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.

      
                                   *