Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : HG poems (label : subject/HG poems).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Six months ago today I started Rest Note, thinking it would be the 1st of 4 books. I did all those "read-along" interpretations of it, here. Now I have the feeling it won't go any further. I wrote 3 sections of Rest Note 2 (posted here a few days ago). But I suspect it might be all done. Last of my Mandel-Cranian quatrains. Maybe.

Pondering in new directions(?). Dissatisfied with my own poetry (though - please don't misunderstand - happy enough with Rest Note, for what it is), & with poetry in general... or just tired, maybe.

The advantage of never getting very far in Poetry World : you start to think harder about what you really might like to read. Or what possibly someone else really might want to read.

The Glut problem is many-dimensional. One consequence of the illusory ease of our writing/publishing technologies now : we take poetry for granted. We lack taste and discrimination.

Making it should be like breathing at the North Pole : very difficult, very cold.

There should be many, many, many obstacles. This is what helps make its eventual appearance so precious. At least that's how it was in the old days (in my mythology, anyway).

Poetry should be the utter opposite of chit-chat.

It should be steeped in absolutely decisive affirmations and refusals. It should be aged and ripened, refined to the utmost. (I'm not talking about academic or intellectual (or even social) refinement, but rather experiential, existential, artistic refinement.)

More unusual mutations from Rest Note (II)...

3

 
The poem is the fruit of Burgundian largesse;
it seeps from flagrant dogwood leaves
that scatter anarchic caravel-carpets
(maroon canoes) around my feet.  Excess

 
is the sign of the season.  Flushed cheeks
on a florid emperor.  These tiers
of flaming trees, magnifying the jeers
of sardonic scrappy starlings (cynical geeks

 
of ravening frost).  So the season flaunts
its doom, a mocking diadem (last fling
amid withered shreds of everything
once green).  So Hobo grumbles (haunted

 
house).  Here the weather is a voice,
the wind a messenger (thinly, thinly).
Screed of starlings' raucous prophecy -
the rasp of a gasping hasp in an iron vice.

 
Occasional cry in the distance.  Late at night
I hear the freight train's single plangent hoot.
Silver disintegration, formal hail (precipitate).
It is the star in the hexagon (right

 
eyelid of the king, left there to melt.  See?)
or the black hole in the hollow of a pupil
reading late into November.  Universal
sailor, say - Ulysses - drifting out to sea.

 
To see how things sound in the campanile
in San Francisco, or Jerusalem.  Emperor
or saint, hobo Fred or Frank - forever
rounding on the perihelion (its catenary smile).

more from Rest Note (Book 2) :

2

 
What I know is waywardness.  My eyes
linger in the roadside sumac and the locust
leaves.  Desire to lose myself is just
the way it is - no need to summarize

 
the summer haze.  I long for this.
I lengthen into absent vacant lots.
One Crane equals a thousand Eliots.
One Henry swings his chariot of bliss

 
into Rock Candy Mountain Paradise.
Here Hobo turns suspicion into cellophane
(queer questings into knotholes, via pristine
phlogiston of embattled campfires).  Nice.  Ice.

 
He seeks to save a face, it seems.
Not his own, anymore (too late for that);
somebody he knew once - maybe just a cat.
Pushkin's in the grave now, suddenly (dreaming).

 
I buried him the other day, still warm
and silky-plush.  Nine lives
numbered (under grass).  Restive
iteration toward sundown.  (Inchworm).

 
In the elliptical pattern of nine orbits
love reverts upon itself.  It shines
in the candle-power of a what millions
of whatnesses.  Or witnesses.  It fits -

 
this hollowness (a mirror-pond).  The face
Hobo longs for hovers in an afterglow...
nowhere to lay his head.  An undertow,
a bent reality (of love misplaced).

Beginning Rest Note Book II :

1

 
A warm day in the middle of October;
a carnival of starlings in the maple trees
whistle among themselves; their gleeful squeals
captivate a lapsing Hobo (not so sober).

 
Deep russet of the dogwood overhead
is autumn's canopy.  A stand-in for the season.
The sun plays hide and seek - light-clouded
blason - dimwit paramour of drowsy Red.

 
So Hobo sought a whistle of his own,
his very own.  Somewhere in the light-
edged clouds, or beneath a moonlit freight-
train's shunting accordion-chord.  Unknown

 
before, because forgotten once.  Dismissed,
abandoned.  Only the echo reckons harmony,
the two made one (so the blind begin to see,
the old made new again).  Come back then,

 
Muse, mistress of my distress, he whispers.
Zephyr of a cipher, ring me round
as in that rusty phantom of Siena-town
(good riddance to nine hundred lonesome vespers).

 
Where brother Lorenzetti flickers horsehair
in the silence of the popular palazzo.
Whistle unheard, sign unseen, yet natural
as is the rhyme of evening and year.

 
The nine girls float into a ring, a tambourine
embellishing.  The tinkling swish of iron limns
a sound like starlings in frail, flaking limbs.
Hobo hears trombones in the aquamarine.

                                      
                          10.15.06

Read-Along with Rest Note

Poem # 15 :

15.1 : "Hobo on a promontory" - Prospect Park, Providence (overlooking city). ..."the chestnut" - an actual little chestnut tree (featured also in concluding passage of Stubborn Grew).

15.2 : "He mumbles toward her" - the poem repeatedly emphasizes various notions of reciprocity or love as integral to reality itself. Part of cosmic "ontology".

15.3 : "We was surrounded..." etc. - and the poem also repeatedly emphasizes acts, commitment, sacrifice - consequences of same reciprocity.

15.4 : "Providence...tree-murmur...wilderness" etc. - the future is obscure, but is entwined somehow with language ("magnetic susurrus").

15.5 : "shorn calibrations" - speech as measurement sheared from (ie. both distinct from and emanating from) common sense or common understanding ("ex-commonwealth"). "vectors... reproof" - speech as ordering or presenting both our sense of future possibilities ("prescience") and our acts of judgement ("gabled reproof"). "9-storied...tithe" - speech is an exploration (a sortie) toward a "tenth" (tithe) - an offering or commitment from one to the community - the offering which relates to the "sacrifice" noted earlier. "9-storied" : ie. part of the ninefold puzzle-game-maze-quest which crops up in various images through the poem - imaged in the 9-10 structure of the poem's sections, etc.

15.6 : "honey...locust" - John the Baptist subsisted on locusts & honey in the wilderness. "Kingfisher / ...jay" - Jesus ("J") was dunked (became "naval" like a diving jay) in the Jordan at baptism before the Spirit of God descended "in the form of a dove" ("jonah" in Hebrew). "sober stillness" - image of the perfect "rest" (cf. "Rest Note") to come. The stanza miniaturizes a whole pattern of sacred history, just as the previous stanza miniaturized a sort of sacrificial pilgrimage toward it.

15.7 : "Hobo turns his face..." etc. - a sort of paradoxical image. Hobo is ineluctably united with the "spirit" represented here ("the breeze in his mind"), yet he turns his own spirit, as if to free himself from himself, or shake loose from his own limits. Nevertheless, the rooted presence of the "chestnut" - an image binding heaven and earth, self and spirit - "anchoring, remains". Anchored in the heart : the "tears in the blind" are both the tears wept by the blind, and tears in the visual or mental "blinds" which separate us from reality.

Here we are, folks, with another Read-Along with Rest Note, the program where we peel away the onion layers, the unassuming gray surface of this massive Poem of Quietude :

Poem #14 :

Rest Note is a simple oscillation, an oscillating structure, a polarity, which grows into larger patterns. So the stanzas rhyme ABBA. So the books are divided into 2 chapters and the chapters into 2 halves. In each half, poems #6, 8, 12, and 14 are slightly different (6 instead of 7 stanzas each), and mirror each other; in each half, poem #10 is at the center and of double length (14 stanzas). So poem #14, in this 1st section of the 1st chapter, is the double or mirror-image of poem #6 in the same section. Got that? The sections (like each individual stanza) are "bivalve" : you could fold up the 1st half over the 2nd and they would match.

14.1 : "hollow hoot" - the sound of the train mirrors the "edict in the heart (its hollowness)" of poem #12. "sets its seal/on a limitless night" - cf. the "seal" imagery in poem #6. The sound, the word, dominates/controls the night - yet the night remains limitless. The image is of industrialized civilization dominating the limitless plains. "Plowman leans on a line..." etc. - the next 3 lines describe the State Seal of Minnesota; but the "plowman" is also the poet, looking back, like Orpheus, at what has been put aside, annulled, abandoned. "Red" - ie. of the heart.

14.2 : "Spirits shuttle..." etc. - cf. Hart Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", with its repeated refrain about "spiritual gates":

"Dolphins still played, arching the horizons,
But only to build memories of spiritual gates."

The Native Americans have melded into the spiritual shadows (cf. "Soo Line" - Sioux Line - in #12) like figures in a Virgilian or Homeric underworld. "Vulcan sets/ the type" - the Iron (industrial) Age is set in "types" of vulcanic fire - both typesetting and human character. Only the "rugged" characters seem to dominate ("rugged" - Cleopatra shows up later in the poem, in a rug, as in legend she first appeared before Caesar). "Calypso, Circe" - mirror the "Empress" in the Russian ice world of tyranny in poem #6. "Scalds, scars" - scalds are both "burnings" and "epic poets". Odysseus's scar was his identifying mark.

14.3 : "Wolf-meals" - melds an image from an old Anglo-Saxon lament with a recurrent image in Mandelstam - poet among (Stalin's) wolves, becoming a wolf himself. "mirror-brethren" - poet vying with dictator for the sceptre of spiritual authority. "Medusa-headrest" - a kind of infernal parody of the "rest note" toward which the poem aspires : amalgam of Orpheus-Perseus - victory & authority based on fright, mirror-paralysis. "Slumber" - it's a kind of troubled sleep, based on 1) images of death (engravings of engraving) and 2) displaced, isolated verbal icons or idols ("star" for star) (a phrase from Mandelstam's "Flint Ode").

14.4 : These submerged evocations of Crane, Mandelstam et al. in the underworld are building toward a kind of structural model of a reality which includes some (hidden, effaced) sacrificial action. "As you move..." - echo of Stevens' late poem, "As You Leave the Room", titled thus by Stevens after experience of giving a reading at Harvard, during which bored students walked out. "Leavings" - leaves, poems, relics over the "speechless" (or "limitless") deep of the unspoken. Mirrors poem #6 again, "...hushed... behind a hedge of speech". "A boy who wanted to play..." - Crane again. The identification with the Word itself exacts its price ("its name, its doom").

14.5 : "He frets your opulent asides" - to fret is both to bother and to ornament, to filigree. But who or what is central, what is marginal? The world's opulence is an "aside" to prophetic, poetic speech. Parallels stanza in same position in poem #6 with its elegant toy soldiers). "you feel/closer to home, Ulysses, as you steal" - this passage an attempt to summarize an aspect of reality in which human heroism depends on a prior sacrifice, a prior abject victim. The "encrypted", submerged "burial" is an "abiding score" (cf. Crane's poem on Melville).

14.6 : "you clipped his jasper bandolier" - the victor brings a token from the victim back to Penelope, who "toys with it" in the grass - thus closing the ring (the poet's offering was the original gift). "jasper bandolier" - martial echo of the "banderole" in poem #1 - the mysterious curtain or cloth dividing earthly image of authority - the king, the emperor - from heaven (in Byzantine and medieval art works).

The first book of Rest Note is available as a chapbook.

OK, here's the last of the first (chapter) of Rest Note. I can only do so much - need a breather. This is the comic coda.

19

 
We waltz toward August, slowly now.  A storm
named Beryl swings out of the Caribbean
toward the coast.  Treetop cicadas sharpen
rusty shares (portents of the sharks to come).

 
Old documents are buried in tree-rings,
blue Morpho prints.  What draws out Teddy from
the jungle, Jonah from the whale?  What crumb-
line on the forest floor, what ninefold kissing-

 
cousins' game?  A golden ball goes glancing,
askew, across the floor... the map's a whorl...
the mower's lost his way, his heart is gone
a-morris dancing, amor is a-morris dancing...

 
Still, sweet, a voice arises from a zone
of rest.  Rapid little wavelets, ringlets,
reverberating through suspended nets
of marigold sun.  A wreath for the horizon.

 
Only a heart playing loop-de-galoot with a gal
with a blue-green beryl on her brow.  A berried
lobster, lobbed over her shoulder, ferried
toward hurt seaman's tomato bucket.  Sail

 
ho, Pilgrim!  Can't bury me yet! yells
Lazarus (like cicada in sequoia, Hitchcock
in San Fran... like Everyman).  A cricket
see-saws on a fiddle.  Summer wells

 
up from a lily pad.  All hearts are in
suspense.  Upon the coracle Capella, panning
gold from Saturn.  A lute-string's spanning
chord sustains : it is the tender rose's twin.

On we go with Read-Along with Rest Note :

Poem # 13 :

13.1 : "jungle was a mutiny..." - we are back with fevered Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon jungle. "mutiny of limbs" - more play with micro/macrocosm. As the jungle is a tangled "mutiny" of tree-limbs, so Teddy's feverish limbs are mutinous (& as Teddy as presidential "representative" American represents a fevered, lost country). "each hypertrope" etc. - see Candice Millard's book again (River of Doubt) on the voracious jungle ecosystem.

13.2 : "death was comedy" - the bizarre hunting/killing mechanisms of various jungle flora & fauna - their predatory quality - pushes the sense that life is cheap. "renounce all vanity" etc. - this environment is teaching TR to recognize the similar forms of malice & brutality which turned the "civilized" world into a jungle too.

13.4 : "jaguar" and "chrysalis" etc. - jaguar as avatar of jungle itself; dangling chrysalis as symbol (related to many others in the poems) of art or poetry - pendant, swaying between sky & earth. In this stanza the unknown & uncanny forces of both are interrelated or fused to some extent.

13.5 : "Fevered"... etc. this fusion - a sort of act of literary magic - is part of TR's fever; it leads him to find metaphorical/symbolic relations, to "poetize" himself. Thus he sees his father as both tree and "oaken volume" and "valid redeemer" (Vladimir Nabokov acronym); his mother as the almond tree with the dangling nest (Mandelstam/Jewish subtext), and all becoming a pendulum-breeze. This may sound rather "fevered" in its own right : but there is a subtextual logic to the lines. If TR is a persona or mask for the poetic speaker, then this narration - about language/jungle/human lostness - is in part a story about the poetic process in general, and in particular about the literary ancestry of the speaker's poetic voice.

13.6 : "Bored then... the planet was enough" - an arcane encounter - wrestling match, chessgame - between nature itself (the jaguar) and poetry ends in a kind of draw. The jaguar pads off, leaving the president in extremis : yet still he mutters, "the planet was enough". This phrase a sort of amalgam of Wallace Stevens with Osip Mandelstam's credo of Acmeism : that one of the deepest motives of poetry is to "humanize" the earth, to domesticate it, help people to recognize their kinship with it and each other, their "at-homeness" in reality. Stevens & Mandelstam came at this from different angles, but paradoxically shared many affinities regarding the (humane) values of the earth.

13.7 : "absolute/checkmate. And he wore a crown..." - in his "defeat" by nature's fierce law (the jaguar) - his willingness to encounter it - the poet/explorer actually wins the crown.

Here we go again, another

Read-Along with Rest Note.

Poem # 12 :

12.1 : "I heard some crickets..." - sometimes the poem drops the masks - the Teddy Roosevelt, Hobo, Lazarus, Oblomov, etc. "Soo Line" - an old midwestern freight train line.

12.3 : "a mask of gravity" - that is, the cricket sound stimulates memory, penetrates layers of past time, so time suddenly feels heavy, material, present.

12.4 : "railroad's ruthlessness" - refers to 19th cent. tension between small farmers, on the one hand, and railroad/mercantile interests on the other. "edict in the heart" - echo of TR's messages to wife "Edith" in previous poems.

12.5 : "peevish king" - allusion to Shakespeare's Richard II, figured variously in this part of Rest Note. "yon imperturbable" - God, divine providence. "shuffles the weights" - again, the oft-repeated motif (pervasive theme here) of balance, see-saw, polarity, swingset, between two dimensions of reality : heaven/earth, time/eternity, etc.

12.6 : "swingset... formula" - back, forth, life, dream... the polarity again. An architecture of reality - an old way of looking at things - coming back again, somewhat, somehow.

Curious how Rest Note is developing, in a sense, out of the final stanza of an important little section appearing early in that poem of several years ago, Stubborn Grew :

It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers – reflective rim 
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing. 
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

I'm almost finished with another section of Rest Note (one more poem to go). I've posted what I have over at Alephoebooks.

This along with the previous section (also at Alephoebooks), together form what is provisionally the first complete "chapter" of the poem.

The plan now (after I do one more poem for current section) is to take a short break and start putting together the next chapter. (Whether I can actually take a break from this mild daily Je est un autre furioso is another question.)

Stay tuned for more Read-Alongs.

18

 
The old maps of the world were circular.
As on a ferris wheel or carousel
each coracle, carrack and caravel
defied the stormy ocean in the mirror.

 
Upstairs, in the house next door, a woman
singing, practicing her scales, reminds
me of a world in balance (as it happens).
So on the walls of city hall (Siena)

 
Justice, buon governo, reigns (in pastel)
on her throne - the scales of equity
hoisted in hand; and on a busy street
below, calm maidens mime a sweet rondel,

 
a rondo in a rondure, round and round.
We know the ferris wheel is iron, not gold,
yet this the Oro Pendula has not been told -
she skirts a circuit-plumbline off the ground.

 
The displaced mowers on a wide prairie
are not quite ready for a painted hallelujah.
And shall they never find their home?  Selah
shalom they shall goes murmuring Windy Mary -

 
out of the womb of her anemometer
in a mazy mummer's Amazon.  She figures
the breeze as a sigh between even shares
of scythe and sky, down to the caterpillar.

 
Sing-song, goes the wind, pitter-patter
comes the rain, the rain that raineth
every day.  The ferris wheel complaineth
not; the swingset is a kingly litter.

17

 
Constant sibillance of a cicada, hidden
in an oak tree's curtained crown, his
hiss like a little silver scythe, it is
strictly historical, it is a timeline,

 
seething (yours, mine).  The loopy garden
swells, meanwhile, beneath his minatory
contrail.  Everything expands, full-sail...
the season shimmies into flower... then

 
slows... slows down, a little more (slowly,
slower...) as if the famous ferris wheel
and cantering merry-go-round conceal
beneath their furious flurry (ply on ply)

 
full stop.  The summa of some springing 
theme.  Unspoken axiology.
Lazarus arose, arose, and tendered his apology -
time's not what we suppose, suppose, O pondering

 
Horatios.  The maps lead nowhere, seemingly.
The ancient iron of the rusted garden gate
is wrung with painful frets.  A filigree
of curlicues, ordained to gradual decay.

 
Hobo loved his dead-end neighborhood.
He lay there buried in the weedy grass
until the stars unfolded.  Let them pass, 
pass.  Flowers are immortal.  Stood,

 
staggering.  And then the voice in the rose
beckoned him close, close.  Anemone,
muttered the wind.  A measuring.
Mesmerized.  Memorize how it goes.

16

 
Far-off rehearsals of a whippoorwill
send Oblomov into the summer deep.
Yearning's sister is eternity.  The steppe
is brother to the sky.  So still

 
the planet's perihelion : so beaten round
the concave of the heart.  Its cup
so plenished with pleroma-envelope
(reverberant bell-boom of circum-sound).

 
I am but a poor herdsman, a dresser
of sycamore trees, bespeaks Hobo.  The priest
(amazed) beseeches him, leave off, desist!
His plumbline oscillates from nothingness.

 
Its long suspension seals the summer rain;
the swingset's rusty interrogative
repeals its requiem (equable ruth).
A whippoorwill replies.  They will remain.

 
Across the rolling distances, a prairie
butterfly makes delicate, indifferent way.
Zigzagging here and there.  A monarch, say,
or viceroy : his plangent rule a mockery

 
of rule, his slip of flight a sweet retort
to blind and dutiful raison d'état.
He's gentle evanescence, only that -
an evanescent elegance, the earth's éclat. 

 
The sound of the whippoorwill penetrates
the humid summer afternoon.  Late summer,
later afternoon.  Oblomov twists an ear
of wheat between his fingertips.  He waits.

15

 
Dragonfly launches from somnolent lily pad
and joins, with agile grace, the air force
of the world.  Pivoting planes course
unforeseen plateaus (Nature's toolshed

 
multiplied plein air).  Hobo-Oblomov
meanwhile rests his case.  His little file
of origami paper.  Like a pillow-
case, under a drowsy brow.  Off

 
work again, it seems.  Homespun topology
(a gyroscope, in a bottle, in a shipment
of vodka).  Crisp spirit quiescent
holding pattern - Pure Oblomology.

 
Between rest and the forest comes gardening,
George, his friend keeps telling him.  Hobo
looks up from his model Blue Morpho, glancing
across town.  Bottom of the ninth inning,

 
somewhere, he thinks.  Life's a ball game.
Players play, lawyers lawyer, builders
build, mothers mother, poets... ponder,
lapping their papyri into paper flame.

 
The fold was not a simple alternating
crease.  Each step led upward, on a steeper
plane.  Cocoon came first, crimped sheer
to chrysalis.  All in by agitating

 
linked caster-cortèges through a stiff
iron gut, separated from pulchritudinous
hencoop (voltage 715 henrys) (deceased)
by hunched inchworm (butterfly valve). 

14

 
St. Crispin's Eve, at summer's apex.
Poets draw near (andante, Dante). Parallels
merge at the crown (a vein into the well
of vanishing).  Within his vivid text

 
of sleep, Oblomov blooms.  He mumbles home.
He is himself a drowsy drone; a summoner
tucked in a crib of absent blossoming
he translates bumble into honeycomb.

 
Yearning.  Behold Oblomov, cusping late
into the moonshine (for a missive he misplaced).
The servant snores.  The brazen paces
of a pendulum (tick, tock...) oblong his fate.

                           
                  *

 
In slack forsaken gardens gone to seed
the Petersburgers gather to imbibe
neglected nectar.  So that wayward tribe
welcomes the prodigal.  Someone will read

 
from the uncanny text, a honeyed poison
for the ear, the tintinnabulation
of an iron age grown old, new wine
poured out across a motherland... so.  Sewn

 
into her waspish, bitter osier (sil-
vered, oxidized).  Forgive what I have written,
if you please - one catenary restitution
will excel the posh, lost horsemen.  Smile.

Will try another Read-Along today. With Rest Note. & will try to keep it brief. Am skipping over poem # 10 : it's the centerpiece, twice as long as the others, sort of projected onto a different "plane" of the poem's structure. (That's the plan, anyway.) So I will leave that for another time. Here are some over-the-cliff notes on Poem # 11 :

11.1 : "only a single line..." etc. - life as a race driven by competitive desires.

11.2 : "a bugle" - TR's military trumpet. (cf. the distorted trumpets in # 1.1.) The horses also faintly akin to pegasi (poets as horses).

11.3 : "A Hawkwood..." etc. here's a nice obscurity I can happily explain. If you've been following along with these read-alongs, you'll know that the figure of Shakespeare's King Richard 2nd hovers in the background, as a sort of amalgam of wrecked poet/monarch. Hawkwood was a fearsome English mercenary and warlord, famed & hated in Tuscany & Lombardy for his contract wars, devastations & plundering. But he was so successful at it that he gained wealth & legitimate social standing among his employers. Richard II welcomed him to stay at his royal estate. (see Barbara Tuchman's wonderful history, A Distant Mirror. A good read.)

11.4 : "The forest..." etc. Rainforest, according to different sources I've read, can show an oppressive side of bleak sameness. The stanza is one of repeated oppositions (in this poem) between human doings and a kind of natural fatality. "A cataract..." etc. we are back into inside/outside imagery - the jungle cataract (or disease of the eyes) ends in the "blind whorl" of fingertips - lost identity, individuality. The palm-tree - and the palm with the fingertips - marks a grave.

11.5 : "tangled knolls" - bad pun (noli me tangere). Another Lazarus in garden/jungle image. "Shrouded cloudbank... etc." - the "incarnate" word is blurred, absent (gardener long gone); the image of the word as hovering between (and uniting) earth and heaven - constant element of this poem, reflected in various strands of imagery (esp. the "swingset") - here appears in a doubtful, uncertain mood. "Magdalen" (who met Jesus-the-gardener at the sepulchre) is "lightheaded".

11.6 : this stanza sort of outlines poet's role, while mocking it. He or she stands in between "prudent and prodigal" - "hunting" for something beyond both (mere) worldly wisdom and the diseased passions represented by the race-horses & mercenaries.

11.7 : "sortilege" - a word for fortunetelling or prophecy with negative connotations (magic, witchcraft, flummery). "Yet the lantern..." etc. despite the scepticism, these final two lines affirm some kind of kinship between art & nature, poetry & truth.

13

 
Tall heads of the daisies in the evening light
grown spindly in the rain (July's procession).
A dragonfly plays acrobat on the clothesline.
Summer ascends its oscillating height.

 
The map was not abstract, a planetary plan.
It was bare footprints, someone who loved
before we knew.  Considerate fingers carved
her firm reply (imperturbable caravan

 
for craven days).  She was prepared for us
somehow, as words before the lips are formed,
or leaves before the tree.  There are women
determined to accompany each limping Lazarus

 
until he flowers from the grave (almond,
magnanimous). And there is no forsaking her.
The rustic bond is adamant, an earthbound
anchor; so the broken wheel comes round.

 
You waited, Ponderous, for rain to end.
Weary with weariness, with a decade's
knowingness.  In the forlorn backyard,
the jungle gym (its latticework of iron).

 
The premonitions of precocious kings
are humored, patiently, by humid soil.
An Oxford Book of Oxford, reconciled
with Journey Down the River Oxus.  Wings'

 
imps, prehensile, Archimedean... wrought
by your unslaked heart, and mine.  We go
into this game of Go before we know
what passionate bough prefigures every flight.

So goes the summer.

This section has a little puzzle in it. There are several obscure oddities here; however - to the first person who can identify the particular little code I'm thinking of, I will send a book!

12

 
Lost sailors in late far extremities
(deserted) dream to the antipodes.
A pendulum swims wide above a void
where butterflies solo (perplexing sky).

 
Ambushed by ambitious shrubbery
(trysted credence of disabled cane)
an edict's submarine reverberation
mutters (barely audible) its remedy.

 
Invisible (veiled arcs of curving ribs)
grave weight it fans - heart's hollowness;
waiting (reed-girt, ruddy bell) to bless
the crimped coin of the realm (dark Sheba's

                     
                  *

 
tinder star).  She makes her bed with bedouins
weft in the iris of a camel's eye (otfe);
greenrusted purple meteorite - ray
inviolate - she is a Bess in the abyss,

 
pent Penny in the well.  A sailor's ark
she rocked so (in the air) on Ararat
an iris flowered overhead - the fiat
of the desert was in flood - its park

 
prismatic (minuscule dew).  And so it was.
Bell-flower, concord's covenant.  Solemn
Solomon's-seal.  Oasis-pendulum.
The quiet crickets' rusty susurrus.