Red Balloon (Paul Klee), Sonnet #596

We used to talk of divine afflatus,

Now no more— dubious inspiration

Led us to the corruption of desire,

Turning each individual to Us —

A collective of alienation

Satisfied with cold ashes and out fire.

I will instead take to my red balloon

And, rising above all that troubles me,

Seeking what only I call destiny

In the apposite hours, late and soon.

The cold wind, hidden sun, and burning gas,

Earth turning to images as I pass,

Undoes the fears and tremors my being

Held too dear, as seeking loves believing.

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The Acropolis, 1842 ( Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey), Sonnet #595

The patina of time is thick.

We feel a life inside old brick

We don’t on a mountain’s summit

Or taste in a fall windstorm’s grit.

For millennia after it fell,

An Athenian couldn’t tell,

As he passed its ruins by,

If it was really there, or why.

It cried out to his soul, sundered

By countless years of surrender,

A mountain of crumbling stone

Better ignored and left alone.

Did he feel, see or comprehend

That glory has no casual end?

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Black, Sonnet #594

As if nothing has a color

And tomorrow is an absence —

Our one emotion is dolor —

A period is a sentence.

Why do we dream in black and white,

Fugal shapes dipped in clouds and ink,

In word-concatenations think,

And in zebra characters write?

Art starts with paper or canvas,

Both white, but proceeds to darken

As hours of inspiration pass,

Approaching black with brush or pen.

These poems reduce ordered paint

To something both more and less faint.

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My Human Disguise.

Blind, Sonnet #593

Seeing all that has gone before,

And what little is yet to come,

I haven’t chosen my colors,

Not from the cathedral’s dim dome,

Or the canvas named by its frame,

(I can’t choose even my own brain),

Because I cannot see what’s seen.

I can’t distinguish grass from green

Or a male cardinal from red.

I look but find it hard to read.

I’m forced to think in images,

Most dancing on flattened stages.

I’ve not much time to choose my hues,

Thinking blood is less red than blue. 

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Tallulah Falls (George Cooke), Sonnet #592

 

Evergreens cling to rock,

Which guides the waterfall —

Rising mists lave the trees.

Nowhere signs of a clock.

All durations stall.

Even the storm clouds freeze.

Earth’s stand-in is a ledge

Where men peek at the edge

In awe less of grandeur

Than such immensity.

How do we still endure —

Motes of infinity?

When all such cascades stop,

Gravity will drop.

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My Human Disguise.

Giant Squid Attacking Boat (W. A. Cranston), Sonnet #591

 

The Kraken, like all monsters, aren’t shy.

They live, not hiding, but where we don’t go.

Does each one have just an eye for an I?

Do they hunt us hungrily from below?

I wouldn’t turn them into metaphors

Because they slip thither on ocean floors,

Rising out of curiosity,

Fearful themselves of monstrosities.

They are too overwhelmingly like us,

Tentacle arms and a sharp teeth-like beak,

Astride their sea realm like a colossus,

In sum strong and in each single part weak.

Starlike, architeuthis came from space,

As did we, a fleeting elusive race.

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Head Within An Aureole (Odilon Redon), Sonnet #590

 

The Glass Man looks in the mirror’s

Pupil and sees himself asleep.

The iris a gold-flecked halo,

A crowning of thought with errors

So lovely he must wake and weep.

His eyelids blink so: slow . . . slow . . . slow.

The Glass Man rouses and rises.

He foresees the coming crisis,

When all that he believes matters

Shivers from within and shatters.

What sonnets he has written out

Are more a whisper than a shout.

Like a mirror he turns face down,

Glass is all he has ever known.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase at Amazon. Click here:

My Human Disguise.