6.23.2004

Something rich & strange (from Shakespeare's Head) for St. John's Eve:

                  15



A shaky hand begins to sketch in summer
as if emerging out of deep dream-space.
In the silver of a hubbub universe
a vast and lumbering cosmos-designer


plays with the baby galaxies, doodles
twirly-curls in the arroyo dust.
Swaddled in a tiny gyro-nest,
graven in Middle Earth, dreidles


and paper lanterns, fireworks in the lake:
the whorl of a dervish crown inspires
reunions, clowns, processions, choirs,
love-potions, divination, gypsy music


spun from the drowsy round of Everyman.
The spell was cast: Hamlet’s muttering began.


*


Ophelia or Imogen, where the river ran
to the sea: star-flower, scribbled in crayon


in the sketchbook of the mumbling ghost
(invisible hand), at the vanishing point
where lines meet, where circles pivot –
at the apex of the beehive (Time’s lost


sundial in the garden), where two boys
scramble and play around her knees
and beneath the stars’ crosshairs:
twin constellations, light rays


aligned by a solstice, at the height
of the parade. So we read the stones
from before the Flood, in Babylon –
in the hammock-canoe, one summer night.

*

Everyman, blind, beneath his natal star
leans his shadow athwart the night;
limping, he reads his limp aright
in pinpoints threaded there – a car,


a flower, a wheel, a bear
... and
Hamlet plunges to the salt sea-floor
churning the everlasting tables there
around the ring, the ring the King bore –


overturning time’s iron-gilded rule,
wagering all upon one leading hunch,
Orion-worm, crawling, inch by inch
toward a stage set for an antic fool...


a play-within-a-play, where he must die
to renew the earth (with equanimity).


*


The love that flowers in a fiery eye
guides Everyman’s unfailing destiny
.

His hunch, an octave and a unison:
since each soul is the hero of its dream,
and cosmos images the cloudy scheme
like human breathing on a windowpane;


so Hamlet paces back to Elsinore
like Jonah stepping from Leviathan;
so the prophetic soul of Everyman
throws his constellations to the floor,


scrying their hieroglyphics in his heart
before the waking of the summer sun
lifts, over the trees, earth’s perihelion.
His muttered covenant will not depart.


*

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