treads of taupe

Or sage, sometimes both, lined with painters tape,

And handrails of pipe never gripped with hope.

Millions of miles of stairs on our planet

Made just in case, which men will never see.

Four dimensions count the hidden quiet,

Fill the near infinite with the empty.

Little Owl (Durer), Sonnet #392

Encore! Let’s sing out with an “o” vowel!

I know of a man like a leetle owl,

Draped head to tail with a golden cowl.

They say he even has a golden bowel

He fills with gophers caught on the prowl.

A kingly bird, his perch a small dowel,

He clears out his cage with a dirty towel.

All that work’s left him with a flappy jowl,

His chirps sounding like a whispered growl.

He’s known to hate the consonant avowal

Unless it leads to a follower’s howl

Of pain or his latest conquest’s yowl

Of pleasure, though that tends to make him scowl.

You choose. As a fowl is he fair or foul?

Petroglyphs (D’Arcy Guerin Gue), Sonnet #391

The artist drew recollections of reality,

Monsters and tornadoes, dead sheep and flooded land;

Everywhere the teeth of electricity,

What he believed was the ravening of the damned.

His god’s head was a woman’s body with four arms.

What else could a god’s brain contain? He never drew

Her face or breasts and dared not imagine her charms,

But depicted his lord’s limbs broken and askew.

The animals he lived on always ran away

And his hungry children begged him in vain to stay.

Alone, at this wall of rock, he fought for his life,

A conqueror, he could not lose until he starved.

The brain of god might consent to become his wife!

He knew he blasphemed as he carved and carved and carved.

The Pond (Sandy Ellarson), Sonnet #390

Yesterday, the snow made the world unsafe.

It’s not a friend to gravity or air.

Mixed with ice and wind it will cut and strafe

Until eyes bind and fields go bald and bare.

Today I throw my knees through knee deep drifts

And float my way down to Ellarson pond.

The ice has frozen deep — all buckled rifts.

Such cold can rend the molecular bond.

The spruce limbs sag and the long grasses break

And drop in multiples of N’s and M’s.

Only cattails bend with unbroken stems.

I recall Nemerov on the snowflake —

How can we know no two flakes are the same?

Being here, I can’t even know our name.

Mont Sainte-Victoire and Chateau Noir (Paul Cezanne), Sonnet #389

I’ve lived at the foot of a mountain too,

Pike's Peak, golden palaces on its flank.

I’ve stood in snowstorms on its peak in June.

At dawn it hummed silver, at sunset blue.

A slight fog rubbed it to a hulking blank.

Full moonlight carved from it a single rune.

In time I started to ignore the peak.

I had no painter’s eye or possession

To look at it harder each day and seek

The thing I hadn’t yet seen — a vision.

Now I live near the continental divide

In the Midwest, where on a swamp’s one side

The water runs east, on the other, west.

I walk its trails often seeking a quest.