1.26.2017

Hobo's continental centrifuge



PACIFIC VOYAGE

Hobo, hunching by the great river
in winter’s clamp, peers
like an Okie Okeanos
through the ice-floes’ ripple-shivers –

through the wavy shimmer, down
through faint diffractions
where the light shines
back... a silver mirror-sun,

layering her limestone shells.
A simple madeleine
(stone crumblevine,
gray rock-dove oval) wells

from the giddy stream in limpid echoes.
Raven in Voronezh,
Cautantowwit knife-edge
grips sun in her beak – light glows

like Pearl Harbor in eclipse.
Her lunar lance shall pierce
the mule’s gray hide.  Ears
perk for Jonah’s salty lips

molded like canoe gunnel
to mime Columbia.
Her dove-insignia
frames Sophie-ship – her funnel

rays its calumet of light
above the pyramid
(violent power-grid
of barbed-wire fraud, not quite

                 *

extinguishing that Evening Star
glancing so tender yet
steadfast – a mauve fishnet
looping beneath flame’s Icarus-car).

Hobo is Jonah now, in Ocean River.
The voice beneath the sea
is like a Kievan harmony –
perpetual melody of live-forever;

her flute-throat flickering dusky rings
like rain-drenched iris
round the throne of Isis –
Hagia Sophia in a peacock’s wings.

The river chimes in Hobo’s ears
of many waters, laughing,
crying.  Wingรจd seraph,
sister-sibyl, swirl his tears

& yours into the continental
centrifuge (in Center,
North Dakota).  There
the massive gravity of all

Columbia hums into monarch flight –
a raven-transmutation
of infernal nation
to green cedar habitation (night

Pacific voyage of your soul).
Hobo watched the fluttering
lift-off, slowly muttering –
milkweed seed, sail; Ocean, roll.

1.26.17

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