The man, like a trackless train,
Makes his own determined grooves
With the churning of his brain.
Mud up to his axles, he moves
On his earthbound odyssey.
(Not one goddess approves.)
He’ll see the grassy sea
As he sinks into the sand.
“Now,” he cries, “for Persephone!”
A neap tide drowns the land,
While he, chugging into the main,
Discovers himself unmanned,
Rudderless, sane, and insane.
Feb. 2, 2022, was the 100th anniversary of
James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Music in time: evanescent,
Humming ghosts of tempo,
Neither past nor present,
Equally fast and slow,
Epitomes of entropy.
Violins sing, horns blow
A memory of melody,
A broken string on a bow,
One chord of a threnody.
Staffs roll row on row
In their staccato descent,
A momentless flow
Of tones, incandescent.
My body is richly scarred
As if caught in an avalanche.
It’s crisscrossed and barred —
Lines of sewn flesh branch,
Nose and brow bear hyphens,
Once pink areas, burned, blanch.
Time ravages us with its sins,
Which have nothing to do with will,
But the vulnerability of skins.
Not one baby’s molecule is still
In us after fifty years, discarded
Without changing us, until
We are perfect again, unmarred.
The coming of the naked year
Is announced by desiccated corn,
Its leaves quivering with fear.
These fields will never be shorn,
New seeds never sown —
Nothing slouches to be born.
We have given all we own
To the bankers and the lords
And secured only blood by loan.
Our shacks are hollow gourds,
No water to drink, only beer.
There’s no strength in hordes.
Bawds lift their skirts and leer.
Note: Terzata is a term of my own invention, a conflation of "terza" as in"terza rima" and "sonata." Other than the varying number of feet per line, the difference from terza rima is that each Terzata ends with a quatrain whose second and fourth rhyme is the same as the poem's beginning rhyme, and is composed of 13 lines (terza rima can be of any length). The first 30 Terzata, written several years ago, can be found here: 30 Terzata
With these two sonnets, this sequence of 600 ekphrastic sonnets, My Human Disguise, is complete.
My Human Disguise, Part One, Sonnet #599
Dear friend, do not forget what is hidden
In both the interstices and behind
The ears and feet and fingers of the mind
Cannot ever be revealed unbidden.
I’m not the human, this disguise you find.
You must call to something else inside me,
A me even I think a mystery.
Both of us stare into the mirror, blind.
Each image we see is pentimento,
The colors laid on increasingly thick,
But like aging time, erring, erratic,
An offering of Now as memento.
I don’t understand “my human disguise.”
I never have. Is it wisdom or lies?
My Human Disguise, Part Two, Sonnet #600
It’s time to put down “My Human Disguise.”
Take off the mask, erase the images.
Enough of playing tyrant with my eyes
To creations of painters and such sages.
At times these acts of synesthesia
Have restored the blank page’s amnesia.
Then I remember I’m not a being,
But only its disguise, a seen seeing . . . .
“He draws aside the brocaded curtain
As if to reveal an intimacy
Tantamount to an indiscretion,
Though it is just to allow us to see.”
Notes:
1. The concluding quatrain is
from the beginning of Sonnet #1,
“The Art of Painting” (by Vermeer),
from “My Human Disguise.”
2. Since this is a blog, the sonnets are
presented in reverse order. The reader
can start here for the first four sonnets:
My Human Disguise Beginning Sonnets
Click here for the next seven sonnets:
After that, click on "newer posts"
at the bottom of each page.
3. The drawing for these two
sonnets is by Alice Guerin, titled
“Hands and Feet,” and appears as
the cover of the book containing
the first 200 sonnets of “My Human
Disguise,” published by Voca Me Press
in 2016. It also appears with Sonnet #40.
Fort Wayne, 1/15/22
1970
When the river that ran by my house froze
And the wind had blown the snow off the ice,
I would skate, chasing the schools of dark fish
(Careful not to run too close to the floes
A warm well cracked into sharp ice slices)
Until they’d leave the shallows and vanish.
1870
“That harshest of winters we all survived.
The wind (so murderous) kept us alive,
Piling snow wherever the cold sought in,
Even when we had an empty wood bin.”
“That winter whole families died, frozen —
In our district alone there were dozens.
We burned the houses — better used as graves —
The wind blew snow on our fields into waves.”
Thanks to Irina Velitskaya for recommending this painting.
After 2021–A New Year’s Poem
“Flying carpet” had been more apt,
Fleeing, unreachable, rapt.
Not magical, but uncanny,
Not even real, epiphany
Without a point because it is
Not up to analysis.
We’re given only a number —
How many can’t be counted, known —
(Fraying threads, fabric unsewn).
“I’m certain that I remember,”
I say. The carpet flaps. I fall.
Can I recall one thing at all?
The memories that I most fear
Are those I hope to lose next year.
