Hunters in the Snow (Bruegel), Sonnet #275

I waited in the car for my mother,
And said the words crystal spark moonbeam.
The deep snow, banked to the boughs of the pines
By the church, wasn't mine, but another's.
I could only take with me what might seem
Mine, the words I would one day write, these lines.
The night sky shined and the snow ignited,
A new snow, untouched by shovel or tracks.
Was I meant to wonder, be delighted?
Was such beauty a deliberate act?
I was four -- the image never left me,
And not once since has snow-light seemed the same.
The hunters return, leather sacks empty.
Tonight, in high-banked fires, they'll taste game.

Oak in Snow Shower, Sonnet #274

The oak won't grow straight or narrow.
Its parsing of three dimensions
Is like an exploded arrow
Or skeins of galaxial suns.
Time is the drifting down of snow.
Some men cut down a dead willow.
For the first time I can now see
The oak out of my front window.
It beckons to the breath in me.
I once compared bare trees to screams.
A stupid metaphor. "Spacetime,"
Too, renames what is with what seems.
Look closely. The oak's branches rhyme
With all we are, as we sublime.

Pileated Woodpecker in Flight (David Mintz, photographer), Sonnet #273

They say his lost cousin, ivory-billed,
Once chopped down a sycamore and when locked
In a cabin with a bobcat, he killed
The beast with a stab, flinging splinters, knocked
A hole in the door and flew. Man, he mocked.
I don't believe his laughter is extinct.
The pileated's eternal drumming
Is always distant, like tiny thunder.
He's flown right over me. I flinched. I blinked.
His loping flight, black and white wings strumming
The forest light, is the end of wonder.
Here he's caught, head turned around and under,
Flying, crest upside down -- impossible.
Yet, a thing of feathers, flesh, blood, and bill.

Couple Walking in the Forest (Van Gogh), Sonnet #272

For Ruth

We call them our "woods walks," as though the trees

Walk with us; one follows, one leads -- each sees

Us, seldom hand in hand because the light,

Leaf-filtered, tinted, already binds us,

And should we ever become lost, finds us.

We're tall oaks branching each other's delight.

You say you always find here perfect calm.

I feel it too, my love, I feel through you.

In a leaf, I see tracings of your palm,

Read our future, not real, perhaps, but true.

Sometimes you walk ahead and look for birds,

The screech owl (unicorn!) in its knothole,

Never yet seen, though you search every bole,

Your face a lovely sonnet without words.

Posted on our 38th wedding anniversary.

Orchestra of the Opera (Degas), Sonnet #271

Half a life spent practicing the cello,
He's performed for less than a year before
An audience, may yet earn his fellow
Players' respect -- never the conductor's.
The little dancer with the pretty knees
Ignores him when curtain calls are over,
But later will do all she can to please.
(Many in the pit have been her lovers.)
That's him, looking up from his music stand,
Giving you, in the audience, the eye.
"Enjoy," it seems to say, "as if you can.
For me, this music is to live or die,
Sounds that cannot speak, yet signify,
And nothing you will ever understand."

Galaxy PGC 6240 (Hubble Telescope), Sonnet #270

One doesn't believe in the galaxies
Because they cannot speak. They ran away
And left us with nothing but dimming seas
Of light (not much of that), the random ray
Of heat, glow of illuminated gas,
And the supernova's vestigial mass.
Cataclysm: stars collide in silence
To the humiliation of science.
Lying awake, I go there every night --
A Lagrange point between planet and sun,
Steadfast along their centrifugal bight,
Worlds parsecs away, not unlike this one.
Things move in space but what does space move in?
What probe scratches the universe's skin?

The Banquet (Magritte), Sonnet #269

The sunset is a fickle idee fixe.
A prayer who cannot focus his mind
On one sentence from last Sunday's sermon,
A scientist who forces what he seeks,
A drunken hunter nodding in his blind,
All, intent on ideas — wavering sun.
But the sun never abandons a thought.
We might see it struggle and dim, caught
In leafed trees, or muddled by fog or haze,
Or gone below horizons where it dies
In the night ashes of extinguished days,
Until it's resurrected as sunrise.
We're all like suns to the sun, its to see
And to burn like an idea — to be.