4.30.2017

bearing her true report


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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