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.

Might Not The Pupil Know More? (Goya), Sonnet #388

The young donkey, at his prayers,

Ignores his brothers, those brayers.

His missal is the alphabet,

Which he hasn’t quite mastered yet.

His master wields a paddle of wood

That stings him like a donkey fly

When he don’t learn his lessons good,

Like mistaking his “U” for “Y.”

“Might not the Pupil know more?”

Nickers Master, “Just his ‘as’s?’”

The brothers honk a mocking snore

And let a mephitic cloud pass.

The pupil thinks, They will be damned,

But first I need my cranium crammed.

Langlois Bridge at Arles (Van Gogh), Sonnet #387

In mourning, the pretty woman lifts her parasol.

Having once crossed the bridge each day with her dear one,

She thinks it a bitter joke on death and healing,

The bridge’s shuddering raise and trembling fall.

The river shivers to a walk — then starts to run,

Sends the boats bow up and down and keeling.

She has always hurried over the steel-shod planks

And never once stepped where the two halves meet.

She saw no beauty there, neither ancient or fleet,

Though for passage she would always whisper her thanks.

No more. She wishes the bridge would quickly unclose

And without looking down she’d step onto nothing,

The parasol filling with thick air and ripping,

Her dress a bloom around her face like a black rose.

An Old Oak Tree Saved, Sonnet #386

For Sister Elise Kriss

When I saw the fence around the old oak,

I thanked the Sister for saving the tree.

“Yes,”she said, “we intend to make a park

Next to the college’s new library.

Someday the two of us will sit under

Its branches and have a nice little talk.”

But on my street city workers sunder

An entire elm grove to make a sidewalk.

I asked the foreman, was it necessary?

He wiped the sawdust from his balding head

And said, “Why the heck are you asking me?”

He had a point — by then the trees were dead.

I told Sister I wouldn’t forget us

Getting together. There’s much to discuss.

End of the Trojan War (Tiepolo), Sonnet #385

The painter doesn’t clearly show a single face

In the starving, struggling, victory-mad crowd.

The men inside the horse could be laughing out loud

Without fear of being heard above the fracas.

The Trickster proclaimed that the genius of his scheme 

Was revealed to him in a post-debauchery dream

By a god who refused to say its name or sex,

But who had addressed the Trickster as Regent Rex.

(An error in speaking T never repeated.)

“Do this,” said the god, “and All will be defeated.”

In later years, faced with sirens and a cyclops,

He’d beg that faceless god for more brilliant guidance,

Since his own soldiers, as fighters, proved hopeless flops.

He returned to his wife with a bow and split pants.