Tasso's Oak (Peter Blume)

#80

We watched transformers spewing sparks
As a freak derecho blew through our town
And cut twenty thousand trees down,
All soon stacked and chipped in our parks.
Centuries old, Tasso's oak still stands,
Buttressed with steel cable and iron bands.
Encased in red brick and mortar, its roots
Send forth a sucker, a lone, seeking shoot,
While beneath no one looks at tree or Rome,
But stick to knitting, play, pray, or make love.
Did the old poet, writing, let his eyes roam
From words to the leaf-tattered skies above?
Trees will outlive us, or not. Let them die.
Only, choose one that we will know you by.

Knight, Death, and the Devil (Durer)

#79

The Knight and his Death ride horses bridled;
One with studded leather, the Other twisted hemp.
The Devil walks. Having nothing hasty to attempt,
He's happiest when men, actively morally idle,
March, run, ride, or fly toward anything Ideal.
Plodding along, He's never too far behind.
The Devil and Death have nothing to conceal
From a Knight known to be uncommonly kind;
To the men who've just been maimed by his sword,
He's always spared a righteous, comforting word.
They show themselves: anthropomorphic Fates
The Knight, smiling to himself, politely ignores.
A running dog briefly disrupts the stalemate
Only one of the three has the power to restore.

Relativity (Escher)

#78

I once stood staring down a long staircase,
Then stood up having fallen all the way down.
The time between appeared to have erased
Both itself and the memory of what I'd done.
Unhurt, staring up at the staircase, terrified
Of forms and forces I now understood, I cried.
There are many steps, floors, and bannisters
In this ant people world, but only one sun.
Yet all depends on the attitude of the stairs,
Which share the simultaneity of the boson.
Every direction ends in a shift of perspective,
Hinting that the fifth dimension may be us,
Each riser a mere extension of consciousness,
Until, falling down the stairs, we no longer live.

Untitled (Alice Guerin)

#77

We should all live in homes on stilts,
As I did once (and now again).
Officer's quarters in the Philippines
Like godown barns, were built
On cement pillars typhoon rains
Relentlessly surged between.
My daughter depicts our home
High above the ocean, a rowboat
Tied close to negotiate the moat,
Barely visible through foggy foam.
Will all be well when the storms
Blow in and the waves swarm?
She holds the image in her hands,
Raising her home above dry land.


Note: This stunning and unusual artwork, by my daughter Alice,
is composed of a drawing photoprinted on silk, then covered with
another layer of silk, which lends the work an ethereal atmosphere,
as if the house (which is our house) is visible only through rolling fog.

Secretarybird, Sagittarius serpentarius (Julia Guerin)

#76

Called the "archer" for his quiver-like crest,
He's a snake stomper, earth-bound hunter,
Stalking the edge of brush fires, gobbling
Reptiles and rodents fleeing their nests.
Like all raptors, he has no eye but hunger,
No thought that doesn't lead to swallowing.
He has the selfish absorption of an artist.
The world disappears, leaving him to create
A bitter order composed of what he ate.
Though he is never satisfied, never at rest,
He glides in flight like a dream of sleep.
His crane legs forgotten, his wings sweep
Away the wind. Soon, he'll wonder why he flew,
Flying just to fly -- something we can never do.

Container for Stars (Klee)

#75

We thought, when we were the heart of the universe,
The constellations accumulate the divine.
We chanted as we watched the gods slowly disperse,
Replaced by single stars and Albert Einstein.
A star can fall. There's too much of velocity,
Distance, and duration in our current science,
Because there's no such thing as specificity.
Even if we could fly a billion light years hence,
What we want to see would be just as far away.
We might find a planet where men would want to stay.
Life could be altered. The sky would remain the same,
New constellations we'd have to give new names.
The discovered universe is not what we sought.
The only container of the stars is a thought.

Interior of a Forest (Cezanne)

#74

The forest waits each time we go away

And knows itself again when we return.

Each branch on every tree has either died

Or grown new leaves or limbs, as if to stay

The same, above the ground grown wild with ferns,

Was once considered, but never once tried.

The pileated woodpecker's square holes

Have gone dark gray; his maniac laughter

Fades into the leaf rustle and only after

We leave returns to the silence we stole.

The river's deep and can be treacherous.

Its trout will not be caught, its otter trapped.

Its odd meanderings cannot be mapped.

The river forest waits, but not for us.