Know 1

Some think trees know each other

As an unborn child knows its mother,

A receptivity to stasis and change,

Which continually rearrange

The molecules of a kind of mind

As they perpetually unwind.

“Some think” has become all

That’s left of the old universal.

Impossible Chairs (Alice Bea Guerin), Sonnet #531

Possible chairs. Impossible chair.

Thought prints like graphite on white stone,

No less real than drawing on air.

(One is the only one unknown.)

The rocker can’t stop and will fall.

Not every three-legged stool stands.

The bentwood arm chair has no front.

The best words, written with an awl,

Are those that no-one understands,

Like this, an impossible stunt.

Don’t tell me these chairs are not real.

You might as well say pairs won’t peel,

That a compass can square the wheel,

Or that what is dead is ideal.

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My Human Disguise.

World Map (Hans Holbein The Younger), Sonnet #348

My mind was designed to click to the grid.

I could draw a floor plan of every home,

Each room I've lived in, etched as with acid.

The maps in my head make a heavy tome.

Some atavism shapes our love of maps --

An impulse to capture chaos in traps

Of paper and ink, odd shapes, twisting lines,

Repeat the world with approximate signs.

One old map shows an angel at each pole

Turning the earth, known by then to be round.

Monsters and sailing ships don't make a sound,

The land is mostly flat, the oceans roll,

The coordinate lines are tightly wound.

All is fixed and still as a sleeping soul.

Divided Consciousness Nos. 1 and 2, Sonnets #339 and #340

Divided Consciousness No. 1, Sonnet #339

The stones think as though they are thought silence.
Ask the big guy and he'll mouth a nothing
He's sure will seem like astounding nonsense,
As if a pretty rock knew how to sing.
He assumes you will understand the sound,
At least that it was real, if not profound.
His minor lobe chatters like a mad bird,
Ideas made sentences like light made seen,
Each thought a secret of the grand absurd,
Pitched higher when it's noble or obscene.
They never speak or look at each other.
What an obfuscation that would create!
Each thought like second thought would obviate
The first, like Cain gunning down his brother.


Divided Consciousness No. 2, Sonnet #340

I, that insistent I, is all I am.
I have witnessed it from beyond idea,
When my senses didn't make any sense,
When I felt like stone, a virtual sham.
Drop me in the deepest chasm, a sea
Seven miles deep, when all is present tense
And the lights fracture color into eyes
And the tones of drumming drown in sighs.
It comes back on me, it all comes back,
Eternal replay of the last moment
Until there is no next second, all slack;
The next I of me will never be sent
Until I bang my head twice and collide
With myself and decide I haven't died.