The Undone Thing

 

My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,

themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.

That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.

As number shapes itself,
we all gradually freeze

into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!

Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.

The caliper and the scale 
exact a shade of difference

between mole and melanoma-
sensations bought and sold:

a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,

I beckon like blue oblivion.
Afloat in a dusty tearpool

with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,

mine is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.

Excavation (Willem de Kooning), Sonnet #630

 

There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all 

beings like themselves...We find human faces in the moon and armies

in the clouds.  David Hume

The anthropomorphic follows me around —

In carpets, tree bark, and abstract paintings.

“If I am the figure, what is the ground?”

Each face whispers, “or am I just feigning?”

Or am I the pretext for pretending,

I reason, a message I am sending

To cohere around the inchoate

Only I can look at and recognize?

These flickering (blinked) images sate

My comprehension, if not my eyes.

“My face will melt if you don’t look at me,”

These ghost images say repeatedly.

I too unseen uncertainly erase —

Though an unreal painting could take my place.

Music

How can sound mean to me?

A note, chord or melody,

Or an invisible bird’s song,

Even the long ringing of a gong,

Is merely an evanescence

To the most fleeting of senses.

It’s only in memory that sound

As music turning round and round

Can deliciously endure

Until distilled and rendered pure.

Tiger Emerging From Bamboo (Kano Tsunenobu, early 18th century), Sonnet #629

 

Zen tiger — imaginary,

None living in Japan — just pelt

From which to construct a kitty —

No sharp claws and jaws, no fear felt.

It slips between stands of bamboo

On silently pillowed paws,

A denizen of our thought-zoo

Who will blink out science’s laws.

It rubs against ungiving grass

And under the shoots’ fingers purrs.

It hides as other animals pass,

Having no taste for flesh-filled furs.

Like time the tiger emerges

And as quickly all things purges.

The Last Painting

 

The brushes kept slipping from his fingers.
Wind-tortured fields of wheat under darkened skies-
every brushstroke a nail.
The season's rustling hurry and the dusk
emotionless crows flap up to multiply
dun the wheat's gold and usurp the storm.
The blackened, infinite blue,
his palette's only suggestion of the primary;
red and yellow are plant and soil,
each decaying at the other's root.
And why the two moons? A starless night will come?
Is one a waning sun? When all else is clear:
grasses sprout darkly along the muddy path
that goes into the field to stop.
Or turns to go where the eye can't see.

Note: There’s some disagreement about whether this 

or Tree Roots was Van Gogh’s last painting. In terms

of content, this, Wheat Field with Crows, is the more

convincing candidate.

The Future

At what point did the present stop
Being present and become the future?

I wake and I am no longer secure
In the bedclothes as I’ve always been.

Nothing threatens, but there is nothing
I know I can safely rely on either.

Was it just another tick of the clock?
The one too many? The fatal one?

Is it only what I’ve lost, beckoning,
Being ignored, rescinding sanctions

Of such long standing I’ve forgotten
How crucial they were to my senses?

Time? Or self? No, what I now fear
Is the two become the same thing -- 

A last fling, a dance that whirls me from
My partner’s arms into dimming air.

The Wounded Deer (Frida Kahlo) Sonnet #628

No, it’s the beginning that is beyond

And the ending is already here.

No idea nestles inside a sound

Like a resting invisible deer.

Surprised, she’ll try to outrun your car

As if she knows just who you are.

She is not afraid or even shy,

And does not know how not to die —

Only the free are hunted and chased.

She can hide but she cannot escape.

What is that word again, that soughing,

Shortness of breath, then a coughing

That betrays not presence but intent?

She’s always known what beyond ending meant.