Rose Island Light

HIGH C

Hobo takes his descending path

sloping to the great river.

What can he give her,

steady Delta Queen, to stanch the wrath?

Past frigid walls of enmity

feathered with graffiti –

a rust-red major C

like an iron magnet... Rimini

or Cleveland?  Venice, maybe –

where the blind king lies,

his crazed hawk’s eyes

closed (petrified) beneath the sea.

The crane dance of the manic poets

circles the salted harbors

of the Gulf.  The Earth bears,

pining, their smoldering caskets

toward one windy maelstrom-vortex –

matrix of Rose Island Light.

Human massif, beaming bright

rotating manna-sun, whose Artifex

is spoked with rays like peacock’s eyes;

radiant Ancient of Days

out of the heart of praise

within a ring of living creatures

breathing fire against the cold

accidia, the starved

& shriveled souls carved

with the scar of Queequeg’s mappemunde

                   *

the raven-star, the midnight sun.

& the Nazir of poets chants

one Galilean entrance –

lacustrine circle, Aquarian –

out of the sea as rapt Columbia,

planetary bird of clay;

cloud-shade of Day

for restoration of Terra Incognita.

Hobo beheld this mighty mandala

like a rose wheel of limestone

light, through human bone

& muscle, limbs & ligament, figura –

tattooed by Piero della Francesca

as a mirror for your glance –

as Miriam in moody trance

harbors the light ray’s umiltà.

Like the Hart of Marsden Hartley

in a rose from the sea,

in a sea-knell’s 33,

out of the sunken chest floats free

the vision of immortality –

Love’s salty clarity

spouts from the clay

enchanted unison, octave’s high C.

So Hobo lay in his muddy riverbed

south of St. Louis.

His clay revolved; his

turtledove hummed overhead.

2.28.17