The Cave at Enoshima in Sagami Province (Utagawa Hiroshige), Sonnet #449

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My Human Disguise.

A sacred wave chases men from the shore

A sacred tree survives the wind and wrack

A sacred root clutches a rocky crack

A sacred cave with silk smooth walls and floor 

This all exists because I stand outside,

My eye less a lens than a picture frame.

My mind shutters, cannot close, opens wide

Dying to give everything a name.

Three men venture slowly into the cave,

Carry one lamp they will light at the nave

Where the sea’s voice is echoic and grave

And the light is not particle or wave.

They bring nothing else, no prayer to say

In this mouth opened by ancient sea fray. 

Contrast (Order and Chaos) (M.C. Escher), Sonnet # 448

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My Human Disguise.













Which of these is the impossible object?

I think the bottle, pipe and flowerpot

Are too much victims of serene neglect.

The string isn’t tied with a proper knot.

The opened can and the crumpled up box

Are both containers that don’t come with locks.

Nothing is whole in itself — the heel plate,

The cork, or the sardines someone just ate.

Even the tool (I don’t know what it’s for)

Needs some receptive substances to score.

You think I’m ignoring the obvious,

A crystal globe that’s pierced with pyramids,

An object of reflections marring grids.

The only impossible things are us.

Blind Man With A Lantern (Sengai), Sonnet # 447

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My Human Disguise.








Sengai! Is the lantern lit?

Granted, your point stabs us with wit.

An old parable, forgotten

And obvious, like a dark cave,

Empty and dry, but not rotten,

Composed by a man deadly brave.

The blind man taps his walking stick

And that may be his burning wick.

To see is to know it is not

To see but to know but a jot

To see in our thought’s darkest blot

Seeing that is and that is not.

Tap, tap, tap, my old frowning friend.

Only you see beyond the bend. 

Friedrich Nietzsche (Edvard Munch), Sonnet #446

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My Human Disguise.

He stands as if on the opposite rail —

On the same old circumambient bridge —

From the man with two strangers on his trail.

His forehead is a rain-carved granite ridge.

Though he seems composed, thoughtful, hands steady,

He might be going insane already.

The other’s panicked cry doesn’t make noise,

While Fritz shadows his pain in equipoise.

They say his sly sister Elizabeth

Let his mustache grow to cover his teeth

And tongue that in a mock rictus of death

Would twist and grind, never ceasing to seethe.

He called himself a nitroglycerine

Antidote for no god, if not for sin.

Pine Tree (Giovanni Segantini), Sonnet #445

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My Human Disguise.

Now is not a moment in time,

But all of time in a moment.

Ice hangs off ledges in the creek,

Which passes through the still sublime.

The trunk of the pine tree is bent

And leans toward the water to seek....

The tree splits at the lower bole

And higher up its halves are whole.

Its lower needles graze pink blooms;

Above the forest canopy

They brush the sky like tiny brooms.

What we cannot see they can’t be.

This now is ever-present change

Not even time can rearrange.

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais and The Tree of Tule, Sonnet #444

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My Human Disguise.

Say that not all works of beauty are willed.

For centuries freemasons tried to build

A spire 500 feet into the sky,

Which collapsed three times and was abandoned.

They settled for the real, but had to try —

Just one of the lessons it taught Rodin.

The Tule tree has the same architecture —

Chthonian, with buttresses, gargoyles,

All the result of a wild conjecture

And intent and the fruit of endless toils.

In truth, there’s nothing that’s not beautiful,

Nothing not made; even nothing is willed.

Everything is essence, blind, dutiful,

Perfect if at times imperfectly skilled.

The Thinker (Auguste Rodin), Sonnet #443

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My Human Disguise.

A problem with the “hard problem” —

How can this muscle mass and bone

Topped off with a refulgent shell,

Medulla and a tapered stem,

Obliterate being alone?

Thought isn’t thought in a locked cell.

Until we see eyes see, tongues talk,

Our eyes and tongues are chunks of chalk.

Rodin meant us to see an act.

His Thinker is an angel fact,

A nothing without us to see, 

Though it’s hard for us to believe.

No, it’s we think, we are — we weave

Each thought from you and you and me.