Koi And Turtles (Hokusai), Sonnet #407

The Kishwaukee River was polluted

When he wandered its mud banks as a boy.

A gray iron foundry’s whistle tooted.

An ice cream company poured colored waste

On Thursdays to the carp and suckers’ joy,

Though peppermint didn’t seem to their taste.

In Japan they breed ornamental koi,

But here carp are held a pesty junk fish

And though his Dad smoked them — a tasteless dish.

He fished them because an eight pounder fought

With fury, gasping on the grass when caught.

He dragged in snapping turtles with stout line,

Chunks of bass. Dad axed their necks and made fine

Soup — until his fingers went from ten to nine.

The Morning after the Deluge (Joseph Turner), Sonnet #406

A fool I knew said the world was broken,

That paradise no longer existed,

As if the field mouse’s neck wasn’t twisted

By the owl before the snake dropped his token

Of love into the hand of fearless Eve.

It’s spring. The screech owls nest and redbuds glow.

That’s all the paradise we need to know,

Though tragedies occur and the good grieve.

It took forty days and nights of deluge

To wash away paradise, leaving mud —

Just mud — not even bone and hair and blood.

All dissolved in a maelstrom centrifuge.

We live post re-genesis. Each life dies.

Each day I tell myself, “Open your eyes.”

The Daydream (Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Sonnet #405

Why is it we never talk of daymares?

Her lily gray eyes only seldom blink.

To close them would open the mind to cares

So desperate she is afraid to think.

The daydream often takes us by surprise,

(Unlike fugue states we dive into for sleep);

We relinquish vision to congeries

Of the self, either stupefied or wise,

Or images that float up from some deep,

More beautiful than our best memories.

In dreams we find little to remember

Or control — there’s no order or meaning

And nothing left, an extinguished ember.

If we could trade our dreams for daydreaming . . . .

Buddha Riding a Dragon (Utagawa Kunisada), Sonnet #404

The question of responsibility

Is confronted where the wind meets the waves,

That filament of cause where the one laves

The other in strict reciprocity. 

Buddha and dragon each the other saves:

If the serpent throws him, the man will drown.

(He can walk on scales, but not on water.)

But, the mythic dragon cannot falter.

Faith in a faith will never let him down.

The mind of the monk may change, not alter.

Without the Buddha the dragon will die,

As a vacuum would kill the dragonfly.

I walk each day and watch the red-tail fly.

When I turn away, he holds up the sky.

Horseman Attacked by a Giant Snake (Henry Fuseli), Sonnet #403

The marauding giant snake isn’t there

In spirit, his eye askance, as if bored,

Though it tries to swallow the horse head first.

The man, trotting by without a kid’s care

(He seems to be a knight or princely lord),

Will soon have his vitals torn out or burst

By his horse’s hind hooves or the snake’s tail,

With no one to heed his nearly choked wail. 

If I came on this scene what would I do?

There seems to be no spear, arrow or blade

On the ground, and I’m no David who slew

His giant with a stone. An enfilade

Of rocks pelted by my two-armed army

Would just turn the snake’s other eye on me.

Musical Fête (Giovanni Paolo Pannini), Sonnet #402

Angels with trumpets adorn the valance

Above the apex of the proscenium,

That imaginary portal of distance

Between us and singing delirium

So intense the response is often tears.

I lived in this world for twenty-six years.

At times, I watched and listened from the wings

Urging them on like a ghostly maestro

Not always quite happy with the tempo.

Sometimes I sat in the chorus singing

From memory — I could not read a score.

I left because the patrons hadn’t stayed

No matter how well the orchestra played.

I do not go to concerts anymore.

On Nothing, Sonnet #401

It’s my favorite word and the most frightening.

A self-negating word, not even a ghostly

Idea, or an empty round, a noose tightening

Around itself, and a stern critic of “mostly.”

We use it mostly in a soft, relative sense,

As if it were a verb in more than the past tense,

Existing by not, to describe what isn’t there.

I had a cupboard, but the cupboard was bare.

We think we know variable interstices —

Between Andromeda and the Milky Way,

And between different but similar species —

Such nothings are nothing but what’s lost in decay.

Real nothing, if it exists, should freeze the soul.

In death we’ll dive into light or a rimless hole.