Epiphany poem

My grandfather John Ravlin would have turned 130 today.  He was born in La Porte City, Iowa, and worked as an engineer with the Barnett & Record Co. in Minneapolis, building grain elevators & other big structures.  This poem is dedicated to him.

A grain elevator is a kind of gigantic silo, a barnyard building, a seed container.  Sort of a manger for wheat & corn, a rustic-industrial edifice.  This poem jumps all over the place - my grandfather's in there, along with Dante, Ravenna, Epiphany...  part of Ravenna Diagram, another large construction project.

ROYAL OAK

                               i.m. J.H. Ravlin

Strings of tiny Christmas lights

buried in prickly green

spine-fans, almost unseen.

Grandpa’s Tannenbaum, his birthday

night.  Where trillions of miniature

Lincoln logs emerge

(Railsplitter’s urge

to mend all men, amen).  Within your

triple rainbow, Alighieri.

Omnipresent OMO,

eagle’s starry memo...

Beatrice glowing in your eye.

Starlight, moonlight, chill, ghostly

behind those tamaracks.

Swamplands (weathered shacks,

old rowboats).  Adriatic Sea.

You trace the ineluctable distinctions

of your fork-tongue land –

Chief Broken Hand

or Florence Ainsworth – widows, orphans –

Juliet, my lost Ophelia-

Ravlin – granddaughter –

twig-bent ever after

from that bridge – ey yo...

Wrath simmers in the stolen earth

many buffalo years.

Pathos echoes, whispers

from your ghost-dance birth-

                   *

star (veinous branchings from

on high thread winglets

for an infant Jonah’s

prow).  & each squaw-mummer

bears the whole universe

bundled on her back –

houseboat, tepee or shack,

motel or Royal Oak – all mangers

everywhere.  That gangly monk

with the blue-white beard

felt your pulse, heard

your wedding-sigh (on Black Sea bunk

in prison cell) – beheld the chaste

conjunction of a cosmos

with its heart’s anonymous

warm hand, bright eye...  Make haste,

make haste to find her here, him

there, hid in the vineyard,

my Beloved, O... (weird

Janus-coign of almond bloom,

warm elbow of imperial yardarm).

Charlie sleeps in the oak,

a slumber-king, a bloke

with head round as an apple.  Charm

in a name there be, like Charmion

or Charlemagne... a rose

smiles through its rainbow’s

reign, your charity incarnadine.

1.6.15