4.25.2017

cosmic Sing-Sing


WHEAT-BLADE

Gold catkins dangle from a twisted birch
like those heavy earrings
Empress Theodora strings
into mosaic (grey papyrus bark

afloat above Ravenna choirs
of San Vitale). The canoe
of state is lighter now –
only a woven fingershell or

chorale, a threadbare catenary
smile strung like a veil
from cosmic pole to pole
(north, south... from sunny Sydney

up to autumn-grey Paris).
There’s no place like home.
Kansas... or Burchfield foam
of leafy wind, of writhing tree...

unheimlichkeit unleash of slings.
Lincoln... King... JFK.
World-axle with Ojibway
wing-nut (rust of bee-stings).

Hexagons, unraveling.
The 6 paths of Black
Elk – diamondback
seal of universal Spring

shedding bright tombs of tattoos
into a gathering
of cosmic Sing-Sing 
prisoners in liberation blues

               *

& grays (old Frederick Douglass
understood the sinuous
ways of shifty US).
Let Egalité ring, sang Liberty lass.

So the cedar gazebo of the Word
(a flexible oracle
or circular coracle)
swims in a spiral toward the absurd

happiness of the whole creation –
the chaste eye of Union
at the heart of the onion-
dome of humanism (egalitarian)

welds in its molten planetary core
the future of affectionate
recognition.  Incarnate
octopus of Chinese lantern, your

Guillaume d’Orange Franciscan gate
frames solidarity
amid ecstatic charity
whorled in a fiddlehead agate

or Ariadne labyrinth
(primordial Spring).
Blue Vermilion thing
with stubborn terebinth

or almond flower (ancient
indomitable people-
bloom) – tall steeple
wheat-blade, waving, lambent.

4.24.17

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