9.08.2005

from July :

 5


A wash of evening colors the swerving crowds
around the statue with its own Code Noir
as, lifting three steeples out of its groin
over the fracas, squat St. Louis works


toward the sky. Evening outward,
spread flat past the levées, the river’s
tongues flow swirling – a severance
larger, wider than our herd can understand,


soldered as it is behind its masks
within a masque, like a quick-drying
dying mudpie funneled through ridiculous
morning - after tubes of – scams


and slippery make-ups – repartee
for fast departures – old recipes for
sleep. On the twenty-eighth of August
at the hour of midnight
a latteen sail


was visible in the direction of Cat Island
And Edna was awakening or was it
only a weakening? The cords loosening
into a catenary arc one (naked) isolato


stares toward the Gulf beginning
to dilate and to end within her own
breast heaving-ho now
solitaire (au secours!) nigredo Flood


tears from inside outwards
to the white majestic peaks of a mirage
Andes her own melting Jeremiah’s
daughter-dryad vaporizing into drought


(– these waters and these feral masks
crowding the square, emerging to merge
magnetized like iron – glimmering germ
of bronze ribcage – Julius the Czar).



Whose woods these are I think I know where
an outline sags into swamp into the Nile
a vernal undertaking or snaking line
of some royal blue J’s funeral Erewhwhwhw...


My little horse must think it queer the shakes
of harness bells undersea or under the skin
outline gone a coracle of hardened mud and ink
drifts or swims upside-down flesh succotash


Cawtantowwit Coatlicue the way an eye
swims in Bluejay’s hand like a Natchez
match for a Red Clay bridle’s channel
of loose rains swims your way


The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
Snow now soon for sure on the rooftops
of Florence and the Negus peaks of
Ethiopia upstream, down perpendicular


like a grid or crossroad And miles to go
into a Danish interior, Edna of melted wax
and a half-ring carnelian of cat paternity
(missing the rest of the tale, O Solomon)


before I sleep and the drugged blood
dissipates with age and complacent cork
bobs wine-spilled Queen to Rook
my flesh will stand before you double-


You O Thou Hand of bubbled light
(through the depth-charge of the Gulf’s
ink Sanskrit and Rosetta-Stone glyph)
because this mud-cap is one reddish tile


atop that kingdom’s Dome (aerie
of kingdom come) between the
woods and frozen lake The
darkest evening of the year
.


Erupts a droning man or infant burning
between truth and desire forever and
must stand by his word (revolving
referee with heavy revolver like a nub


weighted with lead through the hole
in the candyman’s lifesaver) coffin drop
for the throat of muddy earth poured
out upon the ground red-wreathd Lo


the millennial Moi of gypsy water
(tumbleweed-spine node) doubling over
You wracked reverberating
telegraphic Thou – Tereuuuu...


as Hamlet reverses course O prodigal
homing binding the ring to the promise
and the arm to the sword as Ophelia
droops into the flowery dewlap


of that Minotaur of starry tarry Nay,
tarry
water (O Nevermore
velocity beneath the sea your venerable
remorse my son, my rat-bitten son)


And only the eye swims in the muddy
coracle of your hand, messy messenger.
Bluejay, funereal, crowing. Seminal
guardian of the drownèd doomed.


Our W hand lifted in blessing and savage
saving. Listening Crane twitched his long-
necked crown toward the scree (a lone
emissary note his own wing-bone gave).


Circles swims over the parallactic
tables the spirals graven
in his brain (wake of one vagrant
blood-vessel’s burst moonship calipers).


Thus the featherweighted drunken coracle
rimmed around the rooftop with an arc
of sloping copper (burnished barge
or burning car of king’s collected bones within)


slipped out into a Gulf
of merging clays and
colored sands.
One fibrillated leaf


of green Ophelia Coatlicue
asleep upon her coat of faded blue.
One penny in the deep. One lobe
of an ear of Natchez corn


one bee one W into Y (our) G
Ophelia your shapely L O U
splintered spar O U R L
hove-to O U curling J (B2) F...



12.3.99

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