like San Francisco vertigo

PAINFUL CORNS

Henry’s inching toward the center

of his poem – bright high gyre

like William Golding’s Spire

(splintered, keening, full of ire).

In the Cathedral at Rodez, we saw

its balsa-wood replica

(like seedling, or amoeba-

virus) – Jocelyn’s vanishing awe

lifted to depths of infinite regress

like San Francisco vertigo.

Yet it shall not be so

with you.  Your realm is humbleness.

Your solar crown, a crown of thorns

your aureole a poor halo

picked up (after the show)

by crotchety vets (painful corns).

Somebody tell me where we’re going

with all this, Henry!

The acorn in an almond tree

makes not much sense; canoeing

(not a major sport in Italy) is

unlikely to resolve the fight

between the mining money’s might

& piping pioneers of wilderness

(attainted Oz).  Henry dozes

in his miniature oak tree –

a mythological Charlie...

& will he wake?  Check JB’s glozes.

6.29.19

cloud & catalpa, Minneapolis

Cloud & Catalpa, Minneapolis (Martin Johnson Heade, 2019)

GRASS CLOVERLEAF

Everything grew simpler in that high room

overlooking Jerusalem

when he added up the sum

& gave us his Thanksgiving poem.

The apostolic laying on of hands

was just an afterthought

Mary Magdalen taught

to keep the Presence each one understands.

The knot held.  The silverweb

floresced, in centaur arrow-

shots – from Antioch to

Thebes, up to remotest Gad-Gab

(Ethiopia).  Axled on coffin

of coffins.  Buried deep

as Noah’s ark.  Sleep,

King of Kings (like everything human).

This gemstone of the Southern Cross

shines like diamond

out of emerald

almond – mossy quaternion, grass

cloverleaf (in shape of heart).

That little tree will root

where all the branches start,

where all the rivers roll (sky-girt

perpendicular – little Everytwig

leaning against current)

– unto that iron agent

sluicing the Delta to a brazen fig

                    *

shriveled, dry (as is the way with figs).

Yet Wisdom is justified

in all her children.  Hide

now, O Man – Ouragan digs

into clay.  Rotating so solemnly,

she shakes the bone-limbs

from their joints, skims

lightly over coastal property

– only to uproot, destroy.  Bideth

nor roof nor door, Tornado!

Like the Iron Age you know

twisted to shattering shadow... Lilith-

Crocodile, climbing from Delta

to muddy matrix of 

St. Louis.  Scorned Love

twisted into dust-mandala –

substantial b-flat of the galaxies

stilled, played in reverse.

The little tree of Ursus

Minor – little star, catalpa’s

iris-blooms – starts wheeling

counter-clockwise.  Clover

culminates your

integral almond-canoe.  Sing,

Muse, Oblomov-grail of prairie earth!

The great wheel turns.

Jonah’s corn-maze yearns

Restoration... (Miriam’s rebirth).

6.28.19

serpent ocarina

RED RIVER

Dante calibrated to the nth degree

the classic perihelion

of medieval civilization

simply to retrieve the smile of Biche

out of nine coils of Cerberus

& that sulfurous pit

known to Cautantowwit

who cauterizes death with raven caws.

More things in heaven & earth, Horatio.

We’re all caught up in this

wrestling match with the abyss;

there’s no detachment of the mind from woe

nor from the body’s final strife

– breathing with agony

at the crossroads (in RI) –

where Red River meets Sargasso Gulf.

So the poem of America embodies

Juliet upon the parapet

Ophelia with hairnet

(download Vertigo for double-whammies) –

the tensile span of every suicide,

waiting for someone to reach

them (eye-in-hand) – teach

HOPE to hollowed-out children (pied

serpent, surging back to Mendelssohn).

Observe the valiant

canoe, she said.  Plant

almonds, quincunctial.  Amen, amen.

6.27.19

a partial answer for Tom D'Evelyn

GREEN SAGE

We are born as the story goes, in

medias res – through the hands

of the midwife, to lands

of motherly milk & honey, the Pine

Island of family circles... onto

the clay wheel of slow

seasons – rusty merry-go-

round, with its quaint iron echo...

& you recall how the sun casts a shadow

while the river floats an image;

imagination’s green sage

is always personal, someone you know

& so the circle of epistemology

whorls back to its source.

Whitman shaken by the hearse

Dante dreaming Beatrice

body forth reality – adhesive,

compagnevole, suffused

with ineffable Providence –

thy feather-light & graceful Love

the origin & end of Universe

O playful Alpha-&-Omega.

All poetry is drama

& all storytelling is your father’s

microcosmos; all wisdom is Hagia Sophia

beneath their human dome of light,

& that Gateway Arch might

mark the navel of your motherland’s Cahokia.

6.26.19

etched in vernacular

BEEHIVE WITNESS

Dante’s rambles round the tamarack swamps

outside Ravenna.  Beached

hulks of Byzantium reach

toward the sea.  Inside, smoke-lamps

phosphoresce hieratic grandeur

(kind bovine gaze of Empress,

Emperor).  Alighieri’s

impressed – ecco l’ora serale

in those green sheepfold meadows

where Time does not run.

He pursues his martyrion –

Crusader grandfather, circle of Mars.

He etches in vernacular his answer

out of deep parish history

to the welded Roman panoply

(Arcadian melody, Virgilian whisper).

I am a scribe who when Love speaks

hastens after, hearkening

noting everything down.

I haven’t heard from Bea in weeks.

I remember lips set with a grim reproof.

Down at the borderland

(Texas to Samarkand) –

Coatlicue, Tezcalipoca... beetling roof

of squalling Raven years.  Esta

su iglesia, Henrique?

She’ll be coming like Elijah,

not Europa, now (beehive witness).

6.24.19

woodcut by Mary Ravlin Gould

sounds vaguely French

MOSS-GREEN

Benjamin Latrobe – sounds vaguely French?

A British architect

tapped to repair, perfect

the Capitol (amid the stench

of swamp & burning).  Dogged by debt

& selective smear campaigns

sets off for New Orleans

to finish big water-works his late

son Henry had so blithely begun

(cut down by yellow fever

in September).  Ever-

green cypress can withstand the rain.

New Orleans doorways lead you back

in time (Edgar Degas

plein air sketches...

moss-green veneer, live-oak

with levee-wash).  Mississippi

spills relentlessly

into the blue & salty

Gulf.  Her sea-monstro be you & me,

O Jessie O.  L’architecture

de l’Amerique c’est plain

& simple, utilitarian –

only... we’d like to see that azure

Paradis, un jour.  Le bateau ivre

des pirates-frères, Lafitte...

en bas le bayou, sweet

Benjy.  Lisez ton ombreux livre.

6.24.19

the water-works in New Orleans

CROW-TRACKS

Old Hobo by the river again,

old mule, old Lear, old man.

Ponders the coiled span,

the tension in the plot called Heaven

Versus America.  Indifferent violence,

violent indifference...

What took you into silence,

Julie, at your blossoming – hence

into the shark’s eye of the Bay.

Like an arching jaguar-lunge

of International Orange

claw-marked with irreversible tragedy

your Bridge – hypnotic Taj Mahal

whose lambent shadow hums

of nut-brown kingdoms,

steep ravines for Solomon, Sheba...

The span tracks a continuum

he scans with tentative

crow-tracks.  To live

or die.  From the will’s ultimatum

of despair, your cul-de-sac of self-

slaughter – to the other pole

of faith, serene & whole;

with Stravinsky’s branded Sylph

leaping her epileptic scapegoat pyre

(in Paris, on May 29th)

– O Juliet, my May-month

sister-dove!... my black North Star

       *

– his limping meditation takes him far

upstream, & down.  The dream-

songe, rivery-rêve, beams

her constancy, an equilibrium (wave-mère).

Her source, an Okean of galaxies,

a murmuring Milky Way –

your sempiternal Day

that never dies, your tree of many Jessies...

open your eyes, Hobo, & see!

This kingdom of canoeing

almonds pours – outpacing

Death with fins of Galilee-Ferrari!

Her mickle water-sprite keeps murmuring

like your sibling ghost,

shady elfin host

who climbs from a mandorla, humming

beside you (ahead of you, within you);

& like Latrobe the architect

following his own son to inspect

the water-works in New Orleans, renew

yourself – restore yourself, American! –

in that strange French-Spanish-

Cherokee dreamland.  Swish

go the eucalypus paddles... the plan

of Heaven is a restoration, so –

not slavery, but liberty –

your soul’s birthday.

Love Kingdom’s galaxies begin to glow.

6.24.19

dialect of high & low

CLAY NAVEL

Literature might be political.

The dialect of high & low,

the pyramidical Pharaoh

& Erich Auerbach in Istanbul...

slaves muttering (familial)

athwart the exaltations

of regal Lion-Suns

& River-Moons (extra-terrestrial)

their jocular contra-dance lingo.

Dantean, obsolete

vernacular (obsidian);

mosaic featherweight, grave Galileo.

Everything formed from nothing... out

of a pinhole in the universe.

Clay navel – Osiris hearse

called up by current, cattail flute.

Whorls of tree-rings mantle each mortal eye.

Isis in Iowa,

Blackstone of raven-sigh –

Cautantowwit, under the Milky Way.

The tacit origin.  Your motherland,

O King.  Incipient

restoration, air apparent...

transparent equilibrium (beatitude).

Near the steel vault of St. Louis.

In the seine of the fishermen,

over the Mississippi.  Sign

from tree-logs, Jessie Ophelia... always.

6.23.19

Hong Kong dragonfly

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

A Friday afternoon of breeze & clouds.

In Hong Kong, crowds awake

the legacy of Edw. Coke

& Roger Williams’ Providence – shrouds

brace the pinnace, steady keel

to sweep of choppy surf.

Aft the canoe’s curve

a foaming V for victory... for real?

A tiny splinter in the eye, or

Chartres-blue dragonfly

camouflaged by sky.

A Thunderbird (outpacing Minotaur).

Apollinaire, in his bright air-machine

waits on the universal sign

for Joie – like blue-green

pine... like jubilant Mary Magdalen

finding the gardener in cemetery...

like nothing else in Oklahoma.

The principle of hallelujah

is always a little ahead of you, chérie –

the way Love leads always, pilgrim, toward

more life (the Way, the Truth).

Out of that cornfield, Ruth;

out of Beforetime plummeted the word –

& so we’re circling around this cave

like a bunch of prehistoric

Australians.  Your biopic

features an almond coracle, O dreaming knave.

6.20.19

let us come into your clay-borne presence

LIGHT RIVER

I see the radiant city on a hill

& Liberty in her harbor

& the Gateway... & ardor

burns, like paint – to make a mural,

maybe?  For one of our post offices?

Floppy Hobo in’s gazebo

full of summer, O

& stubborn weeds, ripe frailties...

& who will deliver us from this cauldron

of planetary woes?

Veiled Isis knows,

out there in West Branch – she’s not sayin’.

Her ghost throws a shadow wherever she goes.

O let me come into your presence,

Lord – let me see your face!

Joanie Magdalen grins... Light River flows.

Her uberous figure under Hooverville

remembers slow clay, &

quickens every which way –

warming the shoulders of your chill

& peregrine companions.  & gadzooks!

She spooks even the Tyche

inside Île de la Cité –

tattooing her airy John Hancocks

to every labyrinthine burg on earth.

A little candle in your soul

flickers through mole-

corridors, Mayflower – brightens your berth.

6.18.19

no one will judge it

Bang Hai Ja, Naissance de la Lumiere, 2015 (part of a stained-glass project for Notre Dame de Paris)

BIRTH-SIGH

Light-waves pulse from primordial Ocean State

from a weightless blazing stone

fallen to our temperate zone

from heaven – & no one will judge it

murmured Joseph, ye blessed stem;

the Word’s articulation

is well-water’s spoken

wheel (from Nowhereland to Bethlehem).

Our history, a contentious dream

scrolled on Möbius tape

pivots its bleak landscape

panorama on a polestar theme :

the plummet-stone, a river-pilot’s guide.

Her name is Providence.

She is each local habitation’s

hopeful capital – ghost by your side;

she is the sister-dove of Mandelstam,

rock-dove of gay Stevens;

she is the Jonah – Berryman’s

& Crane’s last lifesaver (she says I AM).

I see the shadow of gray wings of stone

stretch like a whisper now

from East to West, Glasgow

to Golden Gate; lifting each broken bone

from Frisco shore to some imperishable joy

like Hummingbird lancing the curse

& labyrinth of Homo Tyrannos

with one birth-sigh... her FIAT LUX... that Day.

6.15.19

in the gold realm

ASCENSION DAY

My friend Chris in New Zealand

emailed (on Ascension Day)

about that homely display

of bare feet, trampolining to cloud

in the Lorenzetti fresco (or

was it Philip Guston?)

under the superscription

of a proscenium arch.  Flower

of early Renaissance mind

echoing (if necessary)

your mirror-quality

of reality.  Who will so bend

the boarhound from the boar,

Raven from Nevermore?

Is this your last cigar?

Plein air puffs from a planet’s core.

Limestone shreds of the labyrinth

at Chartres were sort of a letdown.

Rough work.  All the gold gone.

The mower set out to mow... absinthe

green, moss green clasping the scent.

The emerald pentagram

shadowed in the sheep’s I AM

quickens the dead husks in a fundament

of everlasting life; & when the Eternal comes

it will be as we remembered

in the gold realm of childhood –

when time swells (the drone lingers, hums).

6.14.19