Construct, Sonnet #614

A dreamed-of tern feathered bright tin,

With feet of forks and spoons, and eyes

Of rapidly blinking buttons

Flapping in a nacreous sky . . .

So briefly, yet half-remembered.

Is it different than sand hill cranes

Flying tight skeins, or tiny birds

Fighting at your feeder, insane,

Almost: hungry, or is it greed?

All is constructed by what feeds

The integers of counting we’s,

Assembled — one, one — instantly,

As we try to comprehend dreams —

And all else— as more than just seen.

Returning, Sonnet #613

How many remember so much?

I’ve read for some it’s a burden,

That not a thought or word or touch

Is lost, faded or uncertain.

All comes back clear and unbidden,

A constant stream of images

It is prayed might remain hidden.

No, such a past never ages.

The old yew tree in my back yard,

Subsiding, has dug a sinkhole,

Its roots drawing earth to branches.

I fill it in with sand —it’s hard—

I don’t want to choke the tree’s bole

Just to slow small avalanches.

Villanelle

The moment passed and I forget

The reason why or what I meant

In the exact instant I let

It go like a blank letter sent

To someone I don’t remember.

Even Now is an old event,

Both a flaming and an ember.

To hold, even touch, is to burn

Like September in December.

It takes but a second to learn,

What no-one else will ever know,

That all I am will soon return

If I stand not still but think slow,

Say nothing, and as if asleep,

Allow myself to come and go.

Instead, I cannot help but leap

Ahead to what’s to come and let

My self reach for what it can’t keep,

Moments I already forget.

Two Haiku: Mushrooms

 

Like the tops of skulls —

as my shadow would have said —

don’t you dare eat them!

Two, together, kiss —

a third is all by itself —

a jealous lover!

Haiku: Heart

The form of the heart

is the heart beating, thus, thus —

thus no form at all.

Black Holes (James Webb Telescope), Sonnet #612

 

There’s so much I don’t want to know

As I look beyond the Milky Way.

Black holes are the eyes of a crow,

Unblinking, thinking an idee

Fixe: “I see therefore I am an eye.”

What happens to what eyes swallow?

(I don’t want to know, or do I?)

I can’t see a Nothing beyond

The event horizon, but a wand

Beheld by the eye of my hand

Blindly writing an & —

Or, glass orbs with just one side

Tinted with silver iodide:

There, where crows’ ideas reside.

Know 2

We can’t tell anyone to know,

Don’t even know what knowing is,

Where it comes from, its genesis.

Things we know just come and go.

We can’t force anything to stay,

Especially anything we say.

Everything we know is “as though,”

A nothing become contingent,

Mindlessly intelligent.

There’s no bird smarter than a crow,

Or so it’s said by learned men,

Who can count from one to ten,

But find it hard to explain how

Crows never fly in a straight line.

As if seeking some strict design,

We fly from not wanting to know.