a passage from mostly failed poem, India Point (not impersonal enough):

  29

   
  An autumn harbor had become like home,
  a womb for Orpheus the hobo.  Vessel
  for vessels too – Providence (the bumble-
  bee), Kriti River, Rosevean – all handsome

   
  figureheads for voyageuring – back to her:
  source or star of his desire for justice,
  Marian image or magnetic matrix,
  measure of all happiness, harmonious

   
  Polaris out of Mendelssohn.  The locus
  was a consolation prize – yet place itself
  was not the consolation.  Percival,
  bereft, looks up transfixèd into clouds,

   
  into a sheepish flock (of cloudy speech)
  shaping a vanishing point (just out of reach)

      
                    *

   
  and on stone-heavy shoulders of a church
  leaving a light snowfall (whispering, watch).

   
  Under the Bruegel-skies of late November
  a hobo stumbles on, hunched-over, broken-
  down, his fortunate misfortune taking on
  a common nature – weathered, as it were.

   
  He goes into the snow, anonymous.
  Loses himself in night's immensity.
  Above, the pole star, shining steadily.
  Then (on the Feast of St. Lucy) it flowers.

   
  Just as the almond tree in midwinter
  ignites each calcine-rigid human heart
  framed on the hexagon - so the fire star
  crowns (blazing toward Jubilee).  Enter.

          
                        11.24.02