A Flying Carpet (Victor Tsarevitch), Sonnet #597

 

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.

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My Human Disguise.

Red Balloon (Paul Klee), Sonnet #596

We used to talk of divine afflatus,

Now no more— dubious inspiration

Led us to the corruption of desire,

Turning each individual to Us —

A collective of alienation

Satisfied with cold ashes and out fire.

I will instead take to my red balloon

And, rising above all that troubles me,

Seeking what only I call destiny

In the apposite hours, late and soon.

The cold wind, hidden sun, and burning gas,

Earth turning to images as I pass,

Undoes the fears and tremors my being

Held too dear, as seeking loves believing.

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My Human Disguise.

 

The Acropolis, 1842 ( Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey), Sonnet #595

The patina of time is thick.

We feel a life inside old brick

We don’t on a mountain’s summit

Or taste in a fall windstorm’s grit.

For millennia after it fell,

An Athenian couldn’t tell,

As he passed its ruins by,

If it was really there, or why.

It cried out to his soul, sundered

By countless years of surrender,

A mountain of crumbling stone

Better ignored and left alone.

Did he feel, see or comprehend

That glory has no casual end?

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My Human Disguise.

Black, Sonnet #594

As if nothing has a color

And tomorrow is an absence —

Our one emotion is dolor —

A period is a sentence.

Why do we dream in black and white,

Fugal shapes dipped in clouds and ink,

In word-concatenations think,

And in zebra characters write?

Art starts with paper or canvas,

Both white, but proceeds to darken

As hours of inspiration pass,

Approaching black with brush or pen.

These poems reduce ordered paint

To something both more and less faint.

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My Human Disguise.

Blind, Sonnet #593

Seeing all that has gone before,

And what little is yet to come,

I haven’t chosen my colors,

Not from the cathedral’s dim dome,

Or the canvas named by its frame,

(I can’t choose even my own brain),

Because I cannot see what’s seen.

I can’t distinguish grass from green

Or a male cardinal from red.

I look but find it hard to read.

I’m forced to think in images,

Most dancing on flattened stages.

I’ve not much time to choose my hues,

Thinking blood is less red than blue. 

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My Human Disguise.

Tallulah Falls (George Cooke), Sonnet #592

 

Evergreens cling to rock,

Which guides the waterfall —

Rising mists lave the trees.

Nowhere signs of a clock.

All durations stall.

Even the storm clouds freeze.

Earth’s stand-in is a ledge

Where men peek at the edge

In awe less of grandeur

Than such immensity.

How do we still endure —

Motes of infinity?

When all such cascades stop,

Gravity will drop.

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My Human Disguise.

Giant Squid Attacking Boat (W. A. Cranston), Sonnet #591

 

The Kraken, like all monsters, aren’t shy.

They live, not hiding, but where we don’t go.

Does each one have just an eye for an I?

Do they hunt us hungrily from below?

I wouldn’t turn them into metaphors

Because they slip thither on ocean floors,

Rising out of curiosity,

Fearful themselves of monstrosities.

They are too overwhelmingly like us,

Tentacle arms and a sharp teeth-like beak,

Astride their sea realm like a colossus,

In sum strong and in each single part weak.

Starlike, architeuthis came from space,

As did we, a fleeting elusive race.

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My Human Disguise.

Head Within An Aureole (Odilon Redon), Sonnet #590

 

The Glass Man looks in the mirror’s

Pupil and sees himself asleep.

The iris a gold-flecked halo,

A crowning of thought with errors

So lovely he must wake and weep.

His eyelids blink so: slow . . . slow . . . slow.

The Glass Man rouses and rises.

He foresees the coming crisis,

When all that he believes matters

Shivers from within and shatters.

What sonnets he has written out

Are more a whisper than a shout.

Like a mirror he turns face down,

Glass is all he has ever known.

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My Human Disguise.

The Last Day of Pompeii (Karl Bryullov), Sonnet #589

 

Some chose to run, many to hide

Inside their temples and rooms,

Where every one of them died

In incendiary tombs.

I walk in a mourning fog

Outside and inside my mind,

Hand in hand with Gog Magog

And all the rest of my kind.

What are these floods and fires

And stupidity admirers

(Viruses in a cracked petri jar)?

How can I fight the coming war

We’re already losing day by day

As we run, slower and slower, away?

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My Human Disguise.

The Imp Of The Abstract (Rick Gydesen), Sonnet #588

 

“The abstract is the most we know,”

Says the blind, woodenheaded imp.

“Reality is just for show,

Like a colorful, leaking blimp,

Or eyes painted yolky yellow,

Which see only bye or hello.”

We might ask it, “How can you tell?”

It would reply, “There is no point

To my rejoinder or the joint

Where two knotty blocks form an ‘L.’

You may think you see something All,

A tree dropping leaves in the Fall —

They’re not even a chimera,

Just habit, your ephemera.”

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My Human Disguise.

Bodhidharma (Anso), Sonnet #587

 

The man sat for nine years.

After seven he cut

Off his eyelids to keep

Awake. He disappears

Into the mental rut

So like and unlike sleep.

He becomes, without skin,

Just the robe he’s clothed in,

Empty of good and sin,

Sans end or origin.

At last he left the cave,

Thinking, “Mind is a grave

And nothing I can save.”

He gave the wind a wave.

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My Human Disguise.

Death on a Pale Horse (J.M.W. Turner), Sonnet #586

 

Once a year we make fun of death,

When “trick or treat” becomes an oath.

Not one of us knows what it means,

So we taunt it with childish screams.

We scare ourselves beyond reason

Once night has beheaded the sun.

A pale horse carries a blind wraith,

With rags of lung squeezed dry of breath,

Flopping across a flesh saddle,

Disgorging eternal riddles.

A maddened and riddled monster,

His own owner and unmasker,

The beast is not stallion or mare

And foals only in our nightmares.

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My Human Disguise.

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees (Van Gogh), Sonnet #585

In September, 

                       the first leaves turn,

Then nothing seems 

                       to change for weeks.

Later the trees, 

                       dun or blazing,

Consent to the slow, 

                       ragged burn

Harsh air hard frost 

                       and hot sun wreaks.

The eye blinks and blinks, 

                       erasing.

Oh, how the soul takes it amiss —

Departing summer’s final kiss.

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My Human Disguise.

 

Cicada (Hua Yan), Sonnet #584

Why do birds and insects sing so

Effortlessly, without command,

As though they don’t care if they’re heard?

They tell us something we don’t know

And never try to understand.

I’d ignore the babbling catbird,

Perhaps, if I knew what he said.

The cardinal says “I am red.”

The cricket can’t seem to shut up

Lest I approach and interrupt.

The cicada’s incessant whir,

Like the blare of a small Klaxon,

Is intense and irregular,

An urgent call to inaction.

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My Human Disguise.

 

Broadway Boogie-Woogie (Piet Mondrian), Sonnet #583

 

The music in physical abstraction

Is in the eye that tries but can’t see straight,

A synesthesia, thought and action

Blurring all that is too far and too late.

Cross your eyes and a leaf disappears

Into a something, yes, but a nothing

Too, which will quietly begin to sing

Incomprehensibly to your pinched ears.

The New York City streets seen from a cloud,

All movement among sliding monuments,

Are like sheet music notes without accents,

Cacophonous, unrelievedly loud.

The autumn leaves run after taxi cabs

The old painter creates with little dabs.

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My Human Disguise.

The Flowered Dress (Edouard Vuillard), Sonnet #582

 

He bought it for her birthday,

But then he went away.

She wore it day after day

And when asked why, she said,

“These flowers replace the dead.”

She wore it when he returned

From far away in a urn.

She wore it when she was burned.

Her two sisters in return

Wore black and gray dresses

And hacked at their tresses,

Waiting, unable to yearn,

No hope even in flowers,

Tombed in the soberest hours.

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My Human Disguise.

Two of “Nine Dragons” (Chen Rong), Sonnet #581

The dragons follow us around,

Sneaking in and out of the mist, 

Shrieking nonsense, a silent sound,

Lonely and hungry to be kissed.

They are two of nine ancient worms

(A magic number in godly terms):

Each is older than the other;

Each is no dragons’ brother;

Each has a near toothless maw;

Each has lost all but one claw.

Out of this frightless paucity,

They have this one audacity:

Yolky eyes loll in scaly lids,

Laughing at our egos and ids.

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My Human Disguise.

Waterbirds Nesting (Josephine Joy), Sonnet #580

 

The great egret nests in a colony,

In woods not far from a river or pond.

They build thin platforms of sticks, twigs and reeds,

With a distant view like a balcony.

Not many fowl embrace this kind of bond,

Though crows return each night to rookeries.

The egret stands in water still as stone

For hours waiting for a fish or frog

They eat wriggling with a rapier bill.

Patience is the most precious skill they own.

A black mink will leap from behind a log,

Attack, cracking its legs enough to kill.

It’s then like ripping apart a child’s kite —

Broken sticks, torn paper red-spattered white.

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My Human Disguise.

Altarpiece No. 1 (Hilma af Klint), Sonnet #579

 

Here is a painting of our mind,

A congeries of colored shapes.

Balls of twisted twine unwind.

What rises into reach escapes.

A thought is not of any kind

To the overly sighted blind.

Atop the altar of the brain,

A holiness we can’t sustain

Explodes and falls like acid rain,

Leaving neither symbol nor stain.

The pyramid and the circle

Rise from a baseless miracle,

The infant’s incoherent cries

At what enters unprepared eyes.

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My Human Disguise.

Dandelion with a Death’s Head Moth (Margaretha Barbara Dietzsch), Sonnet #578

1

More beautiful dying alive,

(As it fades, generating seeds),

Than in its full yellow flower,

The dandelions in my yard thrive,

Though people denounce them as weeds.

White tuft atop a thin tower,

A brain tottering on a spine,

Its thoughts fly in windblown showers,

Infinitesimally fine,

Like disintegration of hours.

2

Some moths carry a second head

On their backs — fooling — they’re not dead.

Oh, how we love inspired dread,

When our own lives are extended.

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My Human Disguise.