the flicker of a flicker

SHADY IMAGO

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow

of a raven overhead

with the sun in his beak – dead

noon in Jerusalem – I will fear no

evil.  The rabid orangutan

with his orange comb

trumpets drastic doom

for milky stars – the Black Son

of Memphis & his Romany

Hobos (a gospel band)

– he doesn’t understand

the music.  Where‘s the harmony?

Under a ruin of reconstruction,

the rusty copper scaffold

of jealousy (green mold)

they glimpsed a revelation

of plain limestone floor – the sepulchre

where Jesus lies in state,

briefly (before the great

grey wings translate to their obscure

futurity).  Along a Mississippi

sedimentary ridge, I spied

the quick white-gold

Ionian flicker of a flicker (underbelly

lambsdown curvature aloft)...

Io?  from Iowa?

Some swift sky-cow

out of Abyssinian abyss?  Soft...

                    *

I hear her owl’s wing whisper

through the silence.  Nut-

brown acorn chariot,

a whorl of grey cloud-matière...

Gödel’s self-interference, weft

of Maximus bard-

beard (sun tangled

with midnight, O infinitely deft

monarch)... Apollinaire in blue

kepi (the unknown soldier

waiting out the end of war)...

twin silver doves that mirror you

upon a double door from Mexico.

O Guadalupe – heart-

encrypted grail-casket –

cedar & cypress womb-Argo

whose planet is moss-green tomorrow –

bend down to sister Psyche

now, unknot my

Tauromachia; Raven’s shady Imago

unfolds a lantern crown of light.

Out of the cthonic hills

of frightened, haunted wills

a laughing stream called Make-It-Right

(the Minnehaha of the minnow tar)

floats Moses-coracle

to Dawn (original

lodestone – morning North Star).

11.4.16