Red Wing colors

TWIN WINGS

Sun through winter clouds, light

grays, pale blues...

Red Wing colors –

Mississippi stoneware (molded tight).

The heavy clay, churned by the river.

Earth forms distend,

disintegrate... days end,

begin... arrows in a quiver

of darkness.  Black Sea, cold, dead.

Salt lashing the eyes,

unseeing eyes – Oedipus

in his beast maze (Minotaur Ed).

Bruegel with his traps & nets.

Sardonic Injun Joe.

Taut lips of Little Crow.

To the bottomland we go, eaglets –

where Janus wrestles in the ice

with icon of his father.

Horned (narwhal weather).

Stars nest in a pair of dice.

High in stretched vaults of shade

stone elms lean down

over a golden corn-

maze (Ariadne made).

Light-roping constellations chant

reunion, reconcilement –

on twin wings of prairie-tent

coulombe (your ghostly complement).

1.31.17

slab of puddingstone

ALMOND LEAF

My lovely Providence, a microcosm

in the ruins of modernity.

Gray pebble by the sea,

colonial casque.  Slow periplum

around a clamshell iron rim –

like horseshoe crab

with buttresses, or slab

of puddingstone Bermuda-dream.

Today’s your birthday, spiny Jenny.

Evergreen of grief

& joy – almond leaf

of love’s firm spiral (funny

soul’s integrity).  You showed me

Piero della Francesca –

candid paisan Maria

pendulous with incendiary

monochord (trompette marine).

You showed me Providence

over your mother’s dense

grass gravestone (swan depression).

April is your azimuth;

mine too.  The cave

where Earth’s a voided grave,

where Berryman’s a vernal mouth.

Cicadas of Apollinaire

buzz over Île-de-France.

The veil of Adams’ Isis

tears – Columbia croons everywhere.

1.30.17

Newport, RI (near Berkeley's Seat)

These Are the Times

Hyper-formalism & the Long Henry Poem

I made a simple creative decision about 4 years ago.  I knew I was about to embark on yet another long serial poem (I've written about 9 of them).  I decided that the individual parts (the separate poems) within the whole thing should be, if possible, more free-standing.

In part, I wanted to make my writing more accessible.  I wanted more magazines to accept my poems for publication (always a real struggle for me).  In order for that to happen, these smaller parts would have to be more autonomous, complete in themselves.  They would need separate titles, not just "Lanthanum bk. 12 no. 28" & the like.

The titles were the easy part.  My plan has only been partially successful.  But partial is better than nothing.  I've landed a few pellets of the new poem (Ravenna Diagram) in various magazines : Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Journal of Poetics Research, West Branch, Notre Dame Review, Truck, Battersea Review...

This is a step forward for me.  I've probably written more poems, and published less, than any poet in America.

Part of the problem is, I'm not consistent.  I make resolutions & then go the other way.  I resolved a year ago not to post so many poems on this blog, & then I did the opposite.

Not only that - I also alienate potential & previous friends and publishers.  Things go awry.  I've come to the conclusion that there are various subtle patterns shaping these frustrating encounters.  Real books only emerge because they were meant to be.  Or because your deepest affinities have finally borne fruit - by grace, by miracle, you meet the small publisher who's been waiting all this time for you.  Kismet.

My waxing voluble here is due to the fact that I'm unwinding.  I'm celebrating the successful finish of book 9, Ravenna Diagram.  & I'm nearing the halfway point of this hyper-formal poem.  It presently stands, or sits, at about 510 pp.

I know where I'm going (as in the old Isle of Mull film).  The poem has a plan for me.  Sort of a sand mandala, shaping itself up with little voodoo flicks of sandy fingertips.  An hourglass in the form of canoe.

It's a Leaves of Grass kind of mumble-saunter.  It's a mummer's walk around a golden labyrinth - a traditional Crane Dance, performed by a blind man (mesmerized).

That's why the blog has proved so seductive & essential.  It's both immediate and chronological; it walks with me on my planetary seasonal rounds.

The poem is a stone fallen from heaven; no one will judge it.  Osip Mandelstam.

I'm trying to exemplify & prove the truth of this statement.  Of course, there is a social cost involved.  If you try to go around the distinguished cultural authorization channels, you will, most assuredly, be branded an outcast, an interloper.

Someone has probably written a treatise on the mutual co-dependence of High Society and Literature (maybe at the New Yorker?  or Paris Review?  Kenyon?  Harvard?).

On the other hand... please understand... I harbor no animus toward Society.  I am, simply, a poet caught in the net of hyper-formalism.

& what, you may ask, is hyper-formalism?

Hyper-formalism is the emergence of a form out of the necessary logic of a theme.  The theme, you could say, is the fate of the poem - & its fate determines its form.

Fate is, naturally, a dramatic force : a force for drama.  & poetry is the mimesis, the dramatization, of fate.  So poetry has discovered its vocation, finally - it's a mumbling medium for the human theatre.

& what if the fate of the poem - its theme - is to be a kind of local, allegorical embodiment of (universal, elemental) truth?  The poem veers toward prophecy... the poet veers toward seer... toward manifest Logos...

A stone fallen from heaven.  You begin perhaps to comprehend & forgive the orientation toward immediacy, toward "unsponsored" speech.

I've devoted most of my life to these verbal snares, these long-walk dream songs.  It's been a joy & a challenge.  I'm stepping blindfolded around a maze on the floor of Chartres cathedral.  Ariadne is the thread.  The Earth lies underneath.

Hobo's continental centrifuge

PACIFIC VOYAGE

Hobo, hunching by the great river

in winter’s clamp, peers

like an Okie Okeanos

through the ice-floes’ ripple-shivers –

through the wavy shimmer, down

through faint diffractions

where the light shines

back... a silver mirror-sun,

layering her limestone shells.

A simple madeleine

(stone crumblevine,

gray rock-dove oval) wells

from the giddy stream in limpid echoes.

Raven in Voronezh,

Cautantowwit knife-edge

grips sun in her beak – light glows

like Pearl Harbor in eclipse.

Her lunar lance shall pierce

the mule’s gray hide.  Ears

perk for Jonah’s salty lips

molded like canoe gunnel

to mime Columbia.

Her dove-insignia

frames Sophie-ship – her funnel

rays its calumet of light

above the pyramid

(violent power-grid

of barbed-wire fraud, not quite

                 *

extinguishing that Evening Star

glancing so tender yet

steadfast – a mauve fishnet

looping beneath flame’s Icarus-car).

Hobo is Jonah now, in Ocean River.

The voice beneath the sea

is like a Kievan harmony –

perpetual melody of live-forever;

her flute-throat flickering dusky rings

like rain-drenched iris

round the throne of Isis –

Hagia Sophia in a peacock’s wings.

The river chimes in Hobo’s ears

of many waters, laughing,

crying.  Wingèd seraph,

sister-sibyl, swirl his tears

& yours into the continental

centrifuge (in Center,

North Dakota).  There

the massive gravity of all

Columbia hums into monarch flight –

a raven-transmutation

of infernal nation

to green cedar habitation (night

Pacific voyage of your soul).

Hobo watched the fluttering

lift-off, slowly muttering –

milkweed seed, sail; Ocean, roll.

1.26.17

beneath gray Bruegel sky

WAVE-CRADLE

Crows ink beneath gray Bruegel sky.

A line from A to B

zigzags spacetime – see?

So raven vanishes in Noah’s eye.

Between two points, a yawning Ocean.

Infinite intensity

of black-hole density

draws yesterday into its spin.

What is your personal specific gravity?

The poem is gray pebble,

obscure soldat (trouble

for no one).  Ordinary Smitty

whose greatcoat pocket holds an agate.

Lodestone of a jay

tracing King’s Highway

into the calyx of a ruse (checkmate).

It is Path P, the chi-rho

branch – diamond

mandala of almond;

Black Elk milk road (ey yo).

Love is the tread between twin pillars –
only a glance of weightless

spiderweb.  Inverness

of vernal tenderness... wind, stars...

when the bow sways in its wave-cradle

& Ithaca, Iona, Eire

lift like green fire

Skye-perpendicular – familiar grail-dreidel.

1.25.17

shade of fig trees

OAKEN ARK

I remember the tall shade of fig trees

on Observatory Hill

in Sydney, their colossal

spread feet lifting leafy memories.

The diamond hologram glinting

upstairs – the Southern Cross

a silver doubleness,

a micro-mirror (winking, hinting).

Dante in Ravenna, on the coast

of swamps & tamaracks

the scars of Whites & Blacks

scorching his palm (a sulfur-host)

felt a light flute-breeze ruffle

his conch-shell ear

whispering draw near –

beheld Matilda waltz the Buffalo

(an aboriginal design

painted on granite

for Woodpecker-flight

framing two Thunder-twins benign)

& plumbed the gravity of clay

that wheels so slowly

through mortality

toward candescent kiln-fired Day

of Jubilee   the metamorphoses

of starfish realms to stars

the green & gold pillars

of corn & wheat   Georgina’s

laughter in the new-mown fields.

So her green-almond eyes

drew Alighieri to Vitale’s

arc of Paradise (welds

souls into an infant baptistery,

a fan of everlasting

life).  Interesting,

murmurs iconoclast Henry

Hobo   but I would bend the lens

slightly   enfold the ray

into a Bay of Biscay

alphabet soup   Beguine begin-agains

based on an anchored oaken ark

of milky bread & wine

the whole human communion

in the sun of mnWmn (spark

from a Galilean jewel of light).

Inside the delicate crystal

gently circling... still

potter’s whirl from infinite night

around the whisper gallery

Twine Monastery

pregnant humble glory

of Francesca (Piero’s poverty)

leaves mutter in the sea-breeze

just beyond the orange

bridge   Georgina’s Grange

the dusty gardeners   Maria sees

1.24.17

poem in memory of Mark Baumer

DOVE’S FEET

                             i.m. Mark Baumer

The poem’s wobbly orrery

of airy ore is self-

correcting, like an elf

inside a gyroscope.  Unwary

cheerful troubadour, he walked

barefoot across these states

joking at potentates

to heal a hurt planet – balked

by Mammon, Moloch (vanity,

acedia).  The white van,

an indifference machine

in seething Florida... such petty

wreckage snaps a sapling tree.

The jungle broods, silent.

Her gentle ape’s extinct.

Minotaur mutters his poetry.

We have not learned the lesson of

the golden bowl.  We tread

the fractures on a head

of Incan stone (grey mourning dove).

Coatlicue is raging at

her funeral.  Splinters

of daylight almost pierce

the warped crossweave – chariot-

spokes of angry Manitou.

Thunder comes soon.

The light’s deep green.

The land is ripe for tornado

                  *

when Francis ambles right past you.

A river of pink peonies

surges through cities...

salty labyrinth in Dallas blue.

Her pillbox hat, his scattered bran.

Unnatural shocks (that flesh

is air, too).  Gold mesh

of tangled fleece... your Ariadne-

champion.  All-suffering rabbi

who declares : the violent

bear it away   rent

robes of kind Melchizedek   mild

eye of Isis   throned in adamant

warm heart of Magdalen

at almond gate   Open...

Joseph’s weathered rainbow-garment.

The poem’s just an ornery gray stone.

The slash of Cain that clouds

its brow irks human crowds –

has not been stitched til now.  Atone,

Adams.  Icons through unworthy

lips break into clay

rivulets & melt away –

your only balm is Charity,

sole antidote to Jealousy.

Spring comes on mild

dove’s feet... her wild

breeze from the open sea.

1.23.17

on the verso

HAWTHORN BLOOM

There were verses on the verso of 

the parchment, leaching through

like spidery veins (blue

robin’s-egg hen-scratches... mazel tov).

Imprimature of sovereignty.

Blood-red wax of Charles

sealing the 6-foot chart

of Little Rhody liberty;

beehive of ancient freedoms

rooted in that right

Coke labored to indite –

of persons to their own kingdoms

of thought, & conscience, & truth.

For Roger Williams,

riveting I AM –

rhaptor soul Nazirim, forsooth.

Because that bird circling the oak

is like a thread that knots

the agate to the plot’s

ripe dénouement.  The thunder spoke

& stone rose   like a double-ax

out of the mountain-wave

laddering Jacob’s cave

a grail-casket   for sweet St. Max

whose dream became   a vernal tomb

across the womb of Magdalen

& made of Joshua   a wren

& Henry Sol   a hawthorn bloom

1.21.17

love & reason

GREY PEBBLE

Chris the carpenter, who came

to work on the kitchen today

grew up in Kentucky

(Louisville).  Stabled in the same

horse-town as cousin Julie, Uncle

Jim.  Heard the JFK

Inaugural, just yesterday.

Born in ’63.  Like a carbuncle

burst on history, his red hair

oscillated in

the wind (a Bruegel vine

for allegorical enmity).  Who there?

The difference between love & reason.

Conversion of the Jews

(persecution blues).

Crusaders, conjuring their notion

of Coulombe.  It’s about love

of the idea of love.

Been there, dove

that (through bronze dry ice dove).

Stone stumble on itself.

Luminous millwheel

like a cloudy meal...

ornery small emerald elf

in limelight (grey pebble,

desolate Black Sea).

No one care, see.

Is only poetry (silly rebel).

1.20.17

Roll on, America

fault-line tattoo

GLASS TEAR

Step by shaky step, lame Hobo

spirals the lead-grey hump,

an awkward salience – dump

or agate-hold?  He doesn’t know.

Like Doc Woodpecker, peppering

the old birchbark, testing

the ribs for air – a ring

of hollow knock-knock, worm-hurling.

The sap running... a red thread

of civet.  Venison

oozing from the cauldron.

There’s no going back to the dead.

In the splendor of the west window

a minute glass tear

bisects its mirror –

eggshell splinter twixt Église & you.

My almond diamond, mutters Hobo.

Ring around the rosy,

let’s all go see

Thunderbird (hear the wind blow).

Notes of a flute, along the river.

Ocarina in the woods.

Hums through stray moods

of autumn... Black Elk (Indian giver).

You trace the zigzag coral coil –

a Queequeg scar, knifed

into casket-crown.  Life-

line for Jonah.  Rachel’s whorl-oueil.

1.19.17

in the whisper gallery

BROKEN SHELLS

My mater’s feet, that spun the heavy

wheel of Red Wing clay

dancing with gravity

to shape a starfish gaiety

for these galactic lunch plates, pink

& blue & white... her Ravlin

hands (out of that Iowan

earth Quaker Negus trunk)

were muddy with the garden soil

of Minneapolis-

St. Paul... O this

most plain midwestern gopher hole!

The soul stages a circus act

of spacy time, perchance –

her gyroscopic balance

tops an unknown Planet X, in fact

& dream.  Mary’s crafty fingers

rhymed those blue-&-white

starbeams with one fleet

bathtub tug... her name lingers

in flame & memory (Sophie).

Like Firebird in the Russian

symphony, my swan-

boat swallowed up Eternity

consumed by cigarette-smoke blaze

in Petersburg poet’s

birdnest (Elena Shvarts) –

pipestoned into a purple haze.

                   *

I pace your clay circumference

in sleep.  My blind alley

or whisper gallery

is domed – an acorn’s happiness

or Okie’s California – inward

mother-of-pearl, bent

parallactic as a mint

wrapper... green mirror-bird

soaring from rusty copper frame

into the theatre of sky.

Your crossroad, ply on ply

flexed on sine-wave of Ever-Same

& in the dust of the Ecclesiast

of human brokenness

inherited faiblesse

& all the suffering, from East to West

one mighty spindly tree, one pine

of cloudy poetry

swirls, fiddlehead – sea?

Transmodulation of the sign,

en face!  To pivot on the least

of these... gray wing

of Jonah, mutely lifting

from the broken shells... the Beast

stung by remorse (Guillem d’Orange)

– stick figure of the Son of Man

familiar, somehow – someone

you must have met, somewhere... étrange!

1.18.17

elephant burials

SOFT RIVERBEND

Snowflakes crystallize, unique

& elegant.  Mandala-

knots (of ice).  Then follow

the sun, like dew in a raven’s beak.

Into the rain, the river, Ocean.

Heart’s slow dilation.

Sunken beams of pain,

of petrified love... beyond reason.

Light tracks of salt, the tears

of trees.  Sacrament

of speechless element –

elephant burials.  Fallow years.

Inarticulate, dumbfounded soul.

The knowledge of the end

in each soft riverbend –

her fingerprint, on clay bowl.

Dreams gather, so.  The dream.

A curly wave of sheep

threading from the deep

time-meadows.  Trim trireme,

bearing a casket wrapped in fleece –

matrix of Paradise,

grail-caduceus

lifting each Jonah to release.

The air murmurs immortal Spring;

your friend is limping sweetly

by your side.  The tree

of Galilee is blossoming.

1.17.17

with malice toward none, with charity for all

BIRCH-BEE

                  i.m. MLK

We walk together on a zigzag path

tracing the death of kings

miming crow’s wings

of trickster history – wrath

bursting yellow-orange (balloon

for Apollinaire,

strange signal-flare

scripted for carrier pigeon)

like scars of Mars across an unknown

martyr-soldat (Eeyore-

Verman, smoked as of yore

in mustard-bowl of Bosch-demon)...

Glassed like a pair of broken bifocals

the earth’s blind O

& heaven’s diving zero

mesh in the crosshairs (personals

coulombe).  Shepherd’s last calendar

(yours, mine, ours).

Beyond blank stares

of slate, in Arctic Cimetière –

beneath Jonah’s anchor, tattooed

by Minotaur... one homing

turtledove draws OMO

in red chalk.  Graphite étude

of pensive Milky Way... orant

abysmal honey-beard’s

raven-rose word

lifting light birch-bee ark (aslant).

1.15.17

rowing to Kiev

RAZOR BEAK

The human family of human

families – clay

honeycomb array

in earth-colors – aims for a zone

of radiant plenitude – sustained

chord from a horn of plenty,

hived in community –

a milk-&-honey land, ingrained

along a cedar path of goodness

clear as winter air

warm as Apollinaire

chanting his biplane with finesse

Parisienne.  A Spirit of St. Louis

circling the blazing crown

of Liberté floats down

into the eagle-nest of Chartres

whose rose rim complements that Gate

of soaring human freedom

anchored to the thrum

of one great river’s beating heart.

So pictures flicker in the stream

of Mississippi dream

for one forlorn sunbeam

or hazel-mote, her gypsy scheme...

one footloose soul, one rambler

who would be gone from jail

before the frozen hail

of Hitler-Stalin-Xi-Putin (& gambler

Kim Jong-un) congeals into one

mammoth concrete hulk

of tearful despot-sulk –

one massive Man of Unknown

Snowjobs – Don the Golden Duck-

&-Coverling, the Beast

who gives offense the most

& smears the human face with muck.

So honchos of the earth lift up

their horns, a little while;

they cannot reconcile

their pride with that ineffable fop

who spins the elegant galaxies

here to infinity

              *

right from eternity

& lifts the heart to ecstasies

of fellowship & harmony –

the sparkling of justice

mercy   righteousness

high paths of gentle charity

Saturnian rings of human union

knotting the universe

within one Paradise

plainsong (trompette marine).

The turbid tumult of the beaten-down

rattles the reeds, troubles

the swarming crows – bubbles

explode – all the high-flown

rhetoric disintegrates under

the trampling of grass

by panicked herds (alas).

& yet there is another thunder

gathering in clouds above the oaks,

beneath the sea – low hum

of some beehive continuum –

sun-wheel, whose fiery spokes

feather to wings of Thunderbird –

enormous golden shade

whose raptor-beak’s a blade

of dragon-prow – Norsemen’s weird

serpent-egg on river-tree

sailing to Kiev, now –

St. George’s silver plow

upturning soil to poetry

salting the roots of tyranny

to shrivel them at last

beneath a trumpet-blast

of global human sovereignty –

the almond salience of a union-dome

bright coins of humanism

ringing a cataclysm

for every fraudulent kingdom

& every despot on the earth.

This eagle’s razor beak

has just begun to speak –

a tender rain, wisdom & truth.

1.14.17

in the conning tower

SALT PATTERN

Sophie sketching a choo-choo train

in blue crayon, & a trio

of engines in bright yellow-

black (Union Pacific) planing

across a dented overpass

share the light matrix-

argot of a peacock’s

fan-continuum (sea-surface).

Your eye that opens like a morning

glory forged into fusion

stronger than the sun

this amorous union, splendoring

a plume – your planet, raveled into

one.  Its gyroscopic

spin is geodesic

liftruweight – a feathery canoe

scaled up the hoary Nile to be

fair, kind & true

(peacock’s mosaic view

breathing accordion transparency).

Who then can be my enemy?

Why do the ogres rage

& tinpots ruse to stage

mock war upon me?  Jealousy?

from lambent arboreal North

snow slants softly down

a rose meridian

to blanket aboriginal South

                *

radiant in sibylline East

as tawny dogwood leaf

light welds a choral reef

to Liberty’s gull-dappled West

A shady chess piece in the tower

angles shark advantage

with a flanking edge –

the twisted blade, the bribe’s power;

on prison railroads to the pole

pecking iron grain

by long division

sowing lizard’s teeth (drum roll)

all for a subterfuge of thieves

who plant not (neither

shall they hive)... where

then their homing in the sheaves?

Like a black hole torn through

ice-gilded armor, light

gravity sets right

your kayak’s calm ellipse (true

almond eye, beaming beyond

all scheming pyramids).

Whose birchbark lids

one cosmic hexagon – fond

snowflake angel-star – salt

pattern at the end

of Everychild’s roadbend –

bright rainbow out of Ocean vault.

1.13.17

traveling Walter Whitman

ALMOND-SEAL

A luminosity of grays

above the winter river.

Bands of peach, & silver.

A quiet surge past Pig’s Eye,

which became St. Paul.  John

Berryman sleeps on a bluff

nearby.  Once is enough

for everyone (a long time gone).

One casket will suffice.  Paul

was Saul once; an orange

angel flared so strange

his blade curved into burial.

He felt the change upon his skin.

So Queequeg tingled

where the needle angled

in.  The tattoo (Ecuadorian

gold) blood-red – indelible

recapitulation

(via serpentine

Cain-crozier) of Abe-Ape’s edible

ancestry (just incredible).

The primate history

of human mystery

incarnate in a star (blind, Oedipal)

                   *

who fell to earth, not far from here.

& like Walt Whitman, wandered

swamp-deltas... milk-&-honeyed

Hobo meadows... (poplar, cedar)...

all the way to San Francisco.

Golden Gate grandeur

sparkling orange-azure

not one whit less marvelo

than Solomon’s Templo.  Yet neither

will surpass one friar wight

who flutes across deep night

his piccolo arpeggios (Breather-

Bro to Sister Sigh-Nature)

lifting his humble sign’s

Venetian-blind design

beneath that glory-span – sheer

delicatesse of silver threads

raveling safety net

for one slight violet

(shorn, scarred by callous crowds).

She is your Imogen, who keeps

weight balanced on a wire;

fleet-footed candlefire,

light houseboat over frosty deeps,

your witty Sophie – at the wheel

of supernatural law –

sailing toward Awe

full-smile (lips compassing her almond-seal).

1.11.17

one common wheel

YELLOW TOY

Snow mantles the outstretched granite hand

of Roger Williams, floating

with benevolent feeling

over Providence.  Understand

this pioneer of liberty –

a spark from Edward Coke

whose Temple accent spoke

one common wheel of dignity

the lawful root of sovereignty

beyond despotic whim

in a vibrant realm

of transparent equality.

Within the wigwam of Canonicus

wings of Cautantowwit

Whitsun tide-light

new sign from lofty Okeanos –

Manitou beyond the earth.

Life of Miantonomi

lost on Path P

Christos   locked on Golgotha

the bread cast on the salt waters

returns as octahedral

diamond   of every soul

the living ground.  These gray matters

of galaxies   our origins

in chaste velocities

of Raven-sighs

are reconciled where Time begins

      *

in mid-most mind (O Adonai)

where gyroscopic spins

of corny gold Whitmans

drift from mosaic cupolae

Ravennas of ecstatic joy.

O lift the everlasting

Gates!  The iron spring

gives way – unleashes yellow toy

across the planetary warp –

Ariadne’s shuttle flies

arranging swift surprise

in Chartres maze, her fleecy harp

sounds rustic harmony

(rose choral wreath

of unison, beneath

mild luminous clerestory).

The ancient pattern of the whole

reflects an irrepressible

adoring Psyche – able

to melt each calcified soul

& mend the fractured skeleton

all shattered out of reason

to dehumanizing treason

(haughty deflections of half-men

swept up into strange self-defeat

by heart’s amnesia)...

Help them, Columbia!

Mercy makes Providence complete.

1.10.17