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