Escape into Life (Yves Tanguy), Sonnet #549

 

A baby sits on a giant cherry

While the depleted sun falls through a cloud.

We escape into life not knowing how

We got on and off the forgone ferry.

We’re next to nothing, an ignorant crowd,

Unmovable when we don’t start a row.

The unrecognizable in our minds,

A blurred landscape that writhes, twisting, and winds

Around ideas, resolves from nameless shapes

Into the wonderland of snakes and apes.

All’s not dust said old iron to its rust.

Shrill winds erase the nothing gust by gust.

But the baby will grow and see beyond

Terrors, his mind become a magic wand.

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

My Human Disguise.

The Bathers (Picasso), Sonnet #294

The Bathers are seekers, not believers.
(Old Possum and Pound are as dry as rust,
While Frost and Stevens compromise with trust,
And Berryman is a soul deceiver.)
Though the Bathers are not sculpted from sand,
By some moist, cool Heisenbergian hand,
They're happiest on a floating island,
Where they can sit or swim or float or stand.
The Bathers build boats with uneven keels
They steer through sand in concentric circles;
It's easy to make progress when they kneel,
And the boats sometimes produce miracles.
At sandy palimpsests, they dare to peek,
Because (not often) they glimpse what they seek.

Night Fishing at Antibes (Picasso), Sonnet #285

The Spanish mackerel and the flounder
Are not deceived by the fishermen's globes.
Let's ask if they seek to die by the spear.
Raging, the spinning hot moon founders,
And the old Mediterranean sphere
Of dead tides rolls as scaly fish disrobe.
The old Neptunian fraud has blown his top,
While two young ladies lick their lollipop.
Of course, they have a cycle for escape,
And it's water, not men, uproar, not rape.
They seek the tingle trill of the near miss,
A bad man's rough caress but thrilling kiss.
They bike off when all goes drowsy and still.
The fishermen sigh . . . return to the kill.

Sleep (Dali) and The Eye of Light, Sonnets #185 and #184

Sleep (Dali), Sonnet #185

Asleep, awake, the mind is all there is,
Or so our waking minds would have us think.
Asleep, it quails before its own image.
In crepuscule, without the drum and fizz
Of coherent ideas, or evil's stink,
It cannot muster love, regret, or rage.
It shivers, blanketed, fetal, offstage:
"But what a monstrously huge I I am!
I span vast deserts and dwarf whole cities.
I am all ego and all else is sham,
Imagined vanity no man pities.”
A cripple on crutches, it mutters, "damn."
The world fades from gray to color to gray;
We're asleep and awake, facing the day.

The Eye of Light, Sonnet #184

The eye of light is a spectrum of irises
With two dilated pupils, like binary stars,
Slightly blind, in need of Man's eyeglasses,
Its cornea a matting of translucent scars.
Light is a god, as consciousness is a god,
Illuminations we require to survive,
And each is useless, like a cracked divining rod,
Without the bird in flight or a bee-boiling hive.
The eye-beam that threw a rainbow on my ceiling
The sun sent minutes ago to find a prism,
Like the brain turns sensation into feeling,
Near purity, a benign astigmatism.
A man is godly then, in part, without being
A god, though he can often go blind with seeing.