ROSE TATTOO
This tenderness of moss-green light
in the craggy oaks around
the Witch’s Hat (ground
bass of Sibelius, to finish right).
The hat itself a darker green.
Twilight of thunderstorm –
fork-gyring twister-worm
over holm oak in Oklahoma (lonely
scene, brooding). That mounded Pan
by Mississippi, in Rez
graveyard... his enormous
Rabbit-corpus. Heavy Everyman
skittered, skating on ice
unswift as raven-wing
(Po-boy, kow-towing
Whitman’s rust-mold Providence
under the night-shade of Cautantowwit).
Earth shaken by thunder,
horns of Minotaur –
titanic labyrinth of lies (knit
by yon dull orange cur, on fire).
Outcast beyond these walls
Jerusalem worm-hurls
against the black hole (central pyre
*
of Man’s propensity to murder)
– bearing her true report
like tattered gun-shot
pennant under murk of war.
These damaged epitaphs of pride
& shame (twin Boanerges
buried for albino
snow-contagion). No crypt can hide,
no script elide. Vermilion Thunderbird
wheels down to Red Wing
tallying everything
& reckoning each deadman’s ford –
plumb eye of blistered Galilee,
eye of the hurricane.
Out of the depths, someone
traces an arc of palm, for Henry –
skipping from the sea like royalty
(posthumous Davy for
posterity). Sea-floor
of grey Jonah. Ocean-reality.
From Queequeg’s casket, like Osiris-
tomb, the rose tattoo
(framed by two-man canoe
of Manitou) slowly rises –
sweet grail of sunken Paradise.
The maze of Ariadne
beams from Milky Way –
meek penny-glow (seal’s copper glaze).
4.30.17
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