Gare Montparnasse, The Melancholy of Departure (Giorgio de Chirico), Sonnet #318

The second hand always departs.
The minute hand always arrives.
The hour hand claps at our lives
With one hand that stops and starts.
We climb the red stone clock tower,
Stare out slits in its white faces.
Its hands are minute and hour,
No second, which just erases,
Like the one on my mantelpiece,
Always threatening my decease.
We need a hand for time to come,
One that whirls while always slowing,
That tells us (since the hour's dumb),
When we'll be without our knowing.

King Hobgoblin Sleeping (Hugo Simberg), Sonnet #317

I found a hobgoblin in my back yard,
With a possum pillow under his head,
Asleep, surrounded by a thousand kin
Standing in ranks, his imperial guard.
A cricket on a string droned by his bed
Of crepe tucked under his majesty's chin.
His crown (a fool's cap) and truncheon scepter
Were all he owned that made him emperor.
They cast his grandeur and his power spells.
His minions, one by one, exhausted, fell,
Near death, and groaning hauled each other up.
I shouted, "Wake thee! Or you'll interrupt
Your sire's sleep!" Then they all disappeared,
Leaving possum to chew the dead hob's beard.

The Wounded Angel (Hugo Simberg), Sonnet #316

We found her nearly conscious under the willow,
Her wings so wet she must have come from the river.
We ripped a strip from her gown's hem and wrapped her brow.
A gash meant to us someone could not forgive her.
We dared not wipe the blood from her broken pinions,
Afraid that it might make us bleed or break our hands.
We remembered stories about the Lord's minions --
How their feathers had beaten mountains into sands.
Our minds blazed awe. She whispered, "No superstitions."
We cut two branches from an ash and made a chair
To carry her. She rose and sat, like light, like air.
She clutched five snowdrops we had taken from her hair.
We asked her how we should go. She pointed
At the river. "There," she said, "We are anointed."

Bond of Union (Escher), Sonnet #315

For Ruth

They say that only gravity can make an orb,
That when two pliable objects come together,
An attracting force at their centers will absorb
All imbalance, all turbulence, wind and weather,
And even out the distance from center to rim
To form a satisfying equilibrium.
The loves of men and women are beribboned air,
Much that's empty and much almost decorated.
It's up to each to seek the beautiful and fair,
To smile, to look past the moment, sad or sated
(Though we'd wrestle the sun if it would hold the day!),
When the moment is over and has rolled away.
My love, our ribbons tighten and, like gravity,
Have made a single perfectly round you and me.

Stonehenge, Sonnet #314

Perhaps they never finished it.
The stones wouldn't stay put or fit.
The builders grew weary and quit.
Their act of faith was a battle
With a terrible mystery,
The unseen evil, gravity. 
The lifting high of each lintel,
Unsure of a secure seating,
Might have seemed a self-defeating
Act, simply in the repeating.
When we exhausted stone-layers
Fail, do we resort to prayer,
Or abject, wild ululation
In praise of our liberation.  

The Alchymist (Joseph Wright), Sonnet #313

As we turn gold into lead each day,
Alchemists of humors, vapors, and clay --
As we dip our hot dreams into dry ice,
Shocked when our dragons turn out to be mice --
The Lords of Change drift in unseemly sleep,
Snore so loudly we dare not make a peep.
Know who you are, you philosopher's stones,
Elixirless lives and pilotless drones,
You false promisers, prophets of the cloud,
Your cant can't and decants only the loud.
Take but little sips from your retort flask,
And try never to answer, only ask.
You base metals, here's your Magnum Opus --
Rust dust in our eyes, your hocus pocus.

Death and the Miser (Bosch), Sonnet #312

There is one bastard that Death doesn't want --
A man He's content to smilingly haunt,
To gesture that He hasn't forgotten
What comes. "Maybe when your mind's most rotten,"
He whispers from behind the sickroom door.
The man, a murdering conquistador,
And raper of the widows of the poor,
Cut a priest's throat to settle an old score,
And sold babies to feed the king's prize boar.
Delectable crimes for Death -- no reason
Not to take this human in his season.
His disgust was with the miser's grasping
Love of His own hot and eternal sting,
Leaving death for no other living thing.