Fall of Rebel Angels, detail (Pieter Bruegel The Elder), Sonnet #428

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My Human Disguise.

Did each cease to be an angel

The moment he or she rebelled?

What creatures were they when they fell,

Who spewed and farted, bled and yelled?

A kind of dead, not devils yet,

Before the rest of time in Hell,

They must endure a monster’s spell

In payment of their Master’s debt.

So men today learn to betray

Themselves and all they ever knew

As truth. They haven’t lost their way,

They’ll say. “We’re just making things new.”

The air is full of monsters’ lies

Falling like newly wingless flies.

Pikes Peak (Albert Bierstadt), Sonnet #427

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My Human Disguise.

I lived on Custer, a white hood

Filling my living room window.

On a June afternoon I stood

On the summit in blooms of snow,

An hour later in sun below.

The peak was seldom where you were

And never where you were not sure

A great presence of white and pink,

As if by thinking, made you think.

The Utes called it “Tava” or sun,

As if there must be more than one,

Needing light close enough to touch,

To take away, but not too much,

Or soon the mountain would be gone.

The Actor (Picasso), Sonnet #426

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My Human Disguise.

As I am “else,” I am more than I am.

I really only speak thus to myself.

My voice is always sweetly orotund,

But what I’m here to say is all mere sham.

I’ve earned a moiety of fame and pelf

And not once have I given a refund.

My fingers flick about like ten small swords,

No sharper then the edges of my words.

My visage contortions are a mirror

(That’s where I learned them) of your hapless souls;

Mine is a mimesis of your terror

As you nose up squinting from your mole holes.

Ah, sirrah, let’s be friends. I’m just joking!

This playwright coughs words as though he’s choking.

Nearly Hit (Paul Klee), Sonnet #425

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My Human Disguise.

















My brain is a stairway to the arrow,

The one and ineluctable pointer

That flies true as any truth can and strikes

Like the rusted tine of an old harrow.

The arrow’s in an attic I enter

With telescope eyes seeking, like a shrike’s,

What I left here for later long ago.

The progress of the unfletched shaft is slow,

Has yet to pierce the humor of my eye.

Seen darkly, dust-mote-shaded, almost shy,

It moves, like Zeno, only half-way here,

Then half more, hardly trying to arrive.

It’s time I see I have nothing to fear.

It cannot pierce me while I’m still alive.

Marine Fauna (Pompeii Mosaic), Sonnet #424

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My Human Disguise.













When you look into their eye — shrimp or squid,

Octopus, lobster, bass, flounder or eel,

You’ll find no volition except blind id,

A shiny button or a spokeless wheel.

I wonder if the artist pleased the man

Who paid for this mosaic for his house.

The sea discreetly hides the inhuman

The mosaicist serves up like lobscouse.

His art form one of endless accretion,

And his subjects being quick and many,

Did he work from a diver’s memory,

Or pose his dead models till completion,

Not seeing the fauna’s slow corruption

Preserved by a volcano’s eruption?

Tree Cricket and Firefly (Kitagawa Utamaro), Sonnet #423

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My Human Disguise.








When we were kids we used to smear fireflies

With old badminton or tennis rackets,

Unconscious that something more than light dies

Each time. Tonight they seem like opened eyes.

It’s August — there are three sounds from crickets

In my grasses, bushes, oaks, and thickets.

The tree cricket is loudest and solo,

His scraping hesitant and slow and low.

An upper range of choristers sing

With uninterrupted rising ringing.

In the grass, dozens, like an Indian drone,

Emit a mid-pitched and unvarying tone.

In other towns I’ve heard the same tone poem

And thought, crickets are everywhere — their home. 

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Audubon), Sonnet #422

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My Human Disguise.


















It was said you could catch but not keep one.

A farmer once tied a male to a chair,

Which soon was kindling and the rope undone,

And, instead of a door, nothing but air.

Just one could rip apart a ten inch branch

In minutes, and ravage an entire ranch

If it was built of bug-infested logs.

Its crazed cackle once filled forests and bogs,

But today it’s feared the Ivory-billed’s extinct.

I’ve watched its cousin, the Pileated,

Hammer a limb with its head into dust

And thought, does such an addled creature think,

“I too could one day be uncreated.

There must be Ivory-billed left. There must!”