the flute zigzags

Thus we bring to a close Book 6 of the great mumble-pilgrimage, in form of Cricket-Chirp Epic, which we call Ravenna Diagram.  Six books = about 340 poems already.  I do believe the sheer steadiness of this eccentric errand is beginning to garner a little more public notice.  Some batches have appeared here and there in Blackbox Manifold, in the U.K., the Journal of Poetics Research, in Australia, the Battersea Review, in the U.S., and also in Sweden, in a memorial anthology for world poet Regina Derieva.  One poem is forthcoming someday in the venerable & magnificent Poetry magazine, and the estimable Puncher & Wattman publishers, in Australia, have made a preliminary commitment to bring it forth in book form eventually.  For all this support, I am so grateful to the editors involved.  And special affection-rays beam out to those steadfast readers scattered about Rhode Island & elsewhere in the cosmic blogosphere... thank you, dear pals!

*Postscript, 5.28.16 : surprised to learn that this poem was written on the 79th anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge (May 26, 1937).  The poem celebrates the Golden Gate in the final stanza.  The bridge is a recurrent whatnot throughout Ravenna Diagram.

WHISPER-DOOR

Walk back   through a rainy-day memoir

through the watercolor (Grace

Ravlin   Gloucester, Mass.)

over a fireplace   wherever you are

down the River Road   by the cottonwoods

through the rose garden   with

a quipu-thread   into depths

of summer   Willy’s hobo moods

when the eyes relax   deep into green

& a river flows   to the heart-

matrix (almond, athwart

twin orange trees)   your ascent   unseen

Father Hennepin   or St. Louis

by the Stone Arch Bridge

on   New World ridge

where Evening Star   harps Liberty

These harmonic  concordances

Apollinaire   à New Orleans

Ariadne’s  contra-dance

in sleepy Paree   sybilline séance

The flute zigzags   l’après-midi

sad Adams (Henry) perks

his ear   the password works

once more (Encore, encore!)   you see

twin gates rise   virginal   ange d’or

with safety net   one golden

thread   trompette marine

from Jessie O. to J.   soft whisper-door

5.27.16