all glory, laud & honor

PUDGY PALM

The homeless Mandelshtams – Nadezhda,

Osip – shelter in the Hermitage

beneath a Rembrandt image.

Theotokos with Child – da, da –

the yellow-black goldfinch, perched

upon his pudgy palm.

Invisible museum

in the mind.  Like Hagia Sophia (arched

Argo of a million eyes) whorled

in one prow... her kelson

Love’s bright apparition –

equilibrium of peaceful world.

All glory, laud & honor...

the sensus comunis

of common good is

at your service (humble, poor) –

Franciscan mule of stubborn heart

whose fast is doing

(in twilight fast fading) –

out to the glimmer-rim of art

back to the ember-glowing hearth.

The honor of the civitas

so shaped by selflessness

into a form of equity – in truth

& mirth, transparency... your wings

in flight, O Tyche-Liberty –

humble Columbia (Black Sea

to Golden Gate) Nadezhda brings.

4.30.18

rolling logos contest

SWAMP SEASON

Like the 1001 Nights, or a man

facing a firing squad

who just keeps talking (odd

bird – Cassandra in a coal mine,

prophet without honor) so

I go on.  Smoking

bloody forest of broken

ships – keening keel of Argo...

who can lift the great acorn

model Constitution?

Strong whiff of glue,

my son.  The safety net is gone.

Impalement of the nations

on Stalagmite 17.

Thin poets bleed between

the cracks in their creations.

Somehow the acorn is a lightweight

coracle.  Behold an order

older than disorder –

Aurora Borealis, lifting slate

steps up to bonfire (Milky Way).

Your molten magnanimity

from nothingness – to be...

becomes a Minotaur’s nightmare (hey

yo).  The absence of a Someone,

croaks Crow (Solomon

anti-authoritarian) –

presence of a maze (swamp season).

4.26.18

limestone eyelid

TEXAS HERON

The smoking poilu, in his pink turban

like a blasted basilica

bent over Ravenna

marshland.  Many thousand gone.

His ferrous requiem for Texas heron –

wings on migration,

Zion to destination

unknown (indifferent shotgun).

A ghost dance of repetitive waves.

Arthur in Otranto,

Geo in Ferrara...

Micòl & Black Elk (lead-gray graves

in crowds).  A quiet cemetery

full of new-mown grass.

They Shall Not Pass.

Heaven & earth... won’t fade away.

The Magdala Stone... hasn’t figured

yet.  Her equilibrium

of magnanimity (come,

stay!) – like rain over the weird

Mammon of idle selfishness...

a motive for release.

She’s coming, Orpheus –

returning, Willy – rose of Inverness

or little almond tree – Mary

shedding lambent grace

or Jenny Falcon-Ace –

Love’s fiery knot (bright quipu-tree).

4.25.18

domestic hellenism

REMBRANDT WORLD

Imagine a humble Rembrandt world

(domestic hellenism, say)

where everything is (replay,

rusty Super-8) revealed –

unsealed, familiar testament

wherein you were sown

amid Grant Wood corn

(Birthplace of Herbert Hoover), bent

beneath pewter thunderheads

like wheat long-planted

at a battlefield (wind-

harrowed silos, homesteads).

By the rude bridge that arched the flood

– the wordspan, carved against

despair (Grace hastens

with her furnace-lamp... slight lift of mood)

here once the embattled farmers stood

– measuring early earth,

where your Dream (4th

of J?) becomes flesh & blood

& fired the shot heard round the world.

Ariosto in Ferrara,

say – that avian eye

on tyranny (Limentani’s branded

heron-lid).  Poetry is resistance

against the Emperor

of pyramidal distemper;

Concord... Voronezh... (buoyant equivalence).

4.19.18

ship of wind

EGYPTIAN BARGE

A prairie fire like a freight train

fed by wind (your searing

Word).  Not for hearing

but for doing... here it comes again.

Will cauterize your poetry

to cinder of Egyptian

barge.  Lips burn

ice friezes (hay society).

A replica of ancient Greece,

delicate, peevish...

stern Rome’s thievish

siblings (disguised in fleece).

The Pilgrims’ covenant of winter

light – bewildered, free –

a broken redwood tree

(toppled by Oldman’s greedy splinter-

group).  The milk train of the nations

merges with its blistered

rails.  Longfellow heard

rain fall... Berryman damnations.

Who shivers like a flame against

the edge?  Is it Henry

hisself (decrepit Limentani)?

The canoe in the garage (All Saints’

Day shrine)?  Her candle, wavering

above extinction... hum

of rock-dove (columbarium).

Rose bridge of lips, life-savoring.

4.18.18

Reminiscences of 1865

GREY FEATHER

Today we recall the tall gaunt pioneer

with Peruvian cheekbones.

His fifth scene atones

for all that blood shed in anger

at the righting of wrongs; his brief turn

by the Gettysburg graveyard

consumes, with a perfect word,

our kindled rage in bright compassion.

The creaking panorama of all wars

since Cain killed Abel, here

slows, crawls... Ford Theatre –

whose British farce on Yankee manners

stumbles from play to traitor’s hour.

Dusky similitudes...

old King of the Woods

hung from an oak (in Raven’s power)...

the tragic pattern rotates on a string.

Tyro, dangling puppets

tangled on parapets,

shuffles the script – the play’s the thing.

Your clear-eyed servant laughs his last,

cries, Come to my Thanksgiving

feast!  An overlay of evening

wash soaks its river of papyrus bast

in crimson, indigo, & brown.

Still life.  Peto.

Reminiscences on Yew.

Grey feather you must make your own.

4.14.18

spring crucible

ASPHALT PATH

Yesterday your birthday, Papa.

92, mild ghost.  Sun-wheel

set at Swan Point... seal

of a woman’s self-extinction.  Ah,

woeful calendar (Coatlicue).

Strife of father & son.

Friday black sun,

aboriginal sin (hey ey

yo).  Here in Minneapolis

snow, interring April

in one wide hexagonal,

preserves a buried man in ice

(Resurrection Cemetery).

Henry ascends the asphalt

path from heart’s tumult

to frozen Father of his Country.

Washington Ave. Bridge.  Yet

(wobbling, wavering

within your shadowy

ring of flame) – dawn’s pale promise!

Man’s faithless diffidence his own

life sentence, we

depend upon your mercy

to raft us into Libertas again –

mysterious Jonah in the “33”

(Mars’ den) whose hum

breaches delirium,

wind-bred to share (Nazarene glee).

4.13.18

tutelary loon

MURAL CROWN

The river rifles arctic blue today

beneath nippy April wind.

Hobo his way will wend

downhill, ahoy, with the current, hey.

His notebooks stew in crumpled chaos,

like a Burchfield swamp in June –

half cricket calendar, half jejune

palimpsest (July stinks Janus).

Bleak melancholy in Ohio.

Spooks in lean eaves.

Storks bundling wet sheaves

across the ‘30s.  Good material, O.

Hobo looks up from bottomland.

He holds an eye-in-hand –

muddy Cahokia (one grain

of sand).  Just Clay’s j-jug band.

These bricks are 28 feet thick.

A pyramid, almost –

only Hunky Ghost

(Ho-Chunk) could make this stick-up

stick.  Like Killers of the Flower

Moon.  Getch’r Manitou

(just one gris dollar few)

before she get you.  Evening hour

now.  Mire-flowering almond tree

out of Voronezh (or Galilee) –

your mural crown, Tyche.

Hyacinth madeleine (waiting for me).

4.6.18

for Martin Luther King

DEEP SPRING

          for Martin Luther King

Late April snow.  A blinding white

50 years after Lorraine

Motel.  Memphis, again.

River-Land, seeking an Ocean State.

Rich port-of-call – the 51st, maybe?

Lost Black Sea pebble,

gray whale in trouble

(silent in the silence).  Who is she?

Grace filters into Providence

through stubborn darkness.

Rose Island light – less

diamond than dawn translucence –

only a signal for a wayward eye.

A Chartres chart, or maze

from Notre Dame (haze

mollifies her frozen sky).

The sleepwalkers smolder through smoke-

machines.  Father & son,

their colder war passed on –

unfriendly history (life’s but a joke).

Still roses bloom, in Galilee –

galactic Okean

become a local pond;

folksinging Nazir calling me

to dance, & calling you as well.

Deep spring’s Unknowability

leaps into charity –

a little Noah-boat skims out of hell.

4.4.18

mumbling toward spring

EARLY CAVE

To trace the plummeting ellipse

of these post-Easter flakes –

the hexagon each makes

a microcosm of the temple’s

lightweight, hollow honeycomb.

Awaiting his parousia...

ghost-dance Messiah,

Nazir out of Galilee-to-come.

Far-off tumult of primavera.

Genesis of purling springs.

Pale intermingling things

in punished neighborhoods (era

of Pharaoh, or Caesar).  Signals

from an early cave, or tomb.

Eternal vault (the womb

of patient Lazarus, of Jonah’s wails).

Natasha’s limp.... Clover’s marble

Isis-veil.  The keening

eye of Magdalen (far-seeing

heart).  A Galilean stable

where animals & refugees

breathe the same air.

Earth-time halts there –

her catenary thread a breeze

lifting twin pillars (Alpha &

Omega).  Planted so

in graveyard snow...

grain of renewal (to the end).

4.2.18

painting by Nancy Hart