Blackstone in Forth of July tends to emerge in the aftermath of action, out of the shadows. Thus Grassblade Light, the sequel to the tumultuous Stubborn Grew, begins with its first chapter-panel, "The Lost Notebooks", set in an autumnal-winter landscape with a meditative Blackstone at the center. (The book opens with an epigraph from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano:

–"Talking of corpses,"– the Consul poured himself another whiskey  
and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne  
sauntered toward the door –"personally I'd like to be buried next to  
William Blackstone –"  He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom  
mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her.  "The man who went to  
live among the Indians.  You know who he was, of course?"  The Consul  
stood half toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.

Then he emerges again, in the fifth panel ("Of W.B."), following the central double-sized panel ("Ghost Dance"), and before the final nekuia tour-de-force descent of "Giants In the Earth". He transmits elusive, visionary messages, links between the "American" epic of Henry, Bluejay & Juliet, with his own Mandelstamian-Biblical-global sources. Here's a sample from "Of W.B.":

         3
    
                       Heart be ashamed of heart,
               blent with life's foundation.

  
         You close your eyes when the wind blows,
 all ears.  And maybe we are Hagia Sophia
 with a million eyes, he said – a ganglion,
 or gong of ganglia.  Henry goes

  
         back to the school bus (surrounded
 by the profane indifferent gang) after
 the field trip to Symphony Hall.  Were
 they all so deaf, indeed?  Was he all alone?

  
         Heart soldered open by the solemn
 strings, he walked back slowly, hidden
 in that crowd of blasphemers.  A Stephen
 pacing toward his crown – toward Jerusalem.

  
         Each to his own idolatries – candles by night,
 a parasol by day – will fall (in the drift of wind's
 sly invisible eddies).  I labor toward a double-
 bind of iron, or some trans-manual sleight-

  
         of-hand:  earth's core, man's core, heart's coracle.
 Moored Sophie (high-prowed tugboat high
 above the clouds).  Rusty penny-gone-cowpie
 wheeling in the sky (transfixed, transrational).

  
         When the lamb sheds the last patches
 of Joseph's coat and limps toward
 the chimerical, histrionic ford
 (slowly).  Singing catches

  
         of Chippewa canoes, dream songs
 and rainbow trout flickering upstream.
 Furtive Sheba, Phoebe.  Off the dark limb
 of Lemba arrowroot (a lambent Iron Range).

     
                              5.11.99 [p.s. my daughter Phoebe's birthday;
                                          also date of founding of Constantinople]


 4


  
         To close your eyes and see,
 to sink back upstream into foam
 with Maximus, in Byzantium –
 eyeless, both his hands cut off.

  
         A cross-grained infinitesimal
 continuous bridge, salted
 with a mustard seed
 of fire.  Tall,

  
         leering, lowering, limping –
 mother-hearted fisherman-
 brother-father – blind
 in Gloucester (wintering

  
         over).  Toward infinite
 heaven in your palm –
 the coin of the realm.
         One penny (Whitman's

  
         Ringside Indian path) milks
 the galactic glide, sailing
 like iron filings drawn
 into a compass rose

  
         from dust (magnetic net
 threaded from a motherlode
 under the volcano).  And voila!
 the sweet delicate trap is set:

  
         where the meek and sheepish
 toreador tears the veil of terror
 from the red heart of Ferdinand's
 wind-world (snore. . . swish, snore. . .)


     
                                    5.12.99


  
         5


  
         I peer into the neglected garden womb.
 A book of roots, of infinitesimal
 problems.  Lucky to come
 up with something very

  
         small (but more than zero).
 Blackstone's lawbooks follow
 feisty Williams – like the shadow
 of a gnomon hugging a slow ewe

  
         out of the cyclopean cave.  Where
 the clay circulates in angry circles
 (each violent escape you crave reels
 echoing back (each little lever-

  
         tone swollen) on an unreal screen) –
 your children's school a missile site.
 So the tower of Salomé fell.  White
 foam, pigeon-platter.  Hush-bane.

  
         Sill, sileage, loam.  Humus, composted.
 Composed, posthumous.  Plowed by a blade
 like silver water now, continuous.  Wade
 in, break the surface.  Where you situated

  
         the reservoir (Blackstone's heavy book of
 Providence).  At the base of the mast.
 Where the doubloon gleams.  Past
 the greenhouse windows – love-

  
         penny, afloat below, full-fathomed now.
 Like the clear mirror of one New England
 cubic Arcadia salt-savor, world without end
 and all amended.  Mustered.  Beaded.  So (W).


      
                                           5.13.99