the love that draws the sun & the other galaxies

IRIS-TURTLE

The curve of the river twines the curve

of the path, they skip together

downstream.  Warm autumn weather

clears the mind a little (light mauve

asters nodding under cottonwoods).

The poem’s woven trace

catches the vif, the grace

of movement – Berkeley’s moods

in Paradise (Newport)... his eyes

commingling a million

threads beneath the sun

into a massive sky-warp of surprise –

Daphne’s comb or seaweed wave

of tears (the patient laurel

lifts gnarled arms from Hell

into the marrow of yawning grave).

The living mind, the raven-shadow

of Platonic iris-turtle... Venn

diagram or madrigal (ken

you my mosey-keening yet?) – below

the longing of the galaxies,

their milky sarabande –

a spectrum of star-sand,

poured from hand to hand.  He’s

just daydreaming of Marina now

(sea-daughter, blithe naiad

of Taurida) – be glad

you’ve followed his light-dancing prow.

9.30.16 

Ravenna Diagram surfaces

In today's mail I received contributor's copies of the October issue of Poetry magazine.  At the youngish age of 64, this is my first appearance in that venerable & jazzy mag.  Editor Don Share took one poem, called "Cedar Replica" - an excerpt from the endless milk train, Ravenna Diagram.  I'm very glad to have one boxcar of it in Poetry - & grateful for that editor's generosity, his attentive reading.  In a few weeks, the first volume of RD, which includes this poem, will be available in book form.

p.s. I was especially taken with the cover image, by Marion Kadi (titled "Mille et Une Nuits").  It seems to echo slightly these lines from the 5th stanza of "Cedar Replica" :

Your icon, buried in the garden,
sank like a thousand ships
into the grass...

the same voice (Bonnefoy)

Another brief poem from the fine, the superfine, Yves Bonnefoy :

THE SAME VOICE, ALWAYS

I am like the bread you break,

Like the fire you burn, like the pure water

That will escort you to the land of the dead.

Like the foam,

Which hemmed for you the light and the harbor.

Like the night bird, who erases the banks,

The night wind suddenly more rough and cold.

Yves Bonnefoy, from sequence "A une terre d'aube"

music of ordinary things

AERIE-FEAST

Music of ordinary things...

happiness at work,

when things go OK –

when the work is good, & skill brings

flowers to fruition; then at dusk

heading home, to family

& friends, where kids play

beneath a sturdy roof (hard task

fulfilled with courteous precision)...

plain telos of humanity,

pleroma of reality,

continuum of beauty’s diapason.

Grandfather’s house of rusty brick

along the River Road –

an engineer’s abode,

who loved an opera (Elvira’s cheek)...

One high lone raven corkscrews toward

the Pole.  This pillager

is Eli’s forager –

his black-hole fleece ties ragged

knots, makes nest for bread & wine.

Look how the prophet-priest

exalts his aerie-feast

where Time peals to a finish line,

B-flat – è FIAT... è finit.

Apollinaire smiles

in the wings – miles

overhead his plane lifts (azure, infinite).

9.28.16

from the bottom of the sea

JOSEPH’S COAT

Those howling Oklahoma twisters

are more than metaphor

for the ravenous bonfire,

the rabid war in the man-monster –

the Minotaur in the guilty coil

on the Chartres floor

(beneath wooden choir

where Theseus & Ariadne smile,

are reconciled).  Who can lift

the great icosahedron?

Unbind our Gordian

distempered steel – the feral gift

of chimp dominion?  One copper penny

spinning heads-&-tails

goes gyroscope.  Tall sails

press on from stony Normandy

(led by that spine of Juliet-Perdita)

past Flanders wars

into La Paix.  Who soars,

now, from the bottom of the sea...

an Acorn Maid, in a rite of spring

flecked from a deeper wound.

Crevasse of raven-sound,

convenient cripple-victim-thing

turns inside-out; one Joseph’s coat

patchwork mosaic spells

Liberty – swings bells

of Jubilee (round vibrant note).

9.27.16

alongside the canoe

SHIP’S EYE

John Slocum fell into a swoon

in the sea-tinged woods

by Puget Sound; his words

of hope shook many Shaker men

out of their sins.  Sparks fly far

from cedar blaze – the sea

booms in a ship’s eye

lashed by yardarm to the polestar.

It’s not the size of the cosmos

but the color of the scales,

gilded when dawn pales

rippling on ice-floes

across the horizon, back to Ocean –

over hide rooftops

sun-parched corn crops

in the jungle (Squaxin, Galilean).

When Davy the Song Prince pranced

alongside the canoe

Maggie saw what she knew

was hers, & grew embarrassed –

yet her almond eye looks to the sea

& the song endures.  A stone

fell from turtle-grey heaven –

the flare of a meteor, a mystery;

an infinite cloud-bank shaped like wing

a feather of ring-dove

signifying love

left brush-marks down by Slocum Spring.

9.26.16

Ride down the mountain

Memory is full of Providence

FALL STEPS

                           i.m. Henry Shelton

Fall steps softly to the door

beside the river now.

Memory, somehow

is full of Providence today – your

little hideaway of brave

adorable & free

spirits, whom to thee

were given – opening, wave on wave

sea-gates of joy & liberty.

Like that dear one

on Petersburg pontoon

floated to town – Elena, she

of the midnight sun – as if an emerald

kamen-ring of Gumilev

(tattooed ghost-brave)

stood there, incarnate – held

my hand, like Word made Flesh – began

to dance & sing; as if

Columba on his acorn skiff

arrived in New York harbor – shine,

Franco-Irish lantern – beam

your torch around the globe!

Moss-copper robe

whose folds encompass freedom’s dream

whose web of mutuality

is wind-blown sail

on cosmic Ocean trail

chaste vision of equality

                 *

tall northern pine who will prevail

like massive cedar tree

in Puget Sound   like she

who danced the Shaker upland trail

to soul freedom, with John Slocum

or Henry Shelton in

Rhode Eye   Franciscan

mule of social justice   plumb

spine of Blackstone’s Catholic Oak

or Williams’ open hand

give me your poor... stand

in my healing shade... Manitou spoke

on Wisdom’s dancing-wheel of joy!

& my hoarse scar-tattoo

on Queequeg’s silver-blue

casket – my burbled Jaybird cry,

confessional – only an ochre scratch

on earliest cave-wall;

only a golden ball

of Ariadne-wool, wet sheepish match

balled-up by selfishness.  Who lit out

for that stony kingdom –

ancient Big Rock Mountain,

deeper firmament, beneath the shout

of pokey politics – that Cosmosphere

of lovingkindness, where

the soul finds Primavera air

& breathes... & sighs... & lives forever.

9.23.16

4th of July, Providence harbor

Yves Bonnefoy, encore

Another attempt at translation.  This is Yves Bonnefoy, "Le Pays Découvert", from his sequence A une terre d'aube.  (The last word of this poem seems nearly untranslatable, since le temps can mean both "time" and "weather".)

THE OPEN COUNTRY

Star on the threshold.  Wind, held

In motionless hands.

Word and wind in a long contest,

Then there was this gust of silence.

The open land was only grey stone.

Very far and low lay a flash of empty stream.

But night rains over the surprised earth

Awoke an ardor that you call time.

bronze mood of river

MAGNANIMOUS WING

The crickets’ eerie premonition.

The bronze mood of snaking

river, mirrored in

cottonwood’s heart-shaped fallen

shield.  Identity’s an equal sign

in autumn – twin banks

the Mississippi makes

to fringe the tender almonds of a span

darken toward evening, of a year.

That wavy, sooty smudge

afloat below the bridge

no raven now, but King-bird, here –

old Balder Will, majestic, serene

sailing with the wind

downstream.  You’ll find

his imago, dispersed, unseen –

scattered in brown eddies, copper jags...

the soft green lichen

of anonymous kin-

folk.  King Who-He-Who-She brags

like Pharaoh, but it’s all a masque –

autumnal Shakespeare,

smiling through the year-

dregs... tears toward Phoenix-Pasque.

Chaste vision is an equal sign.

Justice like rain – drifting

magnanimous wing

from Cosmosphere, where all things shine.

9.21.16

bald eagle in flight, reflected below bridge

an aria of Ariel

SAFETY NETS

On the vast floor of the nave at Chartres

a golden labyrinth

circles the square.  Myth

of primal clay, where everything starts

over... springs up from the ground;

even the epic poem

circles back toward home –

Thanksgiving hearth of heaven, lost

& found.  It is an Ithaca

where Daphne-laurel molts

back to Penelope – bolts

from the yarn, like Minnehaha

laughing upstream toward Itasca –

primeval Persephone

(O veritas caput).  She

looms at warp speed, like an aria

of Ariel – zips through the Gateway

Arch, to Providence –

races around, from Florence

to the Golden Gate, where she will play

out safety nets, & save the day –

& from Pacific to New York

lift up her blazing fork

of sea-green, Lincoln-penny Liberté.

She is the almond in a nest of nests –

a hollow echo-tomb

from which Columbia will bloom

again, spring-fed by Galilean breasts.

9.20.16

down a river to the Keys

LIGHT RHYMES

End of summer on the river path.

Light almost plaintive

through cottonwood leaves,

a frieze of tall pillars.  A froth

of rambling wildflowers, tender lavender

nameless to me – it’s not

rhodora, in this woodlot

astride mud-coppery earth-bender...

So Hobo goes mumbling along.

A road of melancholy

adoration (holy

fool, remembering a door, a song-

agate)... rowing, rowing down

a river to the Keys.

Angling through trees,

light rhymes with breeze (a wind-sown

octave); a fleet bird whistles

through hearkening cedars.

Her labyrinth of tears

might be a simple maze of thistles –

a hobo circus of circumference

around the dense mast

of a coracle.  Its ballast

is adhesive mutuality – love-sense

smiling through some kid’s affection

for a friend... Mendelssohn

in harmony, one

ark out of many waters (milky lesson).

9.19.16

not made with hands

RHODOS-COLOSSUS

I’ve spun a zigzag ziggurat

not made with hands, muttered

Oblomov-Hobo – squared

round Galilee with palmy lariat

lime-green & violet.  With Okeanos

built a pineland font,

a Big Rook Candle Mint

that floats majestic Liberty to Rus

by U.S. Forest Service (Lincoln

would).  There’s still life

in a copper penny, if

you’re willing to be leaf – we can.

Disenchanted materialists

unlock a spiny Jenny

idle now for many –

Berkeley’s little tree twists

like Atlantic rotor, like Bermuda

paddleboat... clap hands

& sing, who understands!

A dream – dream-songe (Ojibwa)!

Great Manitou be Hole-in-the-Sky now,

mind – love’s apple-tree

a laurel (Victory).

She beams from the heart of Notre

Dame, my voyageur, extending her

green crystalline moss-

copper palm of sobornost –

Rhodos-Colossus 56 (soul harbor).

9.16.16

Bonnefoy, la traduction du jour

Here's another fling at translating Yves Bonnefoy... the poem is "L'Éternité du feu", from the sequence Le chant de sauvegarde.  (see original below)

ETERNITY OF FIRE

Phoenix says to the fire, which is fate

And bright landscape throwing its shadows,

I am one who awaits you, says he,

I come to lose myself in your grave land.

He regards the fire.  How it comes,

How it plants itself in the gloomy soul,

And how dawn breaks at windows – how

Fire goes mute, falling to sleep deeper than fire.

He feeds on silence.  He hopes

Each fold of an eternal silence,

As it descends on him like sand,

Will aggravate his immortality.

down to St. Lou

SLATE PANOPLY

Henry’s Chair is in the woods,

beside the Rio del Espiritu

Santo.  Hobo to you,

mayhap – lost in his darker moods;

drawing a diagram in river-sand

of Ursiana’s barer pillars,

moss-bound Giuliana’s

pines (forlorn Ravenna swampland).

Emblems of spiritual epilepsy,

moon friar.  Lame lone wolf

Dante, crying for a proof

of integral radiance (nay, nay

sobs hunchback Leopardi).

Hiawatha whistles there –

follow the tripping Hare

Whirlaway to Itasca – see?

The spring.  Mammoth drone of stream.

Down to St. Lou,

where airs axle true –

bloodveined grey sponge, clay dream...

tuning-fork in the river road.

Wheel, innocent rabbi,

through your Galilee

of primary colors – lift the load

from Henry’s sloping shoulders.  Bend

a prism to Columbia,

slate panoply of Jonah-sky –

who lights the harbor at grave’s end.

9.15.16

Henry's Chair

something not rotten

BENT WOOD

Two lean ancient red pines

standing blue-green beside

Grandpa’s old house, abide

fanfares of trumpet-vines

(pure orange bugling).  Something

not rotten in the state

of Norway, loco Hamlet –

needles for constant farthering,

an evergreen encounter with the Pole.

A fado rudder for America...

mercurial Columbia

glows with her dusky song, high, whole –

hidden in clouds of starry Eire

that slake eddies of fear

into limey atmosphere

like elfin emeralds from the mire.

These curves along Rhode Island Way!

Hieratical Byzantium

leans down beside a tomb

hunched in Ravenna tamaracks – Dante

& Roger shaking hands (the ghost

of Beatrice will not bow

before the imperial scow,

nor heed the plutocratic boast

of idle punts).  Just a bivalve ark

(tender ellipse of fatherhood)

redeems the bent wood

Caesar to seahorse – shark to lark.

9.14.16

bebop robin

OKIE NOOK

Sophie’s sunny little birthday balloon

with the starry polka-dots

is losing air now – that’s

how it is with balloons.  Under octagon

of the gazebo roof, like a spiderweb

in golden brown.  The Sacred

Wood was reconfigured –

scarred & scored rough oak nub

rounded to slight chaste coracle.

Apollo’s memory of Daphne

wells near Mississippi

into gnarled pillars (maze or miracle?);

one bebop robin solos from 

an Okie nook, wears

pork-pie hat... & there’s

a poppy (rich red-purple plum)

unfolding down his chest – an origami

floating city, cordial

with accordions, with all

things orbital (inverted harmony,

fresco to Viennese).  An island rose

out of infinite green,

balanced on submarine

turtledove blimps (of caritas);

the loping soul of liberty

sprang from Goodwill

her dancing shoes – & (still

traipsing) turns opal Star of the Sea.

9.13.16

Pines in Atlantis-land

STANDING ROCK

In the powerhouse of Providence

lame little Eddie Poe

must play the game hero –

like a minnow tar, fire-pitted mensch

against Mini-Mini-Tick Leviathan,

his haunt of fearful gravity.

His force is a depravity

of animal instinct – Heraclitean

axis of control – apes’ pecking order,

magnified by policy

(raison d’état, you see).

O too-familiar monster, O – our

puzzle-master, oiled in wrestle-hold,

whose flags flap overhead

above each engineered 

corpse-shed (floods memories untold).

The silver dime, Elsie – your Grecian

Artemis – will not

suffice; this Ariadne-knot

must be released, for peace to reign

the dam must burst; an equilibrium

of equity must level out

the bruised minefield.  Bright

misery in wells of eyes... come,

Maggie Shekinah, come Galilean

Buffalo Gal (Eureka-

Psyche)... Standing Rock

pines in Atlantis-land – rise up again.

9.9.16

emerald, magenta, rust

DIVINING ROD

These heavy green butternuts

fall to the green grass

from the milky axis

of the Po-tree – go thump & burst

(each one a miniature globe

of moist black earth).

Thus Hobo mused, at berth

among the river fronds, robed

in emerald, magenta, rust.

One such blade his wand,

divining rod – her land

releasing signs out of the dust;

smoke-signals, signed, co-signed

into a circle (arcing back

to the beginning of the track).

Jade footsteps from a cloudy mind,

a raincloud out of futurepast;

merging, centripetal –

heaven is integral –

a raven knife, a pinecone mast

(that rotates on a maze of grass

within a vapid place

of sterile office space).

Flowers are immortal – pass

then, with Hobo, through the Gate!

Arc-welded acorn

crown for children –

rainbow-faceted checkmate

                 *

that beats Goliath with a tiny mite!

A baby meteor,

a coal of holy fire –

wholeness at heart, golden moonlight!

Her orb gleams like a seal, a coin –

meek penny versus

dolorous minions,

or muted acorn humming down

brass trumpets of disputing despots.

It is the dolphin-seal

of Ocean State, an Israel

incarnate in the rose bee-glade.  What’s

hidden in the earth, a promise

limping with Natasha –

with immovable Nadezhda,

still in Voronezh – liberty, justice;

a rainbow equilibrium, that harbors

simple shining Gates –

St. Frisco’s nail-bites

lifting iron weights, up to palm-arbors

evergreen!  That glory be hidden

like a key, or like a rudder

in the wave – to shudder

into light upon the crest... thy pardon

for this history, White Rose!

Row to the Keys, Hobo –

Eureka by the Po,

our watering hole – look whose Face glows!

9.8.16 

he was no Big Fish

SWEET CORDELIA

Like a Showy Ladyslipper in the woods

unseen by all except

chipmunks (scrabbling adept

through silent clerestories of dead

cedars) Hobo strayed, from Ursus

Major to St. Apollinaire;

he was no Big Fish, barely

a minnow Star du Nord (Jesus

his seine-maître, toiling away

upstream).  America

steamed on, formica-

sleek, pregnant with Labor Day

& White-Tailed Rabbit & Polar Bear

looked on, from cell blocks

melting in the superflux.

The Man of Concrete was no longer there

(he’d cried himself to sleep).  Henry

by a berried Berryman

stood by, his Resurrection

Plot cartooned in St. Paul snow (flaky);

apathetic Oblomov, at the gazebo

spied Olga in the distance –

wading through native plants

like sweet Cordelia coming to rescue

jet-bagged Lear.  Earth dangled

from one silver hair,

suspended over the bear-

cave (striped with blood, star-bangled).

9.7.16

"Pinecone", by Marcia McEachron

Quatrain by Yves Bonnefoy

Another stab at translation.  This is an untitled poem from Yves Bonnefoy's sequence "Le chant de sauvegarde" :


If the bird were torn into pebbles, you said,
He would be, aloft in his dawn sky, our shore.
But he, shipwrecked from harmonious vault,
Already sank weeping to the clay of the dead.

Rock Candy Neva-Neva trail

LIMESTONE PROFILE

The little white cabbage moth

& the dragonfly, following

Hobo down his bumbling

Rock Candy Neva-Neva path

beside the river.  Past the bridge

nearly finished, almost

restored... some ghost

dance out of Petersburg (knowledge

from chaste vision – redemption

blooming like a morning

glory – everything trembling

at the dawn of time – the Galilean

tacking in the wind across the lake

zigzagging like a monarch

slanting orange-black

over sumac, milkweed – to be forsaken

& his cup to take)...  So the dream of a girl

is the grail of a dream, when

startled Magdalen

beholds him (where fern-worlds unfurl).

Like a fiddlehead figurehead, a nettle

Beatrice, the dream ramifies;

what was there always

unveils, the whole sweet kernel-coracle –

as Hobo finds his bearings in the smile

of a limestone Ursus profile,

in the lofty Milky Whale

of a firefly Jonah (rainbow trail).

9.6.16

Late summer cricket

remote highways

DANCING BEAR

The multifarious facets of this vine

are emerald-veined, to catch

the sun – each tendril-latch

anchors cucumber to mosquito screen.

Shade-ravines along remote highways

or melancholy tamaracks

up north... waltz parallax

on Ocean Road (revolving maze).

Hobo, drowsing at Camp Who-He-

Who-She-Wah, slipped

down a culvert, overstepped.

His gravity condensed to mercury –

a silver thread of frozen fire;

sum of all his non-

action, his diffident un-

charity (dead fisheye in the mire).

As if the shining labyrinth,

Ariadne’s fever-chart,

led inward (part

angel, part beast).  One leaden plinth,

one stony-crumb foundation (churled).

One personal scar

of sorrow, raveled far

down Rua Tonimminotaur.  Pearled

diamond from Tsyan-Shizi, or

Marienbad – her glance

a glint, a last-chance-

ghost, a smile (for dancing bear).

9.2.16

Bonnefoy summer

Have been slowly reading and enjoying poems by the late Yves Bonnefoy.  Here's a rough translation of one of them, from the collection Hier régnant désert :

A VOICE

Nettle, O prow of this shore where it crashes,
O frozen upright in the wind,
Show me a sign of presence, O my servant
Robed in scaly black.

O grey pebble,
If it's true that you harbor the color of blood,
Rouse yourself from this blood coursing through you,
Open to me the door of your cry,

So that in you I draw near her
Who is pretending to sleep,
Head closed over you.

"Une Voix" (Yves Bonnefoy)

The Love of Poetry

Ben Lerner's much-bespoken book-length essay, The Hatred of Poetry, is built on a conceptual framework drawn primarily from Plato and one of Lerner's mentors, the late poet Allen Grossman.  Allen Grossman and I, as it happens, attended the same high school in Minnesota (in classes exactly 20 years apart).

Although I admire Grossman's deeply-felt and magisterial writing (he produced a wonderful essay on Hart Crane), I've never taken to his theoretical perspective, his philosophy of poetry.  Nor do I agree with Ben Lerner's recent extrapolation, here, of some of those concepts.

I wrote an piece called "The Love of Poetry" in response.  It's not a review.  I try to mimic Lerner's anecdotal, autobiographical style in order to draw different conclusions.  The essay was published today by the online journal DISPATCHES, and you can find it here.