we were there at the opening

Minnesota Symphony (head in the dear lights)

SACRE DU PRINTEMPS
                                                  if a Greek could see our games...

Stravinsky, Sacre du Printemps.

We were there at the opening,

brimming Finn conducting

momentum – thunderclaps & stomps

revive   tired 20th century

Apollinaire   in wings

puffing peace pipe rings

heart-knots   knock-knock (really

Thunderburnt acceleration).

Sacajawea, limping

the cornfield, keening

high lonesome   milky halcyon

mother-of-pearl   a sacrifice

of Mendelssohn   &

pirouettes   rose islands of

melodious romance   (deep ice

instead).  The violence inbred

in Gothic bones   Poe’s

charnel House of Horrors

under clerestory lines   All dead,

alas   Jessie   Ophelia

sweet dark-eyed river-

daughter   (Prospero,

Moses)   a scent   selah

shelled corn   shellacked

by hangrin’ guilty guile

in lime   hid   laid   Ile

fit you   Why?   Hack’d

               *

be the hackers   ice cracking

at the end   some munster

python swallowing your

Sonny Man (ut one thug lacking)...

Little mote, little penny, tiny

splinter in your eye

Ford Theatre   The King

Must Die   in Memphis   on a balcony

lowly motel   or mangy inn

It had to be done, someone

must’ve said   musty felon

or gypsy   jew-boy   coon

& we all in on it   even FBI

even Adlai Stevenson

some historical person

Hubert Humphrey (or I’ll be J)

– the pressure-cooker of The War

to End All   Wilson   Geraldine

Fitzgerald   Cymbeline

or Everybud   the boar-hound or

the bore   deflect the arrows of

your .44 (or .45)   Merved

orange Grifter   Vertigo

(the movie)   someone’s flic’v love

home run   9th inning   must be

some kinda way outa here

I don’t want to be the deer

in the headlights, Maggie   help me

3.30.17

in the zigzag brambles

A GAP

The effect of insight is a sway

of blindness.  Hobo stumbles

in the zigzag brambles.

Fractured fractal frater Francese

camouflaged beneath the Franklin Bridge

(Brownian motion

through a brown mountain

of thorny lozenges & Persian sedge).

The little we see is like a microdot.

A pimple on an eager

pupil – light more meager

in the spokey distance than we thought

– a black hole at its vanishing

girdled with gold penumbra.

His hairs are all numbered,

Galla... fine fit for banishing.

& out of Purgatory rose the diamond

circled by dark chocolate figs

in Sydney.  Wisdom’s digs

are Solomon’s life-shade (moribund

quincunx in the quipu knot);

mild oil of Cyrus

poring shaky chess

wi’ Vladimir, in Paradise (not

Petersburg – Neva). & milky

black, El K arrays

6 ribbons in a Coke display –

the cosmic fizz is finished, Blackie

                    *

Pushkin (Abyssinian catastrophe).

I sense a communion

in an eyelid’s tear-borne

Rimini.  Her ruffled water-symphony,

her Moth Star – bracketed by wagon-

train or Charley-horse –

rose (by reverse Morse

code, or languish tombsk) to fill a flagon

slithered by play claw (dogwood

& oaken twig matter,

merged in a stream-mutter

toward Troezen crown).  Shivered

the Quaker grave.  Some Isis-ghost

of prodigal Ox-Iris lifted

Isaac from the scripted

crumb – some rose Mosaic host,

some chorus of arboreal grief.

Pacific prescience,

aquiline benevolence

ring from that innocence (belief

by kid in Hart’s magnanimous

Columbia-flow).  A simple

crossroad marks the ample

shadow every Geraldine or Uncle

Roger filed, & Dickey bird loves

just this – reciprocal

acknowledgement of all

a gap entails (Thanksgiving doves).

3.29.17

crest of Summit Avenue

DIVERS STARS

Brune muscle-bound mansion of J.J. Hill

on the crest of Summit Avenue

surveying the valley where two

rivers join – where the railways spill

from St Paul to Seattle (Great

Northern empire, spread

with iron & steel).  O head

taskmaster, engineer, we celebrate

Twin Cities’ renaissance beneath

your wood-burnt work desk

(Richardsonian Romanesque) &

spiderweb of railroad ties (gold sheath

of Gilded Age gloaming, applied

so lovingly above

the banquet table).  Move

across the river, where they hid

Rez Cemetery on the bluffs.

There Berryman is buried

too (J.J. expired

on a May 29th).  Henry still huffs

& hovers overhead.  Clouds bank

their gray matter in shapes

like dolphins, angels... apes

ape each other, rank on rank

while divers stars shed Ocean light.

From Romanesque to Gothic

unison, one fractured brick

serves as keystone – wound tight

                 *

as Daphne or Coatlicue

rooted in broken clay

await another day

when Churnagogue stirs milky

honey   & Apollinaire

attends his Rite of Spring

uncoiling everything

like smoke from Calumet (a Bear?).

Old poison lingers in the verbal mold.

The Sack-a-Jew sad cruiser way

shone from St. Louis ‘til today –

Lewis & Clark & our New World (behold

the Old).  Shoshone shone her pilot

smile, O Sacajawea.

Solid light, our Bona Dea;

stars’ Primavera (bolting nut

arced out of nought).  She dances there

in place of sacrifice –

her graceful feet efface

the facade over the serpent’s lair;

she is the Jonah from the Ocean depths

who croons grey wavy shapes

for blind eyes   leaps

with a Nazir tambourine   & skips

a cartwheel through the broken glass

spoking a Morning Star

within that tender rose   O far

Pacific angel door   lamb-glowing Mass

3.28.17

Dream song of reality

Just read Joshua Rothman's New Yorker profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett, his lifelong pursuit of a materialist, non-religious, un-mystical theory of consciousness.  Dennett steps out as a brilliant, original thinker, with an impressive science background (biology, mostly). And as an admirably enterprising DIY jack-of-all-trades.

I'm neither scientist nor philosopher.  But I have, like many another, puzzled over the question of "mind", this ancient (back to Epicurus, at least) divide between idealism and materialism.

Just a few off-the-cuff reactions to Rothman's Dennett.  He strikes me as a curious, searching person, whose stance toward nature is essentially that of an engineer.  He's interested in the mechanics of process - how things are done.  This is obviously necessary for science, an attentive approach which leads to discovery.  But it seems ironic that Dennett's view of consciousness - as a continuum, shared with other animals and living things - is not that different from the classic "chain of being" perspective of Aquinas (for one example).  That other animals exhibit a "sort of" consciousness (Dennett's term) - an evolutionary preview of the human mind - parallels the chain-of-being picture, only without the traditional hierarchical fence between "Man" & the rest.  For Dennett it's a flow.  & it seems he has focused passionately on explaining (theoretically) the how of it : how our sense of consciousness could arise from purely physical, evolutionary developments.

This is, I would say, the blind spot in Dennett's vision.  There are limits to the mechanical, analytical dissection of reality offered by biology.  Whatever conclusions he can draw from such analysis only serve to justify his prior conviction of the non-existence of an over-arching God, Spirit, or Mind - something which cannot be "proved" by such analysis anyway.

It seems to me that aesthetics & poetry, as well perhaps as some branches of philosophy, can offer a more valid perspective - because they are rooted in a sense of holism, a synthetic sense.

The poet and the artist register the fabric of the dream.  The theologian (or philosopher of God) articulates the analogical/anagogical synthesis.  Materialist attempts to disprove the reality of Mind or Spirit lack the tools to achieve it, first of all - and, secondly, are probably asking the wrong question.

The question, maybe, is not how, but why.  Why does this immense spectacle of the universe exist at all?  "We are such things as dreams are made on..." - but why?

I've always found the theological answer the most satisfactory.  Why the wonder of the cosmos?  The truest answer : it's a gift.  Why human consciousness?  The truest answer is a kind of geometric/analogical one : human consciousness, which governs (imperfectly) life on our planet, demonstrates an analogy - a sort of geometric parallel - with the divine Mind that governs (ineffably) Reality as a whole.  And history is basically a spectacular drama, unfolding the destiny of that governing mind or spirit, working through humanity toward some kind (or kinds) of definitive expression - call it "Providence".

The octave overcomes all wrath

its talons are for real

RAPTOR-SEAL

We moved through a smog thicker than coal-dust

filled with angry cries.

I couldn’t recognize

my guide, only her humming through a gust

of wind.  The moon was a copper disk

printed faintly rust-green

over that desolation –

like a hovering fingerprint, a mask

for Queequeg, Abraham – a penny

for Liberty, glinting

from the dark well (hinting

freedom, good will, where there wasn’t any).

A doubloon for Mammon flickered so

below shrouds of the Pequod –

many an aching tattoo would

echo in blood that talent for woe.

Marine Corps taps (trompette marine).

Memory shapes emblems

like coral wreaths... drums

weave light fleece mandala, copper green

& gold.  Like an iron spring wound

taut into infinity,

one Mendelssohn memory

emerges from my swampy ground –

the ancient plow we found, Heidi

& dragged back home together

through April weather

(iris blooming like a peacock’s eye

                    *

out of dead bulbs that never die).

The tarnished metallurgy

Iron Age surgery

some Raven-shaman shall (with high

& fluting Light Warlpiri) bring

might lift our eyes again

to one galactic common

wheel, that voices in Ark-Argo sing –

Hagia Sophias in Yezidi throng

to harmonize their peacock

tongues, & nations flock

to chime each footnote of a brazen gong.

The Word flies backward so, before Babel.

Its talons (like a raptor-

seal of olive-arrows) are

for real – to carry us from Hell

to Paradise, fledged by free will;

its almond eye (above

the pyramid) is Love –

forever fair & kind & true, until

the splendor of infant Creation

shines like Sacajawea

from green Equadoria –

justice & liberty combine

in meek Franciscan poverty

to weld the planetary

flora into Primavera

sunlight-gold... bright solidarity.

3.21.17 

Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 3.21.17

concrete Cleopatra

RESURRECTION CEMETERY

The river is calm, like a brown mirror

on the vernal equinox.

Moving through bifocals

of that lovable double oval (dear

Franklin Ave. Bridge).  Gliding

from Ojibwa marsh,

a trickle out of harsh

winters... a fluent continuum (abiding

parchment years, the tides of March).

On this sparse Minneapolis

spring morning, under clumps

of woolly cloud-cover, her twin M-arch

might make a 2-seat kayak for a monarch

(Manitou, Big Wind) –

swelling from wing-finned

goldfish to a whale (or Jonah’s ark).

The flimsy grey wool threads a quipu

knot.  Stravinsky’s right

to be so wrong : the lights

are snuffing out all over Europe...

the little gypsy girl must dance

to death (so we might live).

The crowd roars, GIVE.

Ariadne’s thread enwraps the lance

of Theseus, the hunter.  MINOTAUR

IS RUST (feed him tar-cakes

until he bust).  Stakes

are high – each gets an equal share

                     *

or else.  It’s the American way.

So speak plain English.

Royal myth be not the dish

we wish for now – try testimony.

They killed the King of the Milky Way –

lofty Melchizedek

(& his Irish sidekick,

his brother).  Sacrificial hay

for infinite Corn Goddess, maybe?

Don’t think so.  It is

& means to a dead end (his,

theirs, ours)... rewind the anthropology.

Anonymous shadow tilts toward sundown.

Ghost dance under trees.

He coming back, in threes –

the buried man, with his Papillon.

The guy in Resurrection Cemetery

(never gone, still here).

Can’t kill someone who never

died – so let’s undo all this necessary

violence (stand your ground, Hamlet

– until Ophelia’s dead gone).

The Shadow Knows (someone

whispers – my Dad?).  The blood is let.

It’s an old warped story, on the loom

of Time.  Peruvian lamb

sandwich, taken for a ham... a

concrete Cleopatra (equal to her doom).

3.20.17

Blues for James Cotton

Willow River twilight

ANOTHER YULE

Civilization is a natural good.

Valleys are honeycombed

with anthills – tombed

with moral titans (Lincoln would

live up to his Memorial).

Government’s innate,

then – our pleasant fate

to be so compagnevole,

says Alighieri (after Harry

Woodpecker).  D.C.

marbled with majesty

will have a double Jubilee

this year – May 29th (the K

of Camelot’s birthday);

crowds cry hurray

up to the pint of vanishing

& glory glory hallelujah.

I love my country too.

But pride, you know,

leads oft to suicide – King Saul,

alas, fell on his sword, & Henry’s

Clover (sad antithesis

of photosynthesis) was

mortised into concave penury

(her veil of Isis hoovered out

of Iowa).  Her star

twirls like Ishtar

above a Willow River twilight

               *

where gold prairie meets the far

horizon (at the green

mountain, where shriven

penitents climb to the door).

Pride be the world’s blockade.

Banners of orange black

& green (by Jasper Jack)

are complementary, not made

for nought.  Pete? Smoky Pete’s

still lively, though John’s

jotting paper crayons

with encaustic slivers now.  Wheat’s

blonde for Brother Jim’s Great

Purple Hairstreak – what

a butterfly!  Yet

there’s no sketchy moral shortcut

to self-centered celebrations

for a nation, in this world

of woolly worms curled

into cottonwood canyon-

cocoons.  No idle soul-solace

– an oxymoron in

the China cookie tin.

True penitence proceeds apace,

slowly, like Frank’s old shaky mule

inching to San Francisco.

Sorrow made your child go

sailing.  Grief tacks up another Yule.

3.16.17

the Ids of March

LITTLE ISLAND

                                the fallow air grows milky

The Rio shines in quietness,

mottled by fading ice.

Cato the Woodpecker is

prince of cottonwoods – his highness

tock-tocks like Railsplitter toward

the taproot of Twin Cities’

canker sores.  He’s

whittling his wooden law – a word

scrimshawn against all takers,

all Caesars of commonweal,

in the court of last appeal –

galactic axle of the makers.

Is this a holiday?  The soothsayer’s

a dreamer (pass, tense).

Cinna lost his innocence

mangled among conspirators –

murdering for liberty (the mob

took it another way).

Is this a holiday?

The Ids are on the march – to Nob

Hill, where nabobs are on fire

amid their books.  Moses

threw tomes into a rose-

bush (ruby thorn in rabid empire)

& King David warped his harp

with smooth rushes & grass –

his humble plant shall pass

anthills of Tyre, the minnow tarp

                   *

of Lucifer – the arrogant hare

shall slip behind the turtle

& the dove shall hurtle

like a hummingbird (plum everywhere).

The sea wind washes the shoreline;

she lifts my face toward

her calm sunlight.  The sword

shall pierce your own heart, Minute Man,

little island seeker after Liberty –

her candle glimmers, copper-

green, where grasshopper

& ant both anchor.  Charity

of Chartres, Maid of Orleans,

Spirit of St. Louis

circling toward Paris,

read us what soul freedom means –

infinite mercy & joy

lifting the universe

from snowy ovoidness

into a Shakespeare play –

late Mississippian romance

only the first people

have beheld.  Quadruple

diamond, sapphire expanse,

arc of a Southern Cross above

refulgent rose island –

we expiate... to understand

your ever-brimming streams of Love.

3.15.17

pileated woodpecker

then you shall have some pie

PIE SQUARED

Down by the Rio del Espiritu

Santo, the sun ignites

the pileated woodpecker’s

red-feathered crown.  The sky is blue,

the river flows, a serpentine

spark-shimmer, bending

rainbows to the engulfing

sea.  Dido’s shade will lean

forever toward the perimetric

oxhide rim of Carthage,

choking on her rage

with tears.  Dante’s epileptic

yearning for supernal Grace

paces her transcendental

number round a circle

of circles – like Angela Mace

Christian, or a greyhound, hunting

down that palimpsest

of muffled tracks (geist-

hand behind the arras bunting)

to find F. Mendelssohn at last –

well-tuned, unlucky sister

polishing her Easter

song (spliced to her brother’s mast).

& as my poem’s radius inches

toward her hemisphere,

its eigenvalues (fear

& hope) rhyme where it pinches

                     *

here in Mendelssohn, where children

in the shade of worlds

their parents made, unfold

a bruised & tender leaf-pattern.

The family circle is a dented

sphere.  Your twin cousin

became a ghost – the other one

a cryptic cosine (marginal)... prevented

on path P to blossoming, somehow

(obliquity of bad faith,

lack-love).  Now each wraith

in Dante’s bowl of wrath & woe

will step into your Mirror Lake

as into Galilee,

so you might slowly see

circumference of eternity – & make

amends.  Dido weeps by cave-door.

Moses goes home free,

his daughters over Lethe

summoned, as in play (Cleo,

Ophelia, Jessie...) by paddle-wheeler

quick, now, here, gone

like a Mississippian –

irrational Thanksgiving number

Guillem d’Orange (not neon, now,

but international,

beneath his Provençal

shade-grove) beheld – her wavy prow.

3.14.17

the crumbling infrastructure of democracy

TURTLE-DOME

On Coney Island of the West

in Lake Waconia

some paraphernalia

of archaeological interest

has surfaced.  Shards, arrowheads

of prehistoric hunters

peek from beachcombers’

pebble-piles, a gravel shed’s

debris (shale chips, random limestone

scrap).  America

was born of such disjecta

membranes.  Origins are alien.

The poem is gratuitous.

Nature is useless too –

a toy made out of blue

marble, flotsam, detritus.

Ocean is grey as morning twilight.

Clouds, frail shells, gull-

feathers.  Breakers roll

the whole toward a more perfect

Union (not quite).  The whole thing

needs but the slightest

nudge to knock the rest

into a nest of lovable, hurtling

good will... like Roger Williams’

Rogues’ Island – Rog’s

Island – paradox

of durable Rose Lighthouse beams

                     *

outlasting slander & contempt

spilled from sharp fork-

tongued human mark-

of-Cain mistrust.  None be exempt,

Pilgrim.  We all fall in the ditch

led by Venetian blinds men.

We have to clamber again

toward mutual forgiveness (each

to each) if we would be free, just

free (happy).  Restore

the crumbling infrastructure

of democracy – liable to rust –

with a sense of gratitude... play!

This is the order of the day

quadratic creatures cry

mounted on the fiery rim of a sky-

born Thunderbird.  Red Wing

was where she landed –

one cosmic six-handed

octahedral diamond bling-a-ling

like a yellow gyroscope   spinning

from the calyx of a rose

aubade   the center glows

with its own light... the winning

smile   an Okie restoration

out of an almond shell

riding her great sea-swell

vast   turtle-dome   Reunion

3.13.17

green grows the rusty O

GREEN RATION

Mighty Theseus was stuck in Hell,

strapped to a chair by Pluto.

Persephone’s no go.

Pennies clink in the wishing well.

The Blarney Stone’s a backward stretch –

cold kiss from pale ghost,

silky diner hostess

off the Isle of Man (unfinished ketch).

Snarled in the Underworld, Ariadne

warps him her cocoon...

a wee mummy pontoon

bridge, of air (soon, soon).  Erinye

Medea’s in the murk of crime,

stark raving grief –

Death offers no relief;

meek mercy must unspool this time,

unbind expiring rhyme.  Raven

Cautantowwit – wrathful

Coatlicue – skull-

wound knitting Golgotha-maven –

I ken your reddening woodpecker pate

all round our Oklahoma

home (green aura

martyrdom for scapegoat fate).

Because we won’t agree to disagree

we have to pick on somebody

small, like a refugee –

some poor kid cornered up a tree

                      *

who doesn’t sound like you or me.

Somebody will have to pay

for our settlement today –

it’s worth more dough that Proserpine

Hollow, or Bohemian Grove –

& that’s a fact.  Leaven

with mite of muddy heaven

this Martian clay of ours, O Love!

For the wars plainly disturb our sleep

& the mushy copper mirror

shows nobody anymore

way outa here.  Grave is the deep

wherein my friend is laid.  The blue

moth scatters, the monarch

flitters from the ark,

& they will not return until you

say : Blessed be he & she

who come to live with us

escaping strife, as guests –

may we tender hospitality

like theirs.  The whole Indian nation

has done as much for us.

When Thunderbird appears

as thunderstorm over the dry station

the rain might ease this drought

of reason & compassion.

Share the green ration;

pipe-skip the chilly serpent out.

3.10.17

the family woodpecker

STEEP RAVINE

Quiet today along the river.

In the steep ravine, only

the Morse drum-talky

of the family Woodpecker

interrogates the oaks with hollow

query.  Where are you,

worm?  Job’s blue.

Ice-packed for the long, Nile-slow

Egyptian winter, thick with Pharaoh-

dolour, pyramidical –

ridiculous cyclical

suffering, encased in snow.

It’s not his fault, & he will tell you so.

O, if these canyons were

only in a book!  We’re

leaving – desiccated, delicate.  Don’t go.

The poet has her humors – she’s

devoted to them, wholly.

Lear’s wise Fool, she’ll

follow Boaz carrying the heaves

out loud, in sheaves.  The polis, too,

be uncobbled knowledge.  What

vaguely familial knot

of rivals, bickering horseshoe

favors for grubs, is this?

Not Man-Eat-Too-Much

or Minotaur – no, such

rapacity’s reserved for the abyss

                *

of Pole Star Netherworld (Étoile

du Nord).  Little Crow

stood there, y’know –

with the Red Wing clan, in a potted bowl

of leers.  Stood with the scapegoat

as a prophet should – charisma

whirling in the twister-eye

(magenta bronze, the serpent-calumet).

Who sees him sky-hole in this mess?

Light imperturbable

as Mississippi burble

through a transparent lamb-lattice –

the holeness of that holy garment

parti-colored Joseph wore,

shellacquered semaphore

way under limestone sediment

of painful jealousies & wounded hate.

Her singular vocation,

musing on desolation

til scarred earth-pangs abate –

bored by a dream of early days.

Canoe of Camelot,

Lake-Lady’s thunder-knot...

the old bare dance, woodpecker maze

of placid Oak-Gal Day – a writ of spring

(St. Vitus 1913

Paris Corn Maiden)

that joins Creation to Thanksgiving.

3.9.17

like Lear in rags

FRESH WELL

Hobo hides out among his cottonwoods,

a shade in camouflage

of cotton shade.  Mirage

of dreaming limbs.  She’s Robin Hood’s

Maid Marion, mayhap, he wheezes

in his sleep.  Across the road

(under the Shriners’ bold

benevolent scimitar) three turkeys

elegant & dainty as Enlightenment

grande dames mime

their quadrille parallelogram

athwart a sump pump drainage vent.

America drowses in Sargasso Sea.

The frigate Rachel picks

up Ishmael, sticks

him in her hold for an Eternity –

Queequeg’s confessions will be written

on his skin, with milky raven-

ink.  Temple of heaven

& earth, your living image (spit-on)...

Every inch a king.  Take physic,

pomp.  O, I have taken

too little care!  Reason

is gone, Regan is Goneril – my wick

sputters waxy blood, not gentleness!

Old man Pound rages

like Lear in striped rags –

Who shall succeed this rookie wilderness?

                     *

My cottonwood sap is like a floating mote

in Ezra’s crochet eye.

Lend him humility

for Lent – he’ll shrive his peacock boat

like Provençal Guillem d’Orange –

warlord who gave it all

away – the pride, the gall –

for fasting, prayer... passing strange

peace.  She is our peace – Star

of the Sea, the Evening Star;

ange of Apollinaire,

pirhouetting fée to end all war –

green child in her basilica

outlasting Stravinsky’s

thundering infamies

against her limping bull’s-eye

crane-dance labyrinth –

Natasha’s temple

limpid, humble, simple

climbing a ridge in Voronezh.

The temple of her body (yours,

mine).  A little salt

savors that azure vault –

elfin leap across the years

into the pond where Hobo swims

& Ishmael paddles... Jonah

surfs... Rachel’s Magdala-

spring (where the fresh well brims).

3.8.17

night sea journey

SALT-SPARK

                          I mean the bedrock of our freedom – a bedrock of our

                          freedom is the right to worship freely. – G.W. Bush, 2.27.17

A light snow fell the first of March.

Ash Wednesday,

Will Blackstone would say.

Antithesis to Caesar’s march,

this errant solitaire into Rhode Island.

Where his friend Rog Williams

established bedrock freedoms,

planting Providence to stand

all time to come.  Like some great cedar

rooted in the granite eye

of personal soul liberty –

Milk River journey (if you dare).

Dark night of Jonah’s foundering.

Black scar of raven-

knife, Earth’s oven-

kiln.  Poe’s ghastly pondering...

Job’s pain.  Pound’s acid bath of hate.

So take this flake of ash.

Solder hexagonal gash

ice red across your brow, ingrate.

Within the creaking iron rose mandala

where Time slowly, slowly

runs to stillness.  Sea-

rose, sea-bell... whispers, ephphatha.

When the Eternal comes, emerging

from Leviathan

like an infant infantryman.

Unknown soldier, Everyhen, merging

                    *

with your sunken sun... a crown surging

from Lake Vermilion

– soul-memoire’s pain

et vin (violet lilac, ever-urging).

So the shy brown hermit lends his Lent

for ghost dance baptism

to Roger’s freedom-rhythm.

Chaste kamen of Magdalen, arc-bent

in parallax beneath the surface –

retinal curve of stone

lifted, of death undone

by innocence... & you will trace

the light thread-path, proportional –

like hazel-wand, or Blue

Morpho – wing true

monarch (black-yellow jag, regal)

from Providence to Mexico.

Across the night sea

gulf, Psyche, Persephone –

along an agate spiral go

into your copper spring turned green.

Slow wheel in clay...

a simple Lincoln penny,

twirling planet on a mast of pine –

the fiery root – Cautantowwit

& Manitou – the Spirit

blazing perfect light –

salt-spark of snow – sun-chariot.

3.1.17