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