Fontegaia 5 reaches the quarter-post...

7

 
Horse chestnuts lift their festive candelabras
all over the breezy spine of Providence, today.
The Blackstone (placid, parallel) fans toward the sea,
hidden, cryptic (behind massed Swan Point cypresses).

 
And when civilization takes the impress (gives
the impression) of a system of cemeteries...
then, when wind blows through the trees
and gets them droning, you'll know where Raven

 
goes, lives... into his own song (measuring
the distance from his former spring).  
The bird-man sketches a landscape for
escape - papyrus silhouette (plane, crumbling).

 
Only a matrix of whispers, out of a shack (or
hovel), hovering grey beneath titanic arc or span
astride the Bay.  As if a piano (infinite Man)
flew 9-1 centuries back - 1132, to be exact...

 
So the old hobo (former farmer) mutters his
reversals.  To his imaginary friend (yours,
mine).  The implacable one - the one the birds
chirp for (in California, in the Hitchcock frizz) -

 
call them the Fates, or Nature, or Genetics -
call her the Bride, the Spouse - Sheba (pal
of solitary Poe-types, mages-mineurs) - Ligeia, Sal...
what you will.  She's listening, you, you... geriatrics!

 
List.  Only wind (in a craggy chestnut, on the cliff).
Bent limbs (eighty).  The seal of the living God -
consciousness, my friend.  Mind, conjecturing
athwart one questing, jesting heart.  Cleft.

(note : William Blackstone, the early RI settler for whom the river was named, was buried on his property in Cumberland on this day in 1675.)