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