Happy 4th of July.

4

       
      I never knew Biddle, the man with spectacles and a butterfly net, 
      but a first rate railway man, who left that net outside his hut 
      one morning, and at evening was buried, but now I am doomed to 
      think of him while I live.               
                    - H.M. Tomlinson, The Sea and the Jungle

 
The good ship Capella sang in the wind
like a little round oracle on the sea.
She was sound, and round, and though the River Z
was a bumpy logogriph, she could understand:

 
word married thing, in commonwealth parlance
(Adam and Eve, engaged before they met
in a net of chit-chat).  Mankind a kind of poet,
sort of, waltzing in a circle-dance

 
of hermeneutical honey-dew.  Footsteps
of the forebears paved a slow pavane (stately,
exact) for weathering reality;
life was proof (by trial) of their precepts.

 
In the shade of overhanging willow limbs,
the tail-end of the tribal trail... the compass
of an oscillating nest, or crib; slow rose
of sanded pendulum.  Some noose of hymns.

 
We took a shortcut through the twilight aisles.
It is not good to be alone.  Grey monotone,
brown boles, parchment of laurel; flowers, none.
Dilapidated lianas in the high, dark vaults.

 
Back at camp, we squabbled over maps;
the humid air had melted our concord.
If Ralph left at A, and met the pair at Z...
fumblers for words, sodden slippers-into-mishaps...

 
And where's the President?  His father's ranch?
He set out looking for shining Cibola,
found his caboodle kit, and lost America.
What's left of Biddle?  Add it to the launch.