More wild & wacky summer mumbo-jumbo, fresh from the oven of Shakespeare's Head:

15 (continued) 
 
Entranced by the glittering ferris wheel
(creaking round and around to raucous bells)
you forgot the humble hand you held,
that held you close, that kept it real.

 
The dizzy design is built on spin;
a bent pole points to swirling haze
somewhere near Bear and Hercules,
a Cup pours out a frothing dip of Dragon-

 
breathing vertigo, and here we go
again, sledding down into the Maelstrom!
Big Bang potter’s clay, it all came from –
and soon the Grand Finale (here below

 
the Moon) will row us home, over the water
(when Whale gives birth to Virgin Daughter).

    
                    *

 
The shadow of a mortal mediator
falls across the Great Year’s star-on-star.

 
The hand that raveled the colored threads,
numbered the sequence of time and season,
measured the stately rolling motion –
a painter’s hand, that sketched those heads

 
and limbs, so turbulent, troubled, at the table –
was this the hand you held at the carnival?
Sent by a mind and heart arraying all
in the light of kinship (mirrored, equable)?

 
A rooted flower blooms amidships, nested
in the hold, where the last full measure is
familiar epiphany – homely treasure.
And on the seventh day... that Hand rested.

    
                     *
 
 Behind my eyelids, a strange planetarium.
There’s Leo, sketching (with tiny whorling
J-strokes) a design for a light-swimming
catamaran – delicate lightweight (over an M);

 
and two lads, little gems, in a joy-ride
galaxy, sailing on their milky way –
watching each other, timing their Day,
with 153 (or 4) doubloons in the hold

 
(two weeks’ worth of salmon-mammon).
Paddling up toward Orion (Perseus?
St. G.?  Al-Khidr, maybe?) at the axis
of the matrix – his bare, cubic weapon

 
lancing a wounded, white polar dragon –
there, where birchbark spins around again.

    
                    *

 
Under the ju-ju tree... I don’t remember when...
behind Shakespeare’s Head, before you were born.

 
Under the shade of the paradise tree, in sum;
under the Phoebe moon, the Ur-night sky;
by the rivers of Ethiopia; her epiphany,
the little shady flower – watch it bloom,

 
now.  In a round-dance with her, near the sun,
overhead, like an Etch-a-Sketch, forever
waltzing your ellipse, across, a starry floor...
your doubled love, with a V – the only sign

 
for Victory.  And so the sunny flower lifts
from the surface of heaven-ocean; so the
three or four rivers begin to flow again
(beside an almond, amid snowdrifts).


       
                               6.23-25.04