moss-green lamb-rock

CHERRY PETALS

Anniversaries, conjunctions... Latrobe’s

bell tower in New Orleans

& a birthday (Walter Whitman’s)

twine reverberations, stellar probes.

This lone outcrop in far north wood

furred-over with green

& phosphorescent lichen

mimes in lime our original Head –

primordial earth-ram (sheepish lamb)

upon the adamant of Time –

Isis, or Miriam –

Virgin bedrock of the bright I AM.

Inexorability of violent history –

labyrinth of Minotaur –

wolf-trap for who we are

spooled out in filmy, rusty tragedy

after tragedy – the pile-up of ’68

the green redhead in Dallas

the blue blackbird in Memphis

& it all seems endless – infernal hate –

O brazen, obdurate Iron Age

of malice toward all!  Only

the slant eye of poetry

mourning on a misty Montauk stage

might warble a different kingdom comin’ –

chaste infant equality.

Your hummingbird infantry,

Walter – your cherry petals, Benjamin.

5.30.19

surfing Delta gumbo

sketch by Benjamin Latrobe, architect

LIGHT DOWRY

On this day, 200 years ago

Benjamin Latrobe won

the municipal commission

for the bell tower in New O. –

St. Louis Cathedral, surfing delta

gumbo (French-Indian-

Spanish-Anglo-American)

on canoe-back of turtle-flotilla.

Oak Apple Day, Restoration Day,

Rhode Island Statehood Day

& many another day

no doubt (not far from Whitsunday).

In the well of the king, of the king who must die

(before time began?) shone

a shade of green pine

grieving... like an old Irish eye.

Luminous melancholy, just a shade

from joy – from the well

of well-being, when all

shall be well (amid all things well-made).

When frost of fright-scorn, the old

icehouse of sacred king

slides into melt... & everything

shines in right splendor of childhood;

when young ones in Rhode Island

or New Orleans lift themselves

to the light dowry of El

Shaddai – her pact of love and understand.

5.29.19

like Red Wing clay

Mary Ravlin Gould

SKIP-JUMPS

My mother moves toward silence now.

Short wobbly steps

like printemps stumps

of Red Wing clay remainders.  So

I follow along now, too.  Two lumps,

like those she spun once

on a wheel.  Immense

maypole of Mendelssohn skip-jumps –

the way Rembrandt became his painting

(like seaweed-coated plank

of slick driftwood, anch-

ored in sand).  Memory, fainting.

I used to topple to the ground

in school.  An epileptic

pine, almost.  A cryptic

minor character, utterly unfound –

unbound within some fictional expanse

of 19th-century steppe

sunburnt peace-pipe

smoky distances (autumnal trance).

We thread the needle in a mummer’s play.

Ariadne draws the skein –

Dante’s oriflamme ancien

Parisian labyrinth for Beatrice

Jessie Ophelia, remembering her father

Jackson Quick, the river-

pilot, sounding Mount Ever-

Rest (full fathom 5/29... 29...) – Mt. Purgatoire.

5.28.19

in cedar spring

SMALL STONE

Hobo sauntering by the mother-river

with a pebble in his shoe

small stone, toe-to-toe

just for you, forever & ever.

It’s the mystery of history, he says

the authority of the source

headwaters, of course

Veritas caput.  & so his voice

goes modulated with the flow from there

as the sound wave of a whale

goes through a wave, to hell

& back – using echolocation (your

submarine eye, Osiris-sailor).

As the cathedral-builder

put her name in the floor

at the center of the maze, Jair –

that’s where you’ll find her grey-

winged agate (like minnow

in Rio del Espiritu Santo)

making the sign of a spiral J;

like a whisper out of the heart of silence

or out of Ocean River

circling round you forever

with those winking lights, intelligence

of love... because what was human & personal

is as close as your shadow

& adores creation – El Shaddai

in cedar spring (simple, loving, powerful)

5.18.19

the American dreamwork

NAVE RESTORATION

The American dreamwork seems to grow

of itself, like a vagrant

acorn’s buried descendant

branches roots into veins of air, so –

leaving yourself behind, then

as in a park playground

at dusk, all around

echoing shouts of kids having fun

within the green lamps of those trees

& the circle of daydreaming

grownups, their evening

rest emerging at last – the iron wheeze

of the swing-set beginning to mesmerize

with its creaky metronome –

& you have a premonition of home,

like a matryoshka doll of paradise

or a houseboat nested in a boathouse.

American as they don’t get?

Anonymous as a planet

without name, yet – Isis, Osiris...

A figure stands at the dream door.

They put the body there?

Now it’s not anywhere.

He gone, she gone (to tell them more).

Hobo Ulysses glides toward New Orleans,

St.-Jeanne of the Delta,

Jonah.  Coracle fella,

acorn Cap.  Nave restoration’s what it means.

5.17.19

Down the Mrs. Nile

BLACK MARBLE

The slow green river is historian as well, 

moving with time from here

to there, yet always here

same as ever, with detritus of fossil

shells – eroding palimpsest

subject to misquotation,

willful erasure, mistaken

readings...  Observe that anxious,

fretful archivist – thin railing Ez

with his fistful of heroes

impaled on total loss

(a maze of smoking Flanders trenches).

Like a Minotaur in the bughouse

with his Schifanoia grid –

hierarchical, to put a lid

on greed, by force (his Musci-Louse).

What then’s this chaos of bad dreams?

Life’s horror-show?  Not so,

not so.  PAX.  What thou

lovest well...  After the steamboat schemes

Latrobe still floats his capitol design.

Cornstalks, tobacco flowers...

Virgo, with Isis-powers,

on the adamant of time, will shine –

black marble out of Nile (West Branch).

Not abstract or Pythagorean,

but human, Galilean –

shepherd in Ravenna – beaming avalanche.

5.16.19

articulated bagpipes

CICADA SHELL

Last night, in the final French class

Charles explained to us

that intricate forest

of thousands of skeletal pieces

under the armor of the vast organ

of Notre Dame, somehow

surviving the late inferno –

a delicate spider of sound, within

the cathedral’s gray cicada shell

of feathery stone light.

Now, in my monkish hideout

of twisted cedar, a mid-May swell

of emerald sheen beyond the doorway

stretches toward Iona

or maybe Compostela

or Jerusalem... & scrawny face of Henry

lined like wood by age & foolishness

lifts to spring brightness

one wee dram of hopefulness,

mayhap – someone’s vernal Inverness.

It is the ordinary light of day

flashing through our human

imago, her chaste design –

what we might be, beyond dismay

in the conjunction of clear consciences

set toward a restoration

of the common good.  One

amid many – octave’s consonance.

5.15.19

unusual poem

OLMEC TEETH

Providence, a meeting-house of rivers.

Moshassuck, Woonasquatucket...

Narragansett alphabet.

Key into the Language (Roger’s

hopeful idiom).  Green valley space

for some invisible Seeker-

church – plain Shaker

chair for Eli, or Henry (grace

supplementing human nature

like a mild blessing

before Thanksgiving).

Can we do this, Roger?  Sure.

Providence, a circling campfire

of Renaissance persons.

Like a Rembrandt summons

to be humble (as St. Matthew’s ear

to voice of dark-haired angel).

Listen, proud Ferrara –

not to glose of Schifanoia,

but shade-garden of Bassani-spell.

The meekness of a soft goldfinch

will be memorial

for what was already eternal,

always.  As our Redemption is a cinch

for flighty heartbeat (underneath

the chain-link).  Grail-canoe

or eye-in-hand – you

fled into thin air, through Olmec teeth.

5.6.19

Mussolini shoals

MARBLE FACT

Long way from stones of Notre Dame.

We haven’t that feudal allegiance

to a field beyond France.

Bright poppies blister over Belgium

where conundrum of Isis in Iowa

came from.  She is, and was

mysterium of Osiris

on the Mississip – Ezra’s mirror-delta;

hard marble fact planted at West Branch

in Herbert Hoover’s memory

(who would not have taken kindly

to any meat-locker Muss avalanche).

Ezra yodeling the alpine Swiss serene

of his muse Circe Clementine

Vichy (& all the swine

she mesmerized, so spotless clean)

erasing all that history of filthy usury

& black boys handing Bibles

through the bars... Abel’s

your bro, Ez – cain’t you see?

Ah... the shudder of absurdity.

Knife-stab in Marlowe’s eye

– over the Jew of Malta,

of all things!  It cannot be.

It is.  Villon grins in your face,

King Flibberty-Gibbet.

Grimace may be safety net

for every reprobate.  O prodigal race...

5.4.19

 

golden lanterns of Osiris

BREAD-BOAT

May Day.  The ancient wheel of the earth

lifted on a pole of flowers

by a ring of skipping circlers

wearing flower-circlets.  Distant mirth-

song, childhood in Mendelssohn.

Light primordial.

From before the murky Nile-

punts, beneath waves of Heracleion;

older than those golden lanterns

of Osiris, Ezra

beaming from the deep your

imperial star-bar patterns.

Yet the axial pivot is not a dazzling pillar

but an imperturbable muddy

river, rolled into clay

by palms of your servant, Hathor;

into a ring or a bowl of Providence,

a lowly bread-boat

for carrying each soul-mote

out of its nightmare toward deliverance.

The soul is humbled by redemption

undeserved.  Not light

of brazen copper, but of heart

that passeth understanding, O my son.

Light from before all things, who smiles

into blue depths of rosmarine;

who leaps to Galilean

shore, sings out, & hoists the sails.

5.1.19