The Mirror of Cronos (Matta), Sonnet #182

The present is the mirror of Cronos;
His mirror is the future and the past.
He deposed his father Uranus, cast
His balls into the sea; Aphrodite
Grew from the foam. He swallowed Ompholos,
A stone navel he thought one of his sons.
His Golden Age demanding piety,
He slew the Titan serpent Ophion.
So? We see all the same evil today;
Godly men who kill, corrupt, betray.
Cronos sees in his mirror his son Zeus
Dethrone and imprison him in the Nyx,
A cave of eternal life without a use --
Cannot see himself on the River Styx.

Wall Painting From The Temple Of Longing (Klee), Sonnet #181

A full moon and a gibbous moon in the dawn sky
Shiver like arrowheads that just struck the bull's-eye.
The stars show us everything since the beginning,
Until we close our eyes and discover nothing.
We ask "Is that all?" The given answer is "Why?"
To appease us, the gods have granted us longing,
Desire for what we can't have, see, or know,
Since the future, like a broken frame of stained glass,
Is all that's left of all the moments we let pass,
And sheds upon the now only a splintered glow.
Some say time's arrow is just consciousness at play,
That duration flies as swiftly in reverse,
Mending all but the present with no delay.
Try reading this poem, again, from this last verse.

Gassed (John Singer Sargent), Sonnet #180

I drew a high number the last year of the draft,
But a childhood disease would have kept me 4-F.
I have a misshapen hip and couldn't force-march
Or negotiate a pitching deck, fore to aft.
I lost no friend or brothers to war; no one left
My high school to volunteer; no triumphal arch,
No memorial was erected in our town,
No first-hand accounts of battle were written down.
The nightly news showed all there was to see of death
And defeat: we lose each war the minute one man
Fails to open his eyes or to take a next breath,
And new wars start soon enough, because they can.
Both sides used mustard gas and we used napalm bombs,
Generously, Samaritans offering alms.

Dante and Virgil in Hell (Bouguereau), Sonnet # 179

This, the eighth circle of Hell, where liars and frauds
Turn thwarted ambition to violent attacks,
Is the last refuge of all political hacks,
Where righteousness shrieks in the name of the gods.
Men of faith bite the throats of men of reason.
They tear at each other with once-ink-stained fingers
And vow to prove vast conspiracies of treason,
Calling to chambers testimonial singers.
Virgil and Dante cringe, impotent witnesses,
Appalled by acts born of conviction, yet witless.
The less guilty, forgers and fibbers, writhe like snakes
To flee the melee, though they voted for these fakes.
Above, a winged Lucifer grins his approval,
And schemes for our virtuous poets' recusal.

Inventions Of The Monsters (Dali), Sonnet #178

Who sets the giraffes on fire, strips the maidens bare?
Who shovels corpses into an empty chess square?
Who puts breath into a breasted horse-headed bust
And grinds all of mankind's fillings into gold dust?
(They knew a real monster once, a failing student
Who could dissect a soul with a few rude insights,
Trepan their insecurities, vices, and fears.
He'd laugh as he gave each of them the treatment.
They'd laugh, but each felt secretly that he was right.
Too timid to see the truth, they were his mirrors.)
We gather at white draped altars and contemplate
Not who we are but what perversions to create.
The monsters exist to give us a thrill, a scare,
Which is why we invented them -- not one is there.

A Cube Made of One-Way Mirrors, Sonnet #177

Light is nature's effort to understand.
At the mote heart of mirrored repetition,
Like an ant lion in his bottomless cone of sand,
It waits, eager to devour all with cognition.
Our own consciousness, a smeared, vague copy,
Cannot conceive infinity because no seers
Have seen what's beyond the visible canopy
Or the vanishing point in this box of mirrors.
We can come closer, because the end of things
Is as hard to picture as the never-ending.
"There is not nothing," the mirrors seem to repeat,
And the omnivorous ant lion won't cease to eat.

Lessons (Alice Guerin), Sonnet #176

The Eweman, still barren, had so far failed
To teach the terrified rhesus macaque
To see only with her eyes; he just quailed
And whimpered in her palm; he hunched his back,
Clutched his knees and stared into her eye prongs,
Which unrealed for him all the world's wrongs.
(Meanwhile a tiny snail climbs an Everest log
About to roll into a fern-choked bog.
The monkey sees it! "We must save the snail!"
He weeps. The Eweman spits, "Just like a male.")
Her eyes refocused and poured spectral light
Into pupils; he saw what's not allowed.
It was too much; he tried to scratch and bite.
"It's ever so," she sighed, yawned, and swallowed.