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)