more floodwaters from July:

 2

  
 Gray clouds like a heavy wave across the sky.
 Washing over the last of the reddish-gold
 maple leaves.  Mysterious, water-logged
 Thanksgiving – quiet, solitary.  Aches

  
 it, perpetual.  Slowly.  Slow mist of soul –
 almost medieval, out the cool window.
 Distant sound of Flemish dancing, down-
 wind.  (Through the mirror's modest pulse.)

  
 (Blurring.  Astigmatism.)  The distance...
 in Louisiana... in a wide flat space,
 uttering joyous leaves...  it seeps
 like a woodland scent.  Standish?

  
 John?  Speaking for yourself?  Or maybe
 turpentine, or linseed oil?  Solitary
 Harry the Minnesota turkey rattles
 pardoned neck-whiskers a-beam

  
 the Presidential podium, today.  Today.
 Heavy roasting odor hangs in the quiet air
 of empty streets.  A green spar, or sprig
 in the lonely room of one gray doting

  
 solitaire, uttering a different scent
 (oak sap?  Sperm oil?).  Today, knave –
 in an old house in Paris, covered with vines.
 Taste and see, crumblette.  River-nets

  
 and trawlers – nascent Crescent.
 City.  Rio del Espiritu Santo.  Flows
 one Mardi Gras, 300 years ago – wolfs
 down your flood of tears – one tessera or

  
 tesseract.  One cataract.  One dome
 petrified, and buried in your muddy delta
 being born, borne upside-down – an addled
 ark, ancestral crossroad – mode

  
 of darkened prairie – storming sky
 gone black.  Pitch-black.  And winded.
 In your mother's living room – painted node
 of bent grass, purple air, skewed sticks

  
 of weathered telephone poles, still standing.
 Empty meeting of two roads – three –
 in the presence of the wind only – earth
 droning, murmuring – under a distended

  
 whining, whistling – call put through too late
 to nobody – bent vertical, invisible there
 in the frozen painting, at the vortex – ether
 calling – switchback – rattler's tale.

  
 Where the serpent curls in the headwaters.
 Where the alligator opens wide the gates
 of ivory, and all the mistaken messages – Tagus,
 Thames – Neva, Yangtse – the whole tawdry mess

  
 merges – emerges – spread and disappear...
 bobbing, soaking, sinking – papers, cigarettes,
 summer nightloads of confederate rags,
 money... toiletries and crockery-of-paradise,

  
 the whole production... handicraft, hand-painted...
 as though the scattered basketry of breezy
 implausibilities – mere silverfish zebra-
 script – tongued a J2 temperate

  
 perfected buoyancy – your oh and ah
 along a London flank – Finnish, complete
 and seaworthy – a curious token temple
 of adhesive animale compagnevole –

  
 the cup or crown of long-forsaken Baptistry.
 Longing through the serpentine meanderings
 to the spread-wide grand finale of a Mardi Gras
 out of Lenten snowfall, backward, forward – stippled

 
 beast, graven, to apple-pied, applied
 beatitude – Jonah to Joan in
 an arc or surge of stone-dislodged
 desire, afloat now, Archimedean –

 
 you reckon, Huck?  – you see-saw, Jim?
 Acrest to the brim of your Shakespearean
 deluge-dodged mad-hatter's reaper's
 close-shaved bardic midget's

  
 gunnelled whaler's rim-rhymed absoluted
 Absalom, my boy!  And they whispered
 under the hanging moss, among the wide-spaced
 live-oaks, drifting with the curving tumbles

  
 of the banks, rafted and bound together,
 logging the current and the depth
 with little stones – their pithy thud
 sounding token icons, registers

  
 of greater gulfs – further up ahead, downstream.
 Mica and aluminum, pings in the soil –
 bubbles in the level.  Gneiss loss -
 binoculars (measuring a missing distance).

  
 Just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves,
 shadowy inscrutable and serene, against
 that turgid background of a... bloody
 mischancing of human affairs.  Vikings and

  
 Dallas Cowboys...  Lincoln saw ahead,
 LaFarge, Degas (fils de New Orleans) –
 beyond the blue-gray looming snarl:  blagodar-
 nost (mingling with blood and oil).  Anointed

  
 stonemason geysers from the throat
 with nadezhda – all across black
 44.  Odessa jail – pale in a cab
 in Brooklyn - theater of troth

 
 bonded with a bondsman's muscled arm:
 yea, though I walk through the valley of death
 – psalm, solemn love-bubble, thread
 of overflowing burst from Roman

  
 candle's bronzen breast-coccoon:  another
 fluttering monarch of my soul (meek
 Indian summer colors – merged akme –
 Sumerian marks and crane bone theremin).

  
 Oswald fingered a Cuban .44, scrawled
 limply, languorous.  Sport of nature (sick, ef-
 feminate f.m.c., flushed under a doctored kiss).
 Democracy (grand seeming, scheming:  reckless

  
 gamblers:  emboldened lambs).  In Creole
 haunts, headwaters mingle with the ghosts
 borne slowly (through a muddy All Souls'
 mist) into the gulf... one live-oak leaf.


      
                              11.25.99 (Thanksgiving)