your whiskey mule

IRIS-ARCH

The bulb in a wild Chinese lantern

is a bright orange berry,

edible, tart (very).

Little octagon amid the fern-

pine forest, summer Halloween

memento mori; lamp

in Thanksgiving pumpkin,

blood-orange earring for a queen.

My cedar gazebo in the rain

magnifies your painted

facets.  I’m your slanted

saint, beaming gray Bretagne

matière, like old Guillaume d’Orange

in his gelato-cool

Gellone prayer cell –

the armored ape (‘tis passing strange)

grown peaceable & rocky-mild.

Repentant berry-man

in shady homespun

camouflage (as orange span stilled

leaping crag to crag – a frisky

beggar-stag in Frisco

Bay).  My Lady, O

high-hearted votary!  Your whiskey

mule I’ll be – show stigmatized

tattoos you needled through

cliff-jagged river-scars to

radiant Pacific blue... baptized

                *

in Minnehaha Falls – by Manitou!

Her figurehead (surmised

miraculous surprise)

bobs like green fiddlehead, unfurling You!

Blue-green pine haze of Tian Shan,

whose snow-cone peaks

harbor bright lightning streaks

& pure transparency of oxygen...

be like her molten meteoric smile

my natal cog upon

whose wheel of rose spun

hurtling through light’s peristyle

into galactic congregations

sharing pain et vin –

Melchizedek’s Come in,

my wounded daughters – prodigal sons!

The berry, man, the berry lives,

though crypted in the cradle

of an origami grail –

sun of Manitou, sum of beehives!

That copper moss-green Lady

in the harbor lifts her torch

as an intelligible iris-arch,

so read the sign : her rainy-shady

smoke-signal, pine-scented candle

of a little tree – her fiery

omnipresent Amor, mirrory

agate Agape, all blumen (mandel).

5.17.17