Quintet of Sonnets about Jeanette
Black and White
Her eyes cast down as if ashamed of style
And beauty, she is captured. She is held
Forever in the falseness. All the while
This image has existed, it’s compelled
Jeanette to be perfection with a full
Dark lip weighed down by knowledge of a truth
She could not possibly have known, the pull
Of future agony, the vile, uncouth
Obscenity of cancer in the brain:
The camera could not see, nor could closed eyes
With love’s brows plucked, each one a perfect stain,
All heedless of malignancy’s surprise.
Those shoes don’t point to death. Those shoulders, squared,
Think nothing in the scene will be impaired.
Black and White and God
A portrait so contrived has got to be
Suspect. When everything in nature runs
The risk of flaws and mutability,
Thalidomide-like chaos—from some suns
Collapsing to the opposite extreme
Of supernovae spewing death and heat
In a traumatic, monumental scream—
Such faultlessness is too divinely neat.
Some vast, horrific price will be exacted
For hubris on the scale in this picture.
Rough retribution will be enacted.
The cosmos will impose some just stricture.
This image in its beauty is too odd,
Outside the laws insisted on by God.
Black and White and Gray
A subtle veil with specks of velvet on
The lace surmounts the parting of her hair
And we can see, inside, the cancer drawn
Like spider legs. The surgeons can’t repair
Gray matter that arachnid limbs have gripped
But we, with hindsight, see it all too well.
We see the way she lost her hair. It slipped
Down off that scalp. Her tres chic hairdo fell
In slabs too early to the grave. A blotch
Or two remained in mockery, a tuft
Or two of nauseating strands. We watch
At frozen distance, sympathy rebuffed.
She dies alone in ugliness. We don’t
Go near. We want a gesture, but she won’t.
My Aunt Jeanette was Beautiful like a
Hollywood Glamor Queen and
my Mother Wanted to Wear
Jungle Gardenia
The taste of Florida sunshine, its smells
And colors, orange blossoms against green
Leaves, evergreen in sunlight, wetly swells
Across the tongue and gives a fragrant sheen
Inside the mouth when flame vine nectar spreads
Throughout the senses. Foliage creates
Dark forms for Spanish moss to hang from heads
Of live oak trees. This all provides the spates
Of import like philosophy in years
To come—or what philosophy would want
To be, were it less grandiloquent. Tears
Of ancestors, descendants are the font
That meanings come from in a day of heat
And shimmering wet. Their doctrines are complete.
Imprisonment of Perfect Features
in Garden Darkness
I try to think just why this pic was locked
Away inside a barrel in a shed.
Was it because her sisters’ love was balked
By such extreme unfairness? Had this led
To jailing of this image in the dark
Beyond where white gardenias grew, beyond
Hibiscus blossoms? Loveliness too stark,
So stark that others could not feel as fond
As she had felt about herself, was that
The cause of banishment to blackness in
The airtight space? Was she an autocrat
Of beauty needing exile for this sin?
Plain jealousy might easily prolong
Such penance for this silent, fugal song.