6 Sonnets
by Halvard Johnson
Sonnet: Portrait (in Photo Captions) of Chaim Soutine
Outside the farmhouse in Le Blanc, Soutine and Paulette Jourdain
pose with the dog Riquette, who belonged to the cook, Amélie,
who may have lived over a slaughterhouse in the Vaugirard
Districtwhere Soutine may have bought the beef carcass for his paintings
inspired by Rembrandt’s “The Slaughtered Ox,” 1655, which
Soutine studied carefully at the Louvre. In the mid-1930s Soutine
and Madeleine Castaing stand together in casual clothes in an un-
identified town. Soutine in an open car with Élie Faure and his
daughter Marie Zéline at Faure’s home in Prats, summer 1929.
Faure’s young son Jean-Paul stands nearby. Henry Miller moved
to Villa Seurat on the day Tropic of Cancer appeared. The center
building is No. 18, where Soutine had an apartment and studio
on the second floor and Henry Miller lived on the floor above him.
Soutine, in a relaxed mood, with his cigarette and a glass of milk.
Sonnet: Spontaneous Separations
Mixed together and held in abeyance, jostling emotions
mind their tilt and twist boundaries until, going their own
ways, moving across irreversibility lines, they acquire new
properties, losing more and more electrons as they travel on.
Green-blooded and blue-tailed skinks now restricted to
xeric uplands, barring major accidents or electrical inter-
actions. Milk droplets pouring from a cystral chalice,
acquiring different charges, abandoning all hope to enter.
Shaken out into a taxi or limo, sand artists carry with them
their mandalas and mudras. Static prevents our reception
of previous messages, whether blue or red. If public opin-
ion mattered, if it influenced policy, then stealth aircraft
would be much less important, with scattered and temporary
exceptions, now that our tribal balloon has descended.
Sonnet: Morphine Wreckage
Gun crews seemed good and were in good spirits.
When shooting begins, changes are inevitable.
I have no preconceived ideas, no desire to have made
the second-greatest film ever. Slowly, the ship
moved into dry-dock for hull inspection. Several
prospective jurors were released due to “unfortunate”
experiences with police. Scuttlebutt was thick
in the jury room, the jurors trying to piece together
a narrative from contradictory elements. She goes
below, and her fingers trail over the door lintel
as she passes from view. After the first showing
they thought their careers were over, but much too
much anguish has been spilled by those who quickly
judge writers by their middle names alone. Stop.
Sonnet Kit CXLVII
[Some assembly required]
lines, 14 a’s, 42
quatrains, 3 b’s, 2
couplet, 1 c’s, 11
sentences, 3 d’s, 11
words, 108 e’s, 55
letters, 468 f’s, 7
capitals, 17 g’s, 8
lower case, 451
periods, 3
commas, 14
semicolons, 3
hyphens, 1
apostrophes, 2
syllables, 140
Sonnet: Sellinger’s Round
Sellinger sells seltzer down the other side of town.
Up one side and down the other, Sellinger makes
his round. A ramble with almost no restrictions
whatsoever, freely available to sundry and to all.
Cherokee kvetchers camped by the shores of Lake
Tathagata Lokeshvararaja used anyone at all to
achieve their ends. Nearby, where villages dwindle
into scattered farms, and cities seemed surrounded
by groves of masts, cityfolk, with their medieval
prefrontal cortexes at the ready, strolling all about.
Timetables for trains were of little use in those days,
but flags of all nations hung from those masts
at the harbor. The age of neurodiversity had just
begun, obsessional declivities all around.
Sonnet: Autonomous Retreat
That hole, that vacuum, with talk and print—all oil
mergers suspended until further notice. No use to cry
outside and scream inside. It was all a sin click
here, until the storm bursts, and house is shut and still.
We share the luxury of seeing it all, building the scrub
of future sugar. Having lost and forgotten everything,
the music must play forever—allegro, ma non troppo.
Unexplained bravura, place of safe laughter.
On the reasonable shoreline, white in the air, white
in the trees. Father of wavelets, come lift your arms
with us. Given this kind of city, sand beneath our feet
like broken glass, pieces of orphaned wreckage
tossed up by the storm. Russian oil mergers suspended
by thumbs, between wetlands and the suffocating sea.
Halvard Johnson has lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois; El Paso, Texas; Cayey, Puerto Rico; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City. For many years he taught overseas in the European and Far East divisions of the University of Maryland, mostly in Germany and Japan. He currently lives most of the year in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.
