his ping-pong twang

WINTER HARBOR

John Berryman, at the Guggenheim

with Robert Lowell

(twins of the groundswell

‘60s – gyrfalcons of the time)

relates a cutting parable

to illustrate poetic

speech.  Paternalistic

hot-shot banker plunks edible

& butler-polished gift-apple

into tot’s trick-or-treat

bag... You big shit!

yells kid – you crushed the crap

out of my cookie! (Guggenheim

giggles).  Jokes take place

in Minneapolis – this

much-derided mini-apple (rhymes

with Big).  Poet’s last home.

Dust-devils & tornadoes

fill his Oklahoma shoes.

His ping-pong twang off spiral womb

booms (sepulcher-recording)

up the ascending ramp

of modern art (Duchamp

is, Mr. Bones).  & there be something

weird ‘bout Henry – year-long

yearning in the yearling

lurching at spring –

light from Evening Star (so long!)

                  *

glancing toward Morning Star

across a black-iced

Mississippi (nice

Minnesota teeth, or solar flare).

The holm oak is an evergreen.

Turned inside-out, grief

lifted underleaf –

a pale moss-light, Nativity scene.

Like that Natasha veering toward

her lonesome labyrinth,

whose airy terebinth

fills sails of summer shade –

whose fluttering eyelids well up

with incomparable

change.  As in the parable

of viceroy in treetop –

evanescent black-&-yellow

wings’ twin semaphore

your sign-lingo, your

promise of new life (tomb-slow,

lentissimo).  The snarky raven

& the tremulous dove –

the starlings’ chatter-trove

amid bare, barren limbs... Olympian

Zeus rattling his thunder-oak

will never leave this winter

harbor – mangy splinter,

tuneful cove – spooky light-spoke.

12.22.16