Two Tales, Sonnets #215 and #216

Sleeping Beauty (Viktor Vasnetsov), Sonnet #216

For Irina Velitskaya

1
Even the family brown bear
Joined the princess in endless sleep
In the embrambled castle keep.
The prince found her pale, cold, but fair,
And released her, her retinue,
From endless dreams to nothing new.
A wedding and two babes conceived
Enraged the prince's ogress queen,
Who ordered them served up in sauce,
Though she was easily deceived,
With hind and lamb in a tureen,
By the cook, who hated his boss.
She died in a barrel of snakes.
Each day the sleeping beauty wakes.

2
We've all been asleep for 100 years,
So, when we wake, vigorously alive,
As the creeping armies of night arrive,
We will wash them out to sea with our fears.
The cannibals will have themselves to eat.
The king and queen will summon a piper
To drive away the thorn and the viper,
But hear only their own hearts cease to beat.
What we will make of our new universe
Depends (like the fine point of a spindle)
On how tiny, sharp our hearts will dwindle.
Will we invite a new, more evil curse?
Sleep on, nothing will happen while we do.
The prince's kiss has changed into a moue.

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Frontispiece from Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Blake), Sonnet #215

The rapist and his victim chained,
The lover, his anguish burning
Hottest where his tears had rained,
On pale cheeks, twisted lips: yearning
For her touch is all that remained.
The rape forged its own manacles,
The woman's shame and the man's fear,
(He finds, wherever he looks, a mirror).
She's no longer a miracle
Of virgin grace and purity.
The rapist is a stupid beast
She can neither hate nor pity.
The sun breaks through clouds to the east,
And melts the chains. The lovers kiss.
The third drowns himself with a hiss.

Ruth and Christopher Guerin (November 27, 1977), Sonnet #214

Still my love, of 41 years, still mine,
You are both a truth and beauty of time.
A blizzard, as this picture was taken,
Danced up the town, as if to awaken
With skeins and wild cascades of wind and white
A lazy prematurely sleeping night,
As you, in our marrying, ignited
A new soul in me, the old one blighted.
After we kissed and I stepped on the glass,
Our eyes met and said our own private mass.
The beauty in this picture speaks to me
Every day, with word, gesture, mystery
Unspoken, not unheard. I answer, so:
We still love. That is all we need to know.

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Memory (The Heart) - Frida Kahlo, Sonnet #213

Every memory comes to us incomplete,
A comet disintegrating as it passes,
An empty sailboat washing ashore at our feet
(Or perhaps we've simply forgotten our glasses).
But say this memory is like her heart removed
And left to beat out its blood on the beach,
The scarred remnant of one once much beloved
She had gladly exchanged for her own, each for each.
Now she has become a memory with a hole
In her breast, pierced by an arrow, vaneless, headless,
Her arms in the sleeves of other women's dresses,
Her white skirt all that's left of her immortal soul.
A woman once replete now completely empty --
Forgotten blood runs to the mountains and the sea.

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Equals Infinity (Klee), Sonnet #212

Nothing equals infinity,
And that, yes, and that, all that crap,
Just a damned ambiguity
And metaphysical trap.

Infinite the galaxies.
Infinite the grains of sand.
Infinite the gaseous seas.
Infinity we understand.

Nothing we can't contemplate,
Because nothing has no equal.
There's no infinity so great
Or timeless, nor a thing so small,

Except, my eye on a migrating bird
At the feeder, there, equally absurd.

Le Salut (Delvaux), Sonnet #211

1
The ball and pyramid finials rhyme
With the snow-topped volcano far away.
The streetcar has arrived almost on time.
Its one rider escapes into dark woods.
A gent tips his bowler, as if to say,
To his muse, "Thanks for a peek at the goods."
She raises her left hand to draw him near;
Does she desire to stroke or slap his cheek?
Great muses are naturally unclear
In their gestures. Is it art or love they seek?
In each window on the street a model
Poses for any artist to ogle,
But there's no one else but the gallant gent,
Whose inspiration is already spent.

2
I've walked this street for so many years.
Always the windows are unoccupied,
And where the robe-draped muse stood beckoning
To others, turning blind men into seers,
I find broken flagstones some mole has pried
From below, and a tired old man, yawning.
I've heard the volcano grumbling, hissing,
And from somewhere padding of unshod feet,
Seen the gent's bowler rolling down the street,
And asked myself, "Is it me that's missing?"
The streetcar is late. Now I understand!
I run and reach it as it comes to rest.
The rider, a child, offers me her hand
And leads me away, into the forest.

Ghost (Kawanabe Kyosai), Sonnet #210

Ghosts are the necessary dead.
Without them we'd take for granted
The world we ourselves have haunted.
Not all must chew the hairy head
Of a witch or maculate bone
Of a disenchanted loved one.
Some lie sleeping, tossing, mumbling
At moonlight flooding the bedroom.
Or whisper in our sleep humbling
Past actions that no longer loom
In memory, since they've taken
Their shape before we awaken.
They walk with us during the day as well,
Kiss our lips, take our hands, guide us to Hell.

Out of Doors, Sonnets #208 and #209

Argiope Spider (Judy Keown), Sonnet #209

Each day I walk on ground prepared for me
By ceaseless settling of stone and soil,
Or the pouring of asphalt and concrete.
The orb weaver shuttles from tree to tree
On the evanescence of his own toil,
The sculpting of air he'll never complete.
His hunger (his world is a deception)
Must war with his desire for perfection,
As each creature he catches and devours
Rips apart and tangles the work of hours.
Some unseeing oaf like me will blunder
Into the trap and tear his world apart.
As I stumble off (my neck stings!), he'll start
To rebuild: one thread out, one thread under....

Thanks to Judy Keown for permission to write about and
post her wonderful photograph. Click here to see more
of her work:  Judy Keown

Autumn Evening (Ferdinand Hodler), Sonnet #208

There's nothing there we haven't seen before,
But not so many times we can afford
To hustle past. Let's promise each other --
Never commit the sin of being bored.
Besides, so much has changed in just a year.
The sun-rustled air seems even clearer.
The pattern of the leaves left in the trees
(Yes, the postcard days ended yesterday),
Suggests paragraphs full of ideas,
Things we think but never think to say.
The colors play the least part of the scene,
And we must grant each leaf its final bow.
If we could stay to watch the last careen
To the ground, we might settle then at Now.