Free Curve to the Point - Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves (Vasily Kandinsky), Sonnet #576

 

Now? Everything points to the now point.

There are no revelations in the joint

But what the curvatures of time anoint

Like ten fingers playing here’s the steeple

When inside there are no little people.

It is a lovely world after all,

When simple, not straight, no awkward bending

Of air, just the eagles’ mad descending,

And the cringing voles’ mute, terrified ball.

Then? A word for time with twined intention —

Then I was and what will I be by then?

Two words (not three) for all of duration

Lead us through the revolutions of arc,

Freely to the point of the question mark.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase at Amazon. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

Pine Tree (Giovanni Segantini), Sonnet #445

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:
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.

Gare Montparnasse, The Melancholy of Departure (Giorgio de Chirico), Sonnet #318

The second hand always departs.
The minute hand always arrives.
The hour hand claps at our lives
With one hand that stops and starts.
We climb the red stone clock tower,
Stare out slits in its white faces.
Its hands are minute and hour,
No second, which just erases,
Like the one on my mantelpiece,
Always threatening my decease.
We need a hand for time to come,
One that whirls while always slowing,
That tells us (since the hour's dumb),
When we'll be without our knowing.

Fateful Hour At Quarter to Twelve (Klee), Sonnet # 289

The waxing quarter moon, a pendulum,
Swings from eleven ten to forty-six,
Its math always slightly wrong in sum,
Its path a leaning gravity can't fix.
We stand beneath the clock-faced obelisk
And with tiny leaps try to grasp the disc.
I knew a witch once who wore sunglasses
When the hour's two hands approached midnight.
She said it had nothing to do with light,
But the way the dark turned to molasses.
She feared nothing more than the coming day,
Except its damn'd tendency to stay.
We're sleeping now with no time to time out,
Or a moon to wane, or a dream to doubt.

Sundial (Escher), Sonnet #246

The motionless gnomon slowly persists,
Pointing the hour in pinching the sun's rays,
While hands of a clock clench their tiny fists,
And sheets of squared paper reckon the days.
A clock can't tick in space, though comets pass,
Light doesn't exist until it falls upon
A planet, your eyes, or a cloud of gas.
Thus, a love is engendered by the sun.
Ruth, our days number some 15,000,
And more than 400,000 the hours.
Let's not waste a moment counting the sand.
What's left us is unknowable, but ours.
I will stand still, watch you encircle me --
No shadows, just the light of your beauty.

A Dance To The Music of Time (Nicolas Poussin), Sonnet #233

1
I once watched a conductor stop the world.
At the end of Mahler's Ninth, vibrations
Still fading from the concert hall, he held
His arms up, motionless, for a minute,
Forcing the audience's attention
On the growing silence, to the now mute
Voice of what had come before, of sorrow,
And obliteration of tomorrow.
It was as if he said, Behold, what's gone
Of suffering and death, all that's beyond
Us now; behold and do not be afraid.
And when he lowered his hands no one said
Bravo, cheered (though some wept), or applauded
For forever. Then the room exploded.

2
I believe in something we call Time
As if it were my own personal god.
I slow it with meter, speed it with rhyme,
And know when it's even and when it's odd.
Under anesthetic, I've completely
Vanished in a vacuum of duration.
In my dreams it embraces me sweetly,
Dancing me in circles of cessation.
I fight Time sometimes with my memories
And foresee circumstances to stop them.
Time indulges my mental forgeries --
Time's the poet; I am but a theorem.
Time is a beautiful woman, ugly
Only when she's gowned with eternity.

EPHEMERA

How many evenings in ten years;
most spent—reading aloud, listening—
trying to be conscious of their joy?

Today one child is still only ten.
The other is only, still only five.
Time disappears into their growing.

Sometimes you think that even
to be conscious is not enough—
then you despair, like a castaway,

fingers cupped on the sea’s edge,
afraid to sip when it is the whole sea
you are dying, dying to drink.