Once upon a time

Once upon a time there lived a Mississippi riverboat captain, named Mr. Lawrence, who had two daughters, Jessie Ophelia and Cleopatra Desdemona (not kidding)... Jessie Lawrence married my great-grandfather, George P. Gould.

DELTA QUEEN

The hobo-poem stumbles out of Itasca,

a somno-ambulant mutter

just west of Superior

like a Nile-canoe in Minnehaha

or Thesée-en-Argo, lost at sea

in a maze older than time.

A stone-barrow, or lime-

burnt spacetime spruce-vortex (little tree

Apollinaire chased down in Paris

listening to Stravinsky

on the 29th of May).

Distant thunder... blessed senseless

mote.  What acorn happiness

coils beneath necrolithic

Moscow?  What lithe

Pocahontas limns Potomac offices?

Lightning rives gnarled raven limbs.

One glint from gold iris

shakes the paralysis

from icebound Neva aisles – low hymns

drone from limestone fish-caverns;

there is no place on earth

where Psyche’s sighing hearth

cannot ray lamplight (ask Jules Verne,

or Edgar Allan – ask St. Joan).

My Delta Queen glides on

toward perihelion

engulfing sorrow in her zephyr-zone.

4.18.16