My long poems an endless ball of insufficiency-twine. A recent section from Time Flowers, the sequel to the sequels that is supposed to tie together all the threads (ha ha):


12

La notte di Santa Andre trovai al fine della quadratura del cerchio e in fine del luce e della notte e della carta dove scrivero fui concluso, al fine dell'ora. - Leonardo da Vinci

At the end of the light, and of the night,
and of the paper on which I was writing...
his hand scribbling like a ball tumbling
left, and downhill, reiterating its broken

symmetry, surveying what unfinished
circumference on the diameter
of a vanishing point (spidery
spiral, infinite clue). Shshsh...

sound of raven-feather footwork (Genius
At Play). Outside, dogwood flowerets
disintegrate into rainy night. Tacit
geometry (J to BD) undeciphered

into dust-motes. His last gathering scattered
everywhere. Only the whorling chalice hesitates.

* *
*

Unbeknownst, Love fortifies and shields
against the complicated tyrannies,
their mazed evasions, mockeries.
And from a spiral fiddlehead builds

springs becoming mammoth summer, streams
vast Mississippis out of baby rivulets
toward delta-home of serpentine returns:
O lightning worm-word, regal David's dream

and cry! There be angelic balances
at work in this, acumen beyond our ken -
plainness grows beautiful (La Gioconda's
unsymmetric smile's intelligence).