Phoenix (Hokusai), Sonnet #518

The Phoenix bursts from its egg of ashes

Every five hundred and eighteen ages.

It will spend years unfurling its plumage

Like crimson, emerald, and golden sashes,

Before it flies. The setting sun rages

In jealousy, cries “You presumptuous midge!”

The Phoenix’s bloodless heart doesn’t beat.

Only its wings that mercilessly blast

The air, and never fold, keep it alive.

Its pearl beak never opens to eat.

Just one exhalation would be its last.

Its fate is to seek and never arrive.

The Phoenix explodes and plunges to earth.

Once, ages ago, there was no rebirth.

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Man Proposes, God Disposes (Edwin Henry Landseer), Sonnet #517

The Provisioner, under a deadline,

Drip-sealed three years worth of tinned goods with lead.

The ships left with 129

Men who would, in less than two years, be dead.

The mythical northwest passage, if found,

Would make Sir Captain Franklin the greatest

Explorer of his age. He was ice bound

For a year and died, laid to frozen rest.

100 men, Erebus and Terror,

Walked to find the Canadian mainland,

Tracked down by the relentless polar bear.

How long before death was each man unmanned,

Turning his eyes toward some other’s food

Or flesh, in a world no less bad than good?

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My Human Disguise.

Joshua Tree (Julia Guerin), Sonnet #516

The Spanish called it the “desert dagger,”

Isote de desierto — Mormons

May have given it the biblical name.

One name implies a dangerous swagger,

The other a religious leader’s palms.

To the tree they are one and the same.

A desert, already half dead, can die.

It needs frost and water, but not too much.

I walk from tree to tree to tree and try

To reach high up enough and lightly touch

The dark green tapered and serrated leaves.

I often prick fingers, sometimes draw blood

(The pain doesn’t know and yet it believes) —

A drop in the sand releases a flood.

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My Human Disguise.

Young Greeks at a Cockfight (Jean-Leon Gerome), Sonnet #515

And so it starts with this, two youths

Setting birds against each other.

One is black, the other red.

(There is never one, but two truths.)

The rest of us do not bother

Until it’s too late — both are dead.

We might have tried to stopped the fight,

Though boy and girl proclaim the right

To this innocent violence.

“That we too are harmed is nonsense,”

They cry. “The world can spare a cock

Or two. It’s not that we would mock

The dead. Instead, we celebrate

Our right to determine their fate.”

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My Human Disguise.

Madame Jeantaud at the Mirror (Edgar Degas), Sonnet #514

Wishes of vanity, he seems to say,

Won’t be fulfilled. The tilted mirror’s ray

Reveals something akin to human clay —

A woman whose beauty has seen its day —

But what she sees is young, pretty, and gay,

The famous star of a popular play.

Perhaps the silvered glass begins to fray,

Or fractured light has lost the will to stay

The hours’, the minutes’, the seconds’ decay.

The end of her last day begins today

(Though she might be granted a day’s delay).

It’s a painting! An imagined display!

The woman is still a blossom in May,

Nor would anyone dare wish her away.

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My Human Disguise.

Evening: The Red Tree (Piet Mondrian), Sonnet #513

I have never dreamed of the tree,

Though I believe it dreams of me.

Leafless, as if empty of thought,

It blushes in the setting sun,

Emotionally overwrought,

Blossoming caught out of season.

It’s inner branches, clotted, dark,

Hide the almost asleep catbird,

(Inventor of the millionth word),

Whose claws are locked on ragged bark.

The red tree stretches to the sky.

Beneath, I sleep and dream of love,

Or old battles — sometimes I fly

Under the sun, sometimes above.

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My Human Disguise.

Woman With A Lute (Johannes Vermeer), Sonnet #512

We saw the rise and fall of melody,

The tuning and detuning of a tone,

Rhythms sprung then stretched like jackhammer beats

And lyrics wrenched, all rhyme, no prosody.

We’ve returned to beating skin with a bone

And symphonies are nothing but repeats.

Once lovers were courted by serenade —

The woman in her boudoir with a lute,

Her suitor in the garden with a flute —

Notes intertwining before they must fade.

Music was a language then, not sound,

The tracing of a portal to the heart,

How emotions given voice were found

Not mortal, but a becoming of art.

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My Human Disguise.