Hands and Feet (Alice Bea Guerin)

#40

I am not the amalgam of my parts.
Not the knuckles, the joints, the palms.
These are merely the hands of my heart.
I am always hot. I've never been calm.
Sometimes I am nothing but an eye.
Seen through the circle of sight,
The darkness is all I need to know why.
My grinning makes my knuckles white.
My thoughts are like wiggling fingers
And my emotions are clenched fists.
I am my own twisted harbinger.
Look at me. You can't resist.
But we're all skin, sinew and bone,
Running from each other, alone.

Pandemonium (John Martin)

#39

Hortus, a suburban devil of Pandemonium,
Is lonely tonight for want of a loyal friend:
Anyone, sick or foul, human or fiend,
Even a specter enriched with plutonium.
The lights glare like angry souls at the palace,
And the burning rivers between here and there
Drown out the sweet, anguished tintamarre
Of endless victims of others' so-called malice.
Cold comfort for Hortus, who once boasted
The brightest shield and the longest spear,
Who stalked the palace halls without fear,
Now to stand out here, alone and untoasted.
"Curse you all!" he cries, "I don't deserve this!"
But knows there's no leaving Satan's service.

Hawk in Snow (Julia Guerin)

#38

I feel better after snow—
The gray world gone white,
The field a spruce torso.
I am a roaming kite,
Hovering above the mouse
Who dies without a fight.
I swallow, mite and louse,
Leave not one red drop
On that immaculate blouse.
My wings unsheathed, I hop
Into spangled air. Let no
Man think I'll ever stop.
I am only what I know,
That I am because of snow.

Snake Charmer (Henri Rousseau)

#37

My father charmed a cobra with a stick.
In the Philippines, beneath our home,
He pinned it down before it could strike
My sister Laura. We gawked at the thick
Neck, the rearing, fang-edged dome,
Its hissing anger -- then Dad thrust the spike
Through and it fell, as limp as a rope.
The true snake charmer masters hope.
His flute cuts the air into primal prisms,
Then blends them into a waking vision
The reptile remembers and yearns to coil
Its length around and around to warm
Itself, finally to rub its blood into oil,
To never again need do another harm.

Starry Night (Van Gogh)

#36

The Milky Way is a maelstrom of light
Where silence is the only stillness.
The cypress tree can only reach
At what cannot be bound by flight,
Distance being a kind of illness
Of idea, each too far from each.
Daily, I hurl at them a thought,
Even at those so great they would
Encompass Mars from our sun's core.
Wonder cannot be overwrought.
Van Gogh sees them as a flood
Oblivious of us on our lonely shore.
Mountains, trees, and houses are all
We may have, until the stars fall.

Catching a Catfish with a Gourd (Josetsu)

#35

The gourd is the dry brother to the fish.
The curvature of spout and spine
Rhyme with the barrier of the riverbank.
Hard fiber, dark clay, and green flesh
Are his brain, befuddled by wine.
I must make my mind a perfect blank,
He thinks, if I'm to lure the catfish inside.
But the neck is only two inches wide!
That fat fellow is slick and fast as light,
While I would lose a race with mud.
But if I could do it, how sublime!
Clearly, there's no wrong way or right.
The answer pulses in his brain as blood,
Easy as catching an idea with rhyme.

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (Redon)

#34

The sky, no matter how clear, isn't infinity.
Look up and bring down all that you know.
The eye isn't what allows the mind to see.
Faith is only what we guess from below.
In my dreams the balloon keeps going,
Beyond gravity, planets, the Oort Cloud,
Reaching motionlessness in space, owing
Nothing to speed or distance, allowed
A view, undimmed, of all of creation,
Its perfection, silent, replete, and empty.
There, at the center, is the universe's sun.
The eye, stared down by that blind sentry,
Can only blink and look the other way,
At my head, beneath, swinging on a tray.