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 Provenรงal
shade-grove) beheld – her wavy prow.
3.14.17
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