Hamlet in the death-canoe

SCARLET WAX

The dreamer, mapping a circling cosmos

of milk & honey, starlight

& sweet fire... like Brightman’s

integral Person – with tables of Moses

in their cedary bark of mutual promise

lending salty substance

to halting hesitance

of reason (while the heart says yes).

The dreamer assembles the disparate realms

into crescendo-tango.

Hamlet in the death-canoe,

precipitous peripeteia – helm’s

Charon-pilot, planting the scarlet wax

of his father’s dread seal

for a doom they must feel

anon (political axe prickling their necks).

The tables of the covenant

written on our hearts –

sine-waves where channel parts,

Osiris-Jonah reassembled (US to haunt).

Old Ironsides, your canny constitution

oxidizes under termite siege.

The man of lawlessness will wage

perverse destruction like a weathervane

cut loose... yet that rust-bound ship

still bends toward Providence –

native Thanksgiving-sense,

red-corn grasshop (at clipper clip).

10.23.19