Something from Grassblade Light (vol. 2 of Forth of July). I may have posted this before. I like to think of my longish poem as stylistically somewhere between Hartford & Gloucester.

(My life changed after 2000 - watershed. Kenneth Warren's essay one of those goads to put it all back together.)

         4


  
         Orpheus in love goes undeground,
 a demonstration - Blackstone's Law: what's lost is lost.
 Blackstone dives into his pile of leaves, his palimpsest,
 to prove a mother-of-pearly paradox - what's lost is found.

  
         They baptized you outside the colorful cathedral doors,
 a point of light, a peephole in a dreamy spectrum.
 Something other than angel, animal - a hum,
 a hem in someone's seemly seamless smock - hers,

  
         yours, ours.  Henry remembers you, remembers then,
 via the impress of your lack of shade - he floats
 in whiskered haze, within the darkness that you made,
 a Noah, sinking in a sea of bird-calls, in the wine-

  
         dusky seas of Evening Man, winely drunk...
 - at the pinnacle of that majestic oak, bluejay
 or mockingbird salutes a descending starling, sideways
 (choral grackles measuring the distance Henry sank) -

  
         I shall not drink it with you again til Kingdom Come,
 he said to them.  Blackstone footing out the Roman foot
 from here to there:  only a cupful, only a child's foot,
 only the spectrum of a children's toy, he told them,

  
         spinning and coming round again.  A rainbow.
 Noah, Bluejay, Blackstone, Henry -
 drinking together from the horn of plenty
 of memories... old autumnal children now,

  
         old men.  And Orpheus goes down into the chaos
 shod with mercury, to reap the enormous harvest;
 Eurydice, still silent, paces toward the past -
 ghost of his future, empress of all his shadows.


        
                                     10.26.98