Along the Minnehaha

Poetry enlists the descriptive, inscriptive, epitaphic, encryptionologous powers of writing - which are obviously formidable - in its campaign of resistance to time.  The poet stubbornly proposes a spiritual orthogonal (an upright L) in opposition to the horizontal flow of history, events, distractions, decay, necessity, time, death, chores, etc, etc.

Perhaps I'm delusional, yet by the same token I do have a sense of being one of the most indomitably resistant poets in America.  Everything I do in this realm seems to oppose the practical, the social, the amenable, the common-sensical, the professional approach.  It's been like this for so long I've lost all perspective on it, anyway.  I do what I do, it is what it is, it's become second nature.  People may object to the obsessive-repetitive characteristics.  Perhaps they're right.  I have no way of knowing.  Let the chips crunch where they may.

STEELY PRONG

Heidi, it’s been many a year

since we went a-Maying together

down Arthur St., in Hopkins

(Glastonbury? Mendelssohn) –

but next door, in the autumn rain

a misty hawthorn silvers

bright chartreuse berries

for the birds (windhover, crane,

starling) who may alight someday.

Just down the ancient lane

my father’s granite urn

abides, along the Minnehaha;

ravens stitch the cooling air

above the stream – a shade

those oak-leaf hands once made

over our heads (good chevalier-

Samaritan).  Yon turtledove

coos from a russet square –

fieldstone embrasure, where

vaults rise on sable ribs (alcove

beyond alcove, into the light).

Bring me your thorny ring-

around-the-rose, Heidi;

I’m ready now to dance & sing

athwart the maypole-chariot.

One drop of scarlet raven-

ink, one graven letter’s

steely prong... (one grail-griot).

9.30.15

Hawthorn in the rain

The mast is dogwood too

The long poem is a curious thing, just going along one can find oneself both inside and outside, like those M.C. Escher reversible mirror-steps.  Step by step I stumble down my wheaty way.  Moving back to Minnesota soon - thinking about the limestone there, & Adrian Stokes' ideas about carving in art, how it merges the figure with the limestone ground, brings them into a watery-stony symbiosis...

FERRARA MIRROR

If I fade into the low relief

of Minnesota limestone

hedgerow cliffs – a zone

of Ice Age gypsy moths (brief

lives of dashing hummingbirds

& wingèd Peacock Angels

fixed in river-angled

banks of sediment) – my words

would bend into the grain, grow

rude & wooden – like

that bridge or flood-dike

scored by slashing Viking prow...

you’ll read about it in the paper.

World events (Pope

Francis Whirring Hopeful

Wings – Blood Moon a Rusty Copper

Penny – Putin Barricades

Himself in Alabama)

refract in your Ferrara

mirror (juvenescent shades

of gaiety & heartbreak, green

& bronze between twin cypress

ribs).  My wilderness

a Mendelssohn continuum (scene

from the window of a Roman train).

The mast is dogwood too,

Mama – I made it for you

all by myself.  The rain in Spain...

9.29.15

Erica's "Ferrara" cabinet

& the ship sails on

CAUTANTOWWIT

The sweet old pussy willow’s gone

that once o’ershadowed Pushkin’s

backyard grave (great Russian

cat).  Leaves not a leaf behind –

only an empty space (alas, 

alack) anchors a magic

carpet o’ masticated

stump.  So we hung up our lyres

on the bow of that stubby caravel,

Acacia – stuffed to the gills

with incoherent motorings,

burbling Barranca Straits – with Mal

& Papa consulting the cabinet

non-stop... coat, liquor...

What have I left her,

now, here?  These were all spirits,

veering toward Prince Eddy’s Island.

Wracking my brains... hollow

ravine in the pupil, valley

so low... black hole of Depression

Inlet.  Perdita, somewhere in

the safety net, under

the ark at Porta Aurea –

dear lightsome daughter!  Ravlin,

unraveled so.  Now rainbows flash

Medusa-shells, O

Mountainous Sad Shadowship –

to wit, to woo... (by Narragansett ash).

9.25.15

where was the willow once

Pushkin

Time is of the essence

I was never much good at baseball.  My last major stint was with the Hopkins (MN) Mighty Mites, when I was about 10 (ca. 1962).  Purple uniforms.  I remember the baseball field seemingly down in my bones somewhere (beneath the amnesiac brain).

In high school (where I focused on soccer) I had a very special English teacher, John Anderson, who radiated encouragement & good cheer to would-be writers like me.  In our school at that time, each teacher, and every senior, had to make an oration before the whole student body.  Mr. Anderson, for his part, read a baseball poem.  I can't recall the poet, or much of the poem - only the refrain : "time is of the essence".  It was about the national game.  I think I was so impressed by his performance that a few years later, when it was my turn to speak, I read a poem of my own (not about baseball).

This poem is about baseball, in a way.  It's also about iconic people, role models so-called.  In fact it's a kind of allegorical poem.  If you think of Dante's explication of the fourfold allegory of his Divina Commedia, this thing exhibits a similar symbolic layering.  How does it go - literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical?  Something like that.  On one of these levels lurks the idea that "Yogi Berra" - man, person - allegorically "stands for" something deeper, more universal.  But I'll leave it at bat.  Stee-rike!

HOME PLATE

                                the game ain’t over till it’s over

How the figure of a man at 90

(any man or woman, see)

becomes transparently

rough diamond, somehow... Yogi?

Behind home plate, in empty lot

traced over waste land,

he crouches – hokey Panda

Bear (wry antic square root

bassist of the base, Neanderthal).

Signals from the crotch

each crypto-kingfish pitch

plumb perfect (Sasquatch cone-ball).

Yankee stars wheel over stadium

where Little Bear paints

himself into pinstripe

corner (gray silo Te Deum);

Big Bear, worried, waves him off

Indian mound (a brave

9 innings) – takes a dive.

Let’s go explore the bottom of

the harbor, little lamb of mine.

I’m gonna let you shine.

Beatrice was a 9-

man game – for 28 seasons

soused us with spray of lilac

Liberty bells (for free).

Between you & me

the wave flows everywhere, Smolak.

9.24.15

Look at the canoe

BRIGHT GAL

        “Look instead at the canoe, I beg you, and observe 

        its honesty, dignity, and moral courage...”

                   – The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

The last full drop of summer sun

plays out across a falling

garden.  Dogwood, shedding

scarlet berries, rattles in

cool air.  Leaving Lil’ Rhody soon

(for North Star State).  Exile

is a state of, meanwhile.

Yom Kippur whispers repent, atone;

Francis in Washington lifts up

his rod of Aaron (bloom

of magnanimity &

doom).  A star from David’s cap

came forth... a cedar replica

from Lebanon – like Wanda’s

wand (the State Fair Queen,

robed in golden Land o’Lakes

boxim (within more boxim)) -

aimed, centripetal,

toward glimmer-portal

of the Milky Way.  The little foxes

all stacked up, O my beloved.

Monarch is an imago

out of the cocoon

of long ago.   A turtledove,

the El of El – Francesco

out of San Francisco – ark

within an arc of light, or

Galilean galaxy (an Okie oak).

9.23.15

Papa touches down

MAZY SIMONE

Equinox : a bridge between seasons.

Nay, no night-mare;

articulate as horsehair

& as serviceable.  Musique de balance,

équilibre – night & day,

reason & faith.  Of summer,

d’automne... (mordant humor,

luminous grief)... Hey-hey,

giddy-up, Old Paint!  We galumphin’ to see

the Pope touch down, in D.C.!

Strait o’ Columba, maybe –

where turtles kick through tough gray

curves – like a mess o’ limbic pigeons

decorating limestone

from the air.  Everyone

behold her, now – mazy Simone’s

the River Queen.  Like Ariadne

with her golden seine,

or murmurous Magdalen

of sunburnt feet, she will meander

underneath each Maximus

(from Po to Eridanus,

Neva-Neva to the rusty

Don)... O Theseus, she’s mulish US!

Chart the way-way back now, Mary.

Through this labyrinth

of dinosaurs, a kitten’s

coracle will bless – make merry.

9.22.15

Life's unwritten history

BRUEGEL SCENE

Summer loses weight, becomes

translucent at the end.

Sunlight slants graveward

with a farewell glance, & autumn’s

trumpet-call is barely audible

amid hilarious

alarums in the circuits

of the starlings (swarming, risible).

& so you wonder where you are

on earth.  John Berryman’s

in jasper, John’s in grey;

Man’s in a graveyard green (so far

from here).  Splat in a corner

one cloud-turtle (from

Iona) lifts her drum-

shell from the sea – almost another

comber, very salt & watery.

I’ll join the starling circus,

friends – I’ll whistle us

to Minneapolis, SE of Rimini.

That raven’s in the Bruegel scene.

His glance is like one

wintry oeuil upon

her apron – by the deep tureen,

at dawn, in the spare refectory;

feathered in soft silence

on a wall of remembrance.

What’s up, Dad?  Unwritten history.

9.21.15

September 21

Observatory Hill

TAPROOT

Observatory Hill, atop the crest

of Sydney Harbor – guarded

by phalanx of great-aged,

magnanimous fig trees – like a nest

for visionary eagles – keeps a lens

trained on stars down

under (twinkling diamond

octahedron, Southern Cross).

Yet here, in a nearby yard, one pine

soars higher than those figs,

flings moth-wide wings –

lime branches drooping like a pinecone

honeycomb – leans into evening

at acute angle (a golden

mean).  Jack’s cheekbones

were so sharp – as that pining

Rail-splitter’s, in the cracked-plate

portrait – like the pyx

flung aloft by priest

or angler’s scale-scorèd blade –

the vertical taproot must plunge deep.

Against sandstorm &

flood, the blistering worm,

a maze of chains... rusted keep

of treason’s rigor mortis – fatal

spire of PX’ed Magdalen.

Where buffalo pern

to droughtland hollow (fetal, natal).

9.20.15

The "cracked-plate portrait", by Alexander Gardner 

Rose pendentive

ALMOND EYE

The half-moon curve of the golden dome

of Temple Emanu-El,

so calm on Morris Avenue

in Providence.  Only an emblem

of transparent well-being – invisible ties

that loop us in a web

of lovingkindness... (hub

of the universe – clear Paradise).

You know – it knots your heart, whoever

you are.  Like the bursting-forth

of a smiling cloud, one 4th

of July, or 19th of September –

like that lunar opalescent gleam

toward autumn equinox,

when they shepherd flocks

of lambkins, & piles of pumpkins beam

like orange suns toward Thanksgiving.

Then you will remember

the anchor in the harbor

under the safety net – the sea-bells’ ding

for one lost sailor.  Radius of sound,

a palm leaf of repose;

her memory a rose

pendentive (over Indian mound) –

Ferrara iron, sounding to the depths

of pain & memory.

I am your soul, Henry;

that almond eye Pacific keeps.

9.19.15

Royal Oak

A few years ago I began digging into various writings on anthropology, from The Golden Bough forward & back.  One of many things which fascinated me was the resemblance between archaic kingship rituals, from around the world, and the rites of Christianity.  It's a strange way of putting it, I know - but in some ways it seems as though the early Christians had struck a taproot leading back into human prehistory.  The story of Christ's "kingdom" (or anti-kingdom) and sacrifice - his giving of his "body & blood" in the Eucharist - was like a reflection of prehistoric human social rituals.  The King always "stood for" the God, or the Source of all goodness : he was the channel of the life-force (anthropologist A.M. Hocart expressed this quasi-governmental role of archaic kingship in his classic study Kings and Councillors).

It's as if the Biblical testimony - itself stretching back into earliest Judaism, offering a cosmological picture of the source of life - was reflected in a kind of "royal seal" or template : a gold coin with two sides, showing Past and Future...

MOSES-KAYAK

The soul’s a kind of mirror, they

used to say – the old

mystical sheepfold;

you’ll find it on baptism day

refracted in an oval, seen

through water.  Incidental

angels rim the cave-wall

(all elongate, string-bean

apparitions, seraphim)

till harvest ripens

& a scythe descends

dividing wheat from empty flim-

flam... everlasting Judgement

Day.  That Galilean

gospeller, Samoan

wrestler, flipped oval Testament

into tight spring – a seventh wave

reversed the Jordan-flow,

the eye of Moses-kayak now

recursive back to Adam’s grave

(SW of Lake Victoria,

no doubt).  My Mirror Lakes

were Mendelssohn out-takes,

rehearsals for a Globe-historia –

the young king, hidden in an oak tree

still, waits for his mother’s

signal – climbs from a mummer’s

moth-shroud – floats to the Sea...

9.18.15

Descendant of the Royal oak at Boscobel House (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Quiet river scenes

Some of the chords in this little 2-finger exercise (for Ravenna Diagram) came from a recent article in the New York Times about the Yulong River in China.

LITTLE STEPS

Halcyon late summer day

in the ancient yard.

Soft came the word

from kayak lips... like one stray

Chinese lantern, swinging orange

over weedy greens.

Quiet river scenes –

Yulong threading bamboo (drafty ange

d’or fisherman) between karst hills

& water buffalo –

bull’s-eye, ground zero

for the monsoon spring.  God wills

fish from such limestone streams.

The way to Promised Land runs

through your heart, O branded

Everyman.  Job’s hook redeems.

A living soul talks back to hieroglyphs

until they come to life. 

Osiris in the loosestrife

with French polio – Ravenna stiffs

in sketchy skiffs, rafting a mossy

Giuliana to her sunny

son – sweet honey

from a shack smokehole, in Galilee.

You won’t get it right away.

The flags are thick

with gold encaustic –

targets flip like livid hay

in a tornado eye – the limp

thread hangs from one

thread or another in

a Mandan sundance.  Nails crimp

crumpled limbs beneath a cloud

of starlings... when one

raven, crowing, spun

through your aching pupil – proud

oculus of Solomon,

Galla’s ripe acorn

crown of sylvan

horn – an evergreen

Ravenna Pinetop, skipping 88s around

your retina.  The iris

in her sheaf of cornea is

larval now – pupa plummets down

octagonal, folded to ground –

Hero in milkweed,

featherweight... freed

fiddlehead wing, cedar-bound.

The mountain lurks above the trees.

Imago flies to her source.

Monarch wafts a deft Morse

code in air – needles sing breeze.

A message-smudge, still incomplete,

yet untranslated.

Fisher King... checkmated?

Will fly again lambchild.  Beat?

Through bearskin smokehole, near

the North Pole, Glenn

plays baby Bach again –

so grand, these little steps!  So dear.

9.17.15

Your moon, Apollinaire

LOW RELIEF

Air is mirror-brilliant today, even

shadows cut clean

across Touro slate.

Mid-September, slanting sun,

a New Year for an old people.

Someone plays a flute

off Morris Ave... fleet

foot sails into New World marble.

As in a low relief in Rimini –

an august Agostino

Venus, or Diana

whorled in limestone dithyramb

out of the sea.  The jutting cliff

crusted with barnacles

whittles its pinnacle’s

bowsprit, figurehead – her glyph

(lifted in one hand-wave) twin

scallop-shells, like

castanets (break,

crashing surf...) where time began.

Your moon along the shore, Apollinaire.

Limestone foundations

crest across seasons,

granite castles – seagull’s mother,

feathering horsegrass in your hair.

1321... 1132...

Joachim voodoo;

Jeanne’s grey-eyed icon (Galla’s lair).

9.15.15

"Venus Beats All"

Dante at 56

Little magazines, poetry publishers, the literary community... I say yes to all of them.  Heck, I co-edited & published a little magazine for 10 years (Nedge); I spent at least 5 years trying to promote a local literary non-profit (the Poetry Mission).  The fact that I put a lot of my poetry on this blog is not evidence that I am some naturally cantankerous, nay-saying misanthrope.  No way.  I may be a little feisty - I think I get this from my mother, who is very feisty.  I may at times be cutting & sarcastic (this is all me, not my mother).

But I do not avoid magazines on principle - in fact, I received another rejection notice just now!  No, I put out a lot of poetry on this blog because the kind of drivel I'm writing is in fact very suited to the blog set-up.  Ravenna Diagram, for example, is an ongoing serial poem, sometimes quite diaristic & occasional (ie. responding to the "occasions" of the day).

Today's entry is an example, as have been several posts of late.  Dante died on this day 694 years ago, in 1321, at the age of 56.  Some scholars (the jury is out) have taken a position which entails that Alighieri & I share a birthday (May 29th).  So I am already 7 years older (& almost 700 years later) than Dante was, when he died - having completed his Paradiso not long before.

I haven't completed any Paradise yet.  I have not "lifted the great acorn of light".  But Ravenna Diagram is a cat's-cradle all tangled up with Dante, among other things.  Here is today's report :

LATTICE-WORK

If we can shrink down small as Frisbee

the little leprechaun

from Arthur Street (in

Mendelssohn), we might just barely

wiggle through the lattice-work

of Erica’s Ferrara

cabinet (dove sta

memoria).  Such delicate

moss-green & gold!  Almost as bright

as your sea-iris – sun-

flecked, pregnant lens

of summer season (cave-light,

river-carved limestone... lakes

of glacier-deft sketches).

Time’s a yarn, that catches

history in quipu-knots.  Oak aches

for each acorn – the great light

diamondiale, that lifts

each person (infinite

è finit, unbreakable).  Slight

limp, unfinished manuscript...

slow clay, Mendelssohn

relief operation –

Berryman in Resurrection crypt

or Pound à Venice (perilous seat

in dolorous gondola)...

Dante sets down Ravenna

raven-feather (geste complete).

9.14.15

Tomb of Dante in Ravenna (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Out sailing

Side note : "Rhode Island Statehood Day" is May 29th, which also happens to be JFK's birthday.  (& see NY Times article, where the photo appears.)

AMERICA’S CUP

An Ocean State sky, color

of sleep or turtledove

today.  Don’t move,

let the wind speak.  Late summer

mandorla of ripenings –

a little boat in your hand.

John off Rhode Island,

lounging, relaxed.  Bare shins

& feet propped up against gunnel.

Good book on deck,

half-moon of wooden oarlock

framing calm harbor.  Sea-knell

through the photo (Pietà).

When we go back to the sea,

whether to sail or to watch... we

are going back from whence we came.

America’s Cup... can you drink it with me?

The Round Table, the Lady

in the Lake... a malady

in the Grail (of all humanity).

One raven-prong drills through the human.

Black Sea sunlight rays

from the depths.  Maximus

with one hand frames the circle’s rim :

one sail traces its catenary arc

along a thread of fleece.

Ariadne’s peace, which

passeth fathom five... Mark.

9.13.15

JFK sailing, ca. 1950s

The latest Dionysus

TWO THREADS

Rite of Spring twirls out of Paris,

1913 (tight-coiled

as a Springfield

bullet-train).  Apollinaire’s

the latest Dionysus – tranquil

eye of Martian hurricane,

versifying inane

Europe’s Grande Guerre Nonpareil.

He will die too (head-wound).

Le Roi Ubu est mort.

Two threads, athwart

a catenary arc (gray ground,

blue sky) form slow raincloud;

two notes, or three

make melody

like a wedding day, a shimmer-shroud

of mutuality.  The King’s

in Memphis for the evening;

Queen’s busy restoring

an old carol (Acorn Tree-Ring);

Lincoln’s going to the theater

of the war tonight.

Curvature of sharp flint

Choctaw cheekbones, at the center

of the storm – a smiling ridge

of tears.  Pocahontas

cartwheels one meticulous

J² = Mx/Mn x 1132 (thread-bridge).

9.12.15

Occasional flight

BLUE SCHWINN

Out of the vernal vernacular,

low to the ground, weedy,

where the plane (on its way

to the White House) took a detour –

in the park, where the kids play

& choose up sides, & dream

of glory, & ice cream –

someone planted (in post-igneous clay)

a wedge of limestone, with an antique

bicycle saddled to

its pinnacle (blue

Schwinn, I think).  Joints creak,

wheels wobble in the barnyard breeze.

My kingdom for a horse,

cried desolate hoarse

Richard, knocked to his attainted knees,

blood-drenched.  Phrases mumbled

as we read along, in school –

Eli lama sabachthani... rue

the day – gave pause.  We fumbled

for our lunchboxes.  We floated

spitballs toward the furthest

pate.  Life in the West

was always evening toward sunset –

where Thunderbird lifts hefty wing

above snow mastodons,

& Mulberry Bay runs

rosy, toward plum Everything.

9.11.15

Flight 93 Memorial (from www.britannica.com)

Pioggia povera e preziosa

Erica Dorf would have turned 97 today.  She worked for decades as the artists' booking agent for Avery Fisher Hall.  For a few years in the 1950s, she served as personal secretary to Gypsy Rose Lee.  Erica was also responsible for producing the English subtitles on many of the classic Italian films of the mid-20th century.

SPARKLING EYE

                                    Erica Tagliabue Dorf, 1918-2007

Rain falling on your birthday, Erica;

after an August drought

these gray skies float

down water lifelines, pioggia

povera e preziosa.

Your green & copper

wooden cabinet

like something out of old Ferrara

still stands guard quietly

in the dining room;

out of the city’s boom

& boffo, to this rustic hideaway.

Memory is mother of the arts.

You were a hidden matrix

deep in that beehive-vortex

(10 W. 66th) where music starts

up from the frescoed scene –

that Lincoln Center fount

of gaiety in sound, that

plummet of gravity & Balanchine;

ferrying Fellini to his grand entrance

or steering Isaac Stern

toward the stage, you were

the dancing master’s high romance –

sparkling eye of the champagne

della vita. In your wide

Gypsy glass, hide

me now, Rose – the globe’s your reign.

9.10.15

Dragonish paradigm

Ravenna Diagram, the continuous poem-in-progress, slithers along in its dragonish way through the clouds.  These lines of Stevens' come to mind :

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

That master theme of his - to consider the imagination, as it shapes the "First Idea" (or ideas) by which we live, is also an unavoidable subject for me (& any poet)...

How is it that "representative persons" become part of the landscape (seascape?) within which we navigate?  What is this shuttling back & forth between the verbal model, the paradigm, & the actual here-&-now?

The question of the icon or image, & how it might be interpreted...

Confess I'm not saying much here.  Just trying to open a door on this thing, which seems to have its own idiom.

SHY COLOSSUS

In the events all around you

at this moment – like

that cabbage moth taking

a hike around the arugula –

there is one Event, like the breeze

cooling your sultry end-

of-summer haze.  Send

to Gilead for news – release

those carrier pigeons from the rooftops!

Take a message to Garcia!

Summon our immune

militia (Firecracker Pops

& Marty King to lead the way).

None shall die in vain.

The long day wanes.

Like Max in Mexico, the monarchs play

hide-&-seek behind bronze pillars,

Lebanon cedar.

One beloved figure –

footnote painted in a corner –

shy colossus in Rhode Island

pasted with primary

color – Hurricane Mary

(Maggie to her friends) will stand

for every cyclone & dust-storm

of tears.  Here’s looking

at you, kid.  Bring

apples, Rosie... comfort Everyworm.

    9.9.15

BAP : Best Academic Poetry

Latest tempest in the American Sneezepot has to do with the 2015 edition of the avuncular Best American Poetry anthology.  Apparently a "white" poet passed as a "yellow" poet, & was accepted as such by the editor of the anthology, who then defended his decision to keep the winning poem (editor seems to have found himself in no-win situation).

Anyway, the most curious thing to me about the editor's (Sherman Alexie's) defense of his modus operandi was statement that 99% of the chosen poets were professors.  Who woulda thunk it?

Anyhow, a Twitter exchange with Sina Queyras about this lil' imbroglio resulted in the following hepicene poem by Yorick truly :

NOM DE PLUM

I have eaten
the poems
that were in
the anthology

and which
you were probably
saving
for 2016

Forgive me
they were so
so

Plums in anthology basket

Something rich & strange

RIVER STREET

                                      i.m. Edwin Honig

That Bluejay with a raven on

his shoulder, that trickster

was a local fixture –

like cornered kid on stony Roman

pavement, Maggie.  Now you see him

in your mind’s eye, whom you knew

from streamy childhood (blue

was the mussel surf, where the Rephilim

stamped a sweet circumference

with giant feet). & Babe

the Blue Ox, & Gabriel

w’hm seraphim, & the fish fragrance

of White Bear Lake (miroir today)...

all the waters in the world

seem to coalesce now, pearled

to a cedar point of windy memory.

Only the shrill cree-crow of the tall

iron swing on River Street

reminds you of the weight

of all that autumn.  One free fall...

Weigh, anchor.  To the bottom you shall go,

infant infantryman –

loaded with diamond

mondiale.  A Seekonk conch will carry you

across her retina’s black sail, into

the womb of Imago.

Full fado five... just so,

Pessoa.  La vida es sueño.  Ephphatha.

9.4.15

Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox

The Venn diagram of Ra

It is the ever-never-changing same,
An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.
- Wallace Stevens

We look around and we see pairs of things - night & day, winter & summer, man & woman, life & death.  It's as if Nature is posing a geometry problem : draw a line C from point A to point B.  Find the inter-mediator, the golden mean.  Build a bridge across that chasm.

We want to make whole what seems to be divided.  It's a psychic necessity.  Sometimes our solutions are very simplistic, and instigate more fractures than before.  Sometimes our answers are very elegant & abstruse elisions - yet despite the sophisticated technology, we end up sliding into the next ditch.

I've been working on a poem-project in which the two parts of the binary, the two points of the calipers, are spread so wide that I can often seem to lose my way - but it also allows for a lot of creative mulling & curious detours.

I knew from the beginning the poem was involved with geometry.  I usually do with this kind of thing.  I start getting unaccountably intrigued by certain numbers & their divisors, how these numbers might be fleshed out in stanzaic and other patterns.  It's a kind of numerology.

The poem is anchored in a Venn diagram - the overlap of two congruent circles, each circumference passing through the other's center.  A pun is a sort of imperfect Venn diagram - the overlap of two meanings in one sound.  The name of the poem is Ravenna Diagram (you see what I mean).

I seem to have many thematic motives (over)determining this basic layout.  One of the main motives has something to do with the traditional Orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation.   Here three Persons overlap as one God.  In the Incarnation we have, very roughly speaking, a Venn diagram of the unity of human & divine.

It occurred to me this afternoon that another facet or motive of this design has to do with Time.

A poet, or any writer, always writes from where they are.  They express their place & time - their "Now".  But a poem or any fiction can project another "Now" as well.  Proust dwells on this mystery with magisterial complexity in his great novel (In Search of Lost Time).

For the ancient Christians, I think, Time was duplex, dimensional.  There is ordinary time, the successions & cycles of clock time - & then there is God's time, Eternity.

History, for them, involved the terrific drama of the intersection of these two dimensions - played out as the destiny of Humankind on earth.  There is a subtle concept called in Greek pleroma - the "fulness of time".  This can refer, apparently, both to the "climax" of the plot of sacred history - God's actual historical presence on earth - and to a sense of time as a kind of ripening of eternity within clock-time (these two notions are obviously close kin).

With Ravenna Diagram I have these two "historical" points of the calipers, a pair of points in spacetime.  There is the "Now" of the author, the poet, me - speaking out of my own experience & character, my place in time & space.  Then there is a second "Now" : that of the historical Jesus, the person who actually lived in Galilee and Judea 2000 years ago.  & then there is a kind of aesthetic middle term - a third "Now" in spacetime : the Italian town of Ravenna, where Dante is buried, where he finished his Paradiso - & where towering, awesome mosaics, representations of Orthodox Christianity, glimmer in their cave-cathedrals (some of these glittering icons found their way into Dante's poema as well).

Jesus tells a parable somewhere - & I forget the exact details - but he concludes with a riddle about time.  Something about a man inviting all his friends to a wedding banquet, but everyone makes excuses.  So he flings open the door & invites all comers.  However, some people show up not clothed properly for a wedding - they are tossed out.  Jesus says something like, "the Kingdom of Heaven is like this too.  So when the Eternal comes upon you, make sure you are prepared."

I've probably botched & oversimplified this parable.  But what interests me is this phrase about "when the Eternal comes".  It seems to goad the listener toward attempting to grasp a certain sense of the layers of time.

We live in a doctrinaire & factional era.  Our "side" is always ready to pin a simplistic label on the other "side".  They are deluded idiots.  Fundamentalists are convinced that old books are roadmaps through life's foggy ambiguities.  Secularists are convinced that religious believers are basically mystified by myth.

I think there might be a kind of philosophical, reasonable aspect to this religious concept of a duplex Time - spiritual and material, temporal and eternal.  The stereotype of puritanical Christianity, clinging to the spiritual at the expense of physical pleasure, is a very old cliche - with some basis in history (think of the desert monks renouncing the world).

But it's possible to think of the religious emphasis on the spiritual as a pragmatic counterweight to life swallowed up by the chaos & futility of the purely material.  A balancing, not a rejection : a synthesis.

This is how I conceive of Jesus' admonition about "when the Eternal comes".  The Eternal is always there : it's only as we get older that we begin to sense the limits to clock-time - our limits.  An awareness of mortality is a spur to long thoughts.  Then we start to sense the presence of the Eternal.

I noticed this with my father - not only while he was dying, but actually long before.  There was a kind of intellectual detachment.  Not that he didn't enjoy life, or care about others - but there was this sense of limits, the fleetingness.

Such a sense can result in a reshaping of priorities.  "What am I doing with my life?"  People are always ready with quick answers to this one, too - usually addressed to others.  But to grapple with it for oneself is the issue.

When you try to write a poem or fiction with two such compass-points, you are immediately handed a wealth of difficult artistic/philosophical problems.  How do I represent my "Now" - and that other "Now"?  But hopefully I put my trust in the creative process.  The whole impulse of poetry is toward integration & wholeness - to enter the rapture of the mesmerizing song.  My pleroma & that other Eternal might in some sense be one & the same, or at least connected.  After all, some such conundrum was the challenge Beatrice threw down before Dante, too...

Mosaics in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

Scent of an ending

Summer fading, a For Sale sign on the house... getting ready to leave Little Rhody.  Yet still remains one rose out back, a very bright one.

PETAL-FAN

September.  One late crimson backyard

rose remains.  Knot

not exactly Ruby, not

Desire – but Steadfast Fire (framed

by maroon foundation of the house).

Afloat upon your thorns,

a crozier, or serpent’s

copperhead – magenta compass,

planetary pole.  Away beyond

all foregone Oregon

disputes – those Diomedan

straits of Fenris-Greyhound –

54º32-by-Four!  Ringing

the International Date

Line – must I hesitate?

Princess in a shower, singing.

We clambered to the clear high room

where SF in a bay flamed

orange bloom – became

entangled like a quipu sum (loom,

cedars).  Weight of one iron anchor

filled that octagon

with spray of azure ocean

when Evening Star fired his tangential

thread of light into shade-womb

of piers – that San Franciscan

adamant, where limestone

Rhodi petal-fan (leaf-shaken hum).

    9.3.15

Her heart was a Mediterranean

Edwin Honig would have turned 96 today.  Child of a polyglot immigrant family in New York, Honig devoted his life to the art of poetry in translation, crossing linguistic & cultural divides.  In this time of great refugee distress, I would telegraph this Honig poem in reply to all the anti-immigration demagogues (Trump, Le Pen).

For an Immigrant Grandmother

She sat for an age at the window with glances that threw
Pennies of pity at collarless beggars, and cripples
Who crawled like crabs from gutter to curb rippled
The geese in the bag of her hunched-over flesh. But you
Always could tell by her murmur for heaven to witness
When neighborhood children like sparrows hopped in distress
To catch from the hand of the baker his three-day-old bread.

Yet she danced with a hint of the hips and a lilt of the head,
And the savor of turbans and princes and spices welled
From her smile like a promise of Turkish delights withheld;
For her heart was a mediterranean cradling the earth
With wishes that tumbled like fish and golden sea fairs
Where pirates were drowned and angels were spared by her prayers,
Till she slipped unaware on the edge of a sigh to her death.

young Edwin Honig

The occasional ark

Sometimes the macrocosm & the microcosm bump into each other, I guess.  I was reading some old Ravenna Diagrams, about a painting of St. Augustine by Piero della Francesca (I saw it at the Frick), in which Augustine's cloak is a crazy quilt of leather Gospel stories.  This got me thinking about Melville's Queequeg & his tattoos.  & then there was a story today on the BBC about the divided Bering Straits islands, Big and Little Diomede (divided for decades between USA & USSR).

In some sense the earth is a human body... in some nonsense, anyway....

WOLSEY RED

On a sultry 16th, in the month of Caesar

I was ambling down by the Blind

King, on Wickenden –

betwixt the Golden Sheaf (or Fleece) &

her Sheep’s Clothing – like a raven

in wolf gear, or some Pierre

o’Cesca – like That Man there,

following his own tattoos into an Inchon

Dept. of the Interior.

Aboard the good ship Keep-U

(between Racquel & Rue – 

achh...) skirting an ice curtain

somewhere... in a Wolsey red, mate.

Weaving around blind

cataracts, muzzled

shoals – paring bears in the Strait

below White Narrows (it was 1728).

I don’t know why ‘twas done.

The Inuit intuit none

of our designs.  Split Diomede? Great.

They look you in your eye as though

you were in RI!  Weird.

I only see weed (black widow’s

weed).  A coffin exchange came through

the aerial, Mira – maybe

amygdaloid inside?

Keep the white slide

for video, Queequeg. That’s my knee.

9.2.15

Little Diomede Island (Ignaluk)