10.23.2015

Indomitable busker

It's a mystery to me (a mystery for which I'm grateful) how these long pilgrimage-de-Henri sagas adjust themselves to my own contingencies.  They round themselves up in their own good time.  We are told art is practice practice practice, & maybe that's what it is.  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will" (Hamlet).

For example : I'm moving to Minnesota in a matter of days.  It's been a roller-coaster year, yet this Ravenna Diagram thingum has persisted, kept on keepin' on.  Now - a few days before we leave, & in the midst of much pack-up anxious biz - the fourth chapter of the poem, and a big structural cornice, draws to a close, seemingly in a fairly-fitting fashion (how can I know).

I'm thankful for the poem time.  I'm thankful for the moonshine of this little Ocean State.

EARTHY TAVERN

This polished late October light.
Burnishes each diamond
of the backyard iron
fence.  One survivor-cricket

churrs behind spruce (indomitable
busker).  Over the rail
a wave of clematis still
surfs; the massive parasol

of luminous russet dogwood leaves
still braces (on its sturdy
mast) against a gusty
autumn breeze.  Halloween in the eaves.

I’m leaving very soon.  The golden
spider packs his poison-
bag, curls (frozen)
in a thread-vortex.  I be beholden

to my Ariadne.  In her hazel eye
the gold lambswool, yellow
Corn Maid poncho flow
into one clay design – pendentive sigh

of wild oats panicle (brown
dangling bird-feet
elegant & neat
as many-rimmed Ravenna urn).

My host is flown.  Like Stella Maris
over the ridge, at Swan
Point – pivoting on équinoxe
de printemps (April 12 it was

                    *

this year)... like Beatrice’s Florence,
born le 4 Juillet – or taut
Francesca, by her net
of Inca wool... ou sont les neiges,

maintenant?  They’ll ride my splintered
coracle back home.
Or (gone threadbare) roam
my prairie west – O mulish cowherd

wind-wag, tickled to Frisco Bay!
Morning Star, look homeward
kind upon yon way-weird
son.  Apollinaire, with calumet...

the wars is over, anyway
– wars in my old heart.
Ravenna’s where we start
again (light brdftprnt of Dante).

Motif of a sacrifice.
Eternity turned
ice-cold (solid,
absolute).  Not nice –

unless you reckon yet again.
The dogwood mast is creaking
in the slanting afternoon;
winter will be coming soon

for Hen, who gathers everyone
into his earthy tavern
(like a Grecian urn)
across far distances... (American).

10.23.15

dogwood (& spruce) on Fisher St.

10.22.2015

Quantum integral


BLUE MIDWAY

In the drift of autumn distances
leaves sail their own Pacific
toward a blue midway
air-matrix.  Somewhere East

of Henry’s passionate history
(mercurial Möbius strip
or Klein bottle – just flip
one M to W).  Love’s mystery

refracts – deflected by the rage
for mastery, an infant
flummoxed by ambivalent
shrugs... until the splintered stage

is suddenly quiet, spooky as old age.
& so he takes Path P
(which intersects roughly
at X) to make a mirror-image

of her wounded face – the child
she was, and is, always
(beneath time-tears, nail-
scars... Hen’s self-betrayals, chilled

on wheels).  Meanwhile, in soft Atlantic
Delft, deft delvers deal
a double-diamond parallel –
quick Jackie-Joanie seesaw flick

like Leo flipped a Lei by 
Oahu Gal in Galilee.
Sol sighs, it’s only Me.
Love’s integral resolves in sky.

10.22.15

Gazebo at Swan Point Cemetery, Providence

10.21.2015

Yu the Great & Alma-joie


SPIDER-PARADIGM

Emperor Yu, beside the Yellow River
noticed a painted turtle’s
dome poke from the yurtling
current... crosshatched with a magic square.

Was struck with wonder – enlightenment.
The order of the world
arrayed, made clear – curled
around one salient shell.  A tent

of meeting at the end of time,
a mote embedded with
encaustic gold... the myth
fleshed out by spider-paradigm –

one woof of mutuality
supernal company
dovetailing tympani
to turtle-immortality.

The character of a place reflects
the character of those
who dwell therein.  Flows
of time illumine the limestone text,

the lambswool poncho, shrouded cave –
where we will meet again
old Roger Gentle-Hand,
bright Guillaume Apple-Mare... Genevieve

Little Tree... dear Juliet Bluejay...
where the matrix wheels
an April love... seals
1200 tribes with alma-joie.

10.21.15

10.20.2015

Sketch (from canoe)


BEE-STING

The rough sketch reaches back
so deep into beforetimes
like those caves of limestone
dolphins, walking... some refraction

in the water-filter flips Time over
into clear half-moonlight,
where Word-is-Psyche
typed into a graveyard clover

prints snowfeet along Minnesota
River, cemetery
ridge of Irish faery-
land (Apollinaire in Georgia).

Hard to explain.  Grace Ravlin
what thou lovest well
this garden, under spell
of summer sun (your Washington

laboratory).  Someone brave
magnanimous & kind
who vaults the epic rind
from orange threadspan (architrave

of salt-blue ice).  An Ocean State
of mind, where ships sail
slowly down to Coral
Sound, abeam some forthright

rabbit lighthouse, trembling.
Forgive me, it is so.
Earth is very slow
a-borning.  Here (one dead bee-sting).

10.19.15


10.16.2015

Dance of the Giraffirmation

Periodically, in the course of writing Ravenna Diagram - as with many earlier poems - I fall into a sort of dancing fit.  This results in passages which evince a certain air of enthusiasm, an affinity with poets like Whitman and Vachel Lindsay (Hart Crane, sometimes).  It's not a popular or familiar mode today.  But it seems inevitable, built into my poems - a structural dimension, which emerges (usually near the end or at some pivotal point) in the form of these bubbles or bumps or saliences or Giant Red Spots upon the very evenly-distributed & lattice-like design of the whole.

Anyway, here goes.

SUNDANCE POLE

A poem might commence with this
little hawthorn tree
on Fisher St., fairly
overflowing with deep rose-red berries

like fireworks on the 4th of July
flaring & bursting in free
association – a liberty
of uncommon fiery wheels across midnight

sky – the pale stars in the background
steadfast lights, bespeaking
deep-down goodness (Hopkins,
maybe... Mendelssohn) – the silver sound

of a tender, melancholy trumpet
(memory of mourning dove,
her all-compassing love
that wanders wild, like autumn blade

of maple seed).  The streamlet of speech
emerges from wilderness
of your own soul – manifest
in scar-chronicles of flesh (we beseech

thee, YHWH, forgive our ingrained wrong);
the language snakes its way
along a jagged ray
of peace-pipe lightning (atlatl-prong

of brazen serpent) back to the source
rippling from limestone,
primordial marrow-bone –
a familiar voice, whose gentle force

you recognize from long before.
Comes with a question, like
a music teacher – Mike,
Jenny... will you try this score?

Do you know where you are?  Bright lens
(rose-red, white, blue) surrounds
her limpid lamp – sounds
stir from the keys – the earth sends

radiance from ground-bass depths
(a b-flat flint enchantment
striking flame – tent
flaring firelight toward the Great

Bear’s ring).  It is the sundance pole
that gathers every Morning

                    *

Star to Thanksgiving
from every tribe & people in the whole

wide Universe.  The Commonweal
of Cosmos-Wheel, the breeze
of Manitou through trees
in Lebanon, South Central

L.A. – a whisper through the pines
of Mississippi, Kansas,
California... Memphis
Tennessee... on any railroad lines

through space & time.  Even here
on Fisher Street, in Little
Rhody, her turtleshell
murmurs statutes of liberty (I hear

you, there).  Gray hawthorn branches
merge the black & white
of factional dispute,
pretentious politics – brace avalanches

of fanatics, stem the feuding tide;
her leaf-shades balance vision
with experience, precision
with that draft of lifeline magnitude –

fresh air of gratitude & calm
compassion (openness,
grace, charity).  Less
dogma, more enthusiasm –

where blossoming cities lift from soil
of civil equity,
brave ingenuity –
American can-do, granted to all

who will.  Old promise of a justice
overflowing, paid
in full – the freedom-chord,
rung with a joyful crash-caprice

of fife & drum, guitar & harp –
O let it roll down now!
That red berry you sow
in morning will be blooming bright C-sharp

by noon!  Song’s equilibrium
rests on her branch –
Love will enfranchise
multitudes (world freedom plumb).

10.16.15

Hawthorn on Fisher St.

10.15.2015

Ides of October


LIPS MONASTERY

This bright transparency of mid-
October Providence –
sweet-sad remembrance
of the princely sun (Caesar’s eyelid,

drooping into Ides).  Boethius,
last of the Romans, slips
away into Sophia-deeps,
drowses beneath dogwood leaves;

little feathery flesh-tone coins
of wild oats dangle, sway
on pale green stalks today.
She’ll plant them with Galla’s remains,

he mutters to himself.  The monarch’s
just a social butterfly;
none need any longer die
in her doctrine.  Light-waves, arcs

of arches, radiating from
a central hearth... archaic
woodland (near Itasca)
where the springing pendulum

of springs is born.  Moss-green Alph
to mauve Omega, vibrant
strings (O most ancient
of lays!) knot Ocarina Everysylph

into her vale of Inca-tiers 
a tinder Lips Monastery,
quicksilver Philosophy
lifts Rome to Mexican cedars.

10.15.15

tame wild oats

10.13.2015

Through human sleep

Christopher Columbus is a divisive historical figure.  The Columbus Day holiday brings out clashing perspectives.  I'm aware of his mixed legacy : symbol of exploration, expanding human horizons, a round globe - and also an image of Western imperialism, cultural hegemony, genocide.  I know today's entry in the Ravenna Diagram series will come across (to most, perhaps) as culturally & stylistically obsolete.  But a poet has a right to be out-of-touch & ridiculous, occasionally.  Sometimes we have to follow the poem's lead.  Now & then a poem unfolds in a metamorphosis, transfigurement.  Symbols molt into something new.  I don't know if that's happened here, though; it's just another Henry sketch.

TREASURE CHEST

A bird hums low through human sleep,
hums softly lullaby,
aubade.  Ohio
bifocals their Burchfields reap.

Columbus is a Jonah still.
The outcast Genoese
casts off, a shifty breeze
of shuttered Inquisition swells

bright spinnaker for Spanish Main.
Indies glimmer in the grain;
Powhatan’s skipping maid
knots scalp & quipu in one braid –

taps down lost gold of tumbleweed
& prairie memory
to one wide planetary
estuary (harvest mead).

The bird floats feathered in her gypsy
treasure chest.  The ship
is Holigost – Time’s keep
(unfathomed yet).  Each Henry V,

grandee Philip will drop the knee
her way; each hungry soul
will stand renewed & whole
upon New Land someday (you’ll see).

Thus in the globe of Jonah’s word
the world comes round, & so
one wing’s carefree proportion
curls each creaking mast homeward.

10.13.15

Statue of Columbus (Elmwood Avenue, Providence)

10.09.2015

October through a giant copper beech

The day approacheth, just a few weeks from now - I must be leaving ye old Providence, heading west to Minneapolis.  Walking around this windy overcast morning - gray skies, gray hair, gray world - thinking of the bark on a great gray beech tree, & the gray stone of churchyards, & the grey-eyed wisdom of Athena-Sophia (you might say)... all these sempiternal things (you might say)... & of Jasper Johns' gray series, & of the strange old gray painter crouched in a gray streetcorner, in Antonioni's Ravenna film, Deserto Rosso (was it Dante?)... & so all these grays blended on this gray day, as I remembered Edwin Honig, who had so much to do with my poetry life here in Providence... & Edwin's terrific short poem "November through a Giant Copper Beech" (you can find it in at least one of the editions of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry).

Edwin's poem is about passing things, & things that are steadfast through time...

I got into a college (Brown) on the strength of some high school poems.  & stuck around here, writing on & off, for 45 years.  I just learned a few days ago that a poem of mine has been accepted for publication in that venerable American institution, Poetry magazine.  So maybe something at least has come of it all - so many wayward years in Roger's city-state, his "refuge for troubled conscience"!

PUMPKIN MAN
                                   in memory E.H.

This windy gray October day,
fat robin camouflaged
(hoodie?) in dogwood’s
rusty green... & then the great gray

beech I passed this morning (Slater
& Lincoln).  Elephantine,
primordial, in motion
still (old pre-Socratic critter)...

Edwin’s tree, his 100-branching
crown – the graying King
of Gray, still whistling
to Even Dove, down never-dying

Dolphin Way (led by leaping sparks
into Ravenna).  O patient
rude dream-sponge – intent
to wrestle safety shroud across stark

span! – your International Pumpkin Man
lit from within (warm
orange flame)... No harm
shall come to thee, my child – listen!

In a corner of a lumber yard
one sharp-eyed old saint
(framed by gray paint
cans, wagon) waves palm upward

toward the dark sheep-door, just
over his shoulder – where
one candle shivers fire.
An endless jet, he whispers.  Trust.

10.9.15

Beech tree on Slater Ave., Providence

10.07.2015

Bronze Age harpoon


SNOW-CONFESSIONAL

These scarlet dogwood berries
sprinkling the patio
like drops of blood, O
thou October pale marine.  Seas

mottle thy face more than they should –
scars, age-spots, drawn
across youth long gone.  Her
billows drowned there, Robin Hood.

So the copper-pronged harpoon
dove deep, to sea-floor known
before Bronze Age.  Ravens
intone their learnèd funeral tune

& crows can recognize your face, 
Cautantowwit.  The moon
be pierced to russet soon;
your soul, also, cannot erase

persistent chronic blood-pain’s trace
that stains each chronicle
of hero-miracle,
mutters Antigone (in Mary’s place).

A coral circlet rings her hair –
aquamarine, full fathom
five; another kingdom
circumscribes (asper coin-lair).

You know it, Henry Buried-Man;
your snow-confessional
remorse codes – Rez is all.
Be reconciled, sez Rabbi Dan.

10.7.15

dogwood in October sun

10.06.2015

Limestone Medusa


DOUBLE-WE

Something inherent in the stone,
the milky, the snow-seasoned
Winnebago (Indian mound).
A pregnant plot, expectant zone...

one-stringèd salt-shanty, or tent
of tentative meeting.
Limestone Mediterranean
USA, moon-galloping... unspent

Ethiopian Edith (double-we).
String’s stretch-to-break
(real Rimini headache)
loops through Persephone-tragedy –

Tiresias whispering mother-wit
or pock-marked moon
keening her Dionysus-loon
(rive-marine beyond yon Key West

jetty).  If the Greeks could see...
but it’s not necessary.
Stout military
Perseus will refract the sea

into a trillion dolphin-heaps;
Poseidon’s jealousy
toss Cassiopeia
upside to her throne (for keeps).

The circle of the sea (deep Circe)
revolves round Galilee –
Pygmalion will be
revived in thee, Pocahontas-B. 

10.6.15

may the circle be unbroken

10.05.2015

Your Persian paradise


LOST PHOTO

Spotty grackles swarm the dogwood,
chatty starlings nibbling
scarlet berries, quibbling
around each drooping leaf (old

ruddy father).  They traipse a happy
nonsense o’er the remnant
garden.  Sir Thomas Browne,
strum softly til I end my Rhody

nap (it won’t be long).  Your Persian
paradise (precisely drawn)
will do for Gödel, Dante –
not so simple to sketch that Abyssinian

abyss, encircling the human plow
through history.  Your soul
is touched by lost photo
whose courteous artist limns her now –

an April child glimpsed through November
shades (All Souls, Grandpa).
One unicorn grace, selah.
O woe to me, that scarred the moon (her

face still gleams from autumn grass).
A soft Franciscan Rimini
rhymes in the memory
of your basilica (on ne passe pas).

Dear evening Matilda, 1-3-2...
(Beethoven, fowled & quartered –
decussation – weathered
sprite).  All shall be well, hums Manitou.

10.5.15

laundry line, old lilac, light Brownian diamond

Rhody backyard I must leave ere long

10.03.2015

The one who got away


TRAIN-HORNS

The raven-message in the ink gets blurred
in the dark.  Signal fades
over badlands.  Wade’s
gone upstream, Charlie – overheard

her talking about the telephone.
One with the wheel-dial
we used to use.  I’ll
call you in three days, Persephone.

Grace made this little linen hanging
with palm greenery, with
red specks for eyes.  So Phoebe
set to compass-pointing in a painting –

hand-prints, fingerprints, green
dolphins breaching in
a fling... theremin
flute-song – ghost dance for Iowa

maiden (midden remains).  400 years
in Utah, seems like,
they danced.  A snake
coppered up in a trance – cheers

for the livid buffalo (the one
who got away)!  I
don’t know, Charlie –
she’s pretty mad.  The whole corn

crop is blown to smithereens.
Hazel threw her whistle
in the purple thistle –
thorns crown hills.  Train-horns...

10.2.15 

10.02.2015

Grassroots gun control : thoughts of a bystander

Yet another mass shooting on a school campus (Oregon).

I'd like share a few thoughts - though I'm not well-informed on the issue.

First : here we have another tragedy, yet more victims of our own political impasse.  We can't seem to get beyond the gridlock brought on by the NRA and its ideology - that is, the notion of Americans' inalienable right to own guns, and the idea that this right is under threat from liberals, police and politicians.

Second : listening to the traumatized public response by local leadership in the wake of the outrage, I kept hearing this message - "We don't even want to talk about the perpetrator.  His name shall not be mentioned."  I think I understand the emotional and practical motives behind this position : first, we want to cast out the agent of this suffering - we want to exile him from the community he has harmed.  Second, we don't want to give any media publicity to the deranged persons who engage in such deeds : their pathological narcissism & hunger for publicity is often a feature of these crimes.

Third : these two aspects underline the fact that what we have is both a political impasse and a community trauma.  Perhaps we need a new approach, a sort of end-run around the NRA.

I haven't done enough research even to say whether or not this is a new idea - probably not.  But here's the concept :

Maybe we need a grassroots, locally-based initiative to deal with the weapons in our communities.  Not a project focused on political initiatives, legislation, or regulation - that's already happening -  but rather a community-driven effort, which makes use of recent advances in data-collection and social networking.

I'm not suggesting any let-up on the anti-NRA, pro-gun-control political work.  I support that movement wholeheartedly.  This would be a complementary effort.

Neighborhoods and communities would take ownership of the problem.  They would do so by conducting a voluntary inventory/public awareness campaign.  Each neighborhood, each community, each town would take responsibility for its own weapons oversight - and would share their information with each other, and with local law enforcement.

The idea would be to take an inventory - street by street, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town, region by region.  It would be done by local volunteers.  The questions on the survey would be as simple and direct as possible :

1.  Are their guns in your home?
2.  How many such weapons?
3.  Who owns and takes responsibility for them?
4.  What is your reason for owning a weapon?  What is its use?
5.  What can we do to help prevent gun violence?

It would be essential to undertake this on a grassroots basis : that is, not simply in cyberspace, on some social-media platform.  These of course would also be essential tools - but there would have to be an actual, human, local resource or center of operations.  Each neighborhood would need to be aware of the project and take responsibility for it (in collaboration with others).

Initially I imagined the survey would also try to discover if there was evidence - criminal, behavioral, etc. - that the presence of guns in a particular home might be an immediate threat to the community.  But there are reasons why this part would probably be inadvisable and unworkable.

Nevertheless, I do think one facet of the problem lies not with the weapons, but with the people who obtain them.  The NRA uses this argument in their propaganda - but there's a reason they do.  Addressing the psychological, behavioral, and social pathologies which lead people to commit such crimes seems absolutely necessary.

I realize there are law-enforcement and social-service programs already in effect, which try to deal with this dimension.  But possibly something equally local and community-based could be attempted in tandem with a neighborhood weapons inventory.

How do we undertake preventive measures - how do we work with people consumed by rage, irrationality, hatred?  How do we prevent them from acting on their violent delusions?  How do we address their problems?  I don't have the answers.  But the inevitable (and understandable) ostracism, judgement, and expulsion of perpetrators - after crimes are committed - seems insufficient.

Are there innovative means by which local communities could forestall such tragedies, without infringing at all on anyone's rights or liberties?  Can we take action - on a neighborhood basis - to confront the problem directly?  Rather than standing by, passively, while the lugubrious, gridlocked political debate grinds on & on?

10.01.2015

Atlantic weather


HOME FREE

Set adrift down Providence streets,
blown along by chilly air,
this autumn Atlantic weather
in the Ocean State... gray cloud-fleets

follow birthday Hobo, his big-baby
muttering – a nonsense
tremolo from Jonah’s
whale-gut habitat (her kingdom’s maybe

someday).  Like Apollinaire slaloming
dolphin-rime atop a marble
door in Rimini, warbling
his trompette marine (something

about a Frisco treasure chest
in a hurricane eye) – or
Bluejay Slocum, Shaker
salt in pauper’s Dauphin-quest...

your sailor’s air, so fortunate
pipes down from the future
on Ariadne lure.
Hookline for deep sinker – bright

hand who flew from the poop deck
waving from waves his
palm-leaf radius
(JJ-pendant, octahedral speck).

Wisdom’s justified in all her children
plays out the line from high-
strung Miriam.  Sky milk-
train sounds – all home free then.

10.1.15

October periscope