AUDACIOUS FRIGATE
Yearnful melancholy Hobo ambles
through the cool autumn air
beside his ancient river.
The stately ship is in shambles –
audacious frigate, Ironsides;
the man of lawlessness
fills sails with loopholes,
fraud & force cloaked in bromides.
The mellow colors by the Mississippi
figure a buoyant hearth
where a woman might give birth
amid flame-tongues of domesticity –
like these nests of bold maple leaves
mingled with cadaverous hearts
of cottonwoods (Hart’s
premonition, Berryman’s Osiris sheaves).
& Henry, patiently delving like a wasp
through its oak-apple shell
or a worm through the skull
of a defunct Lear, will suddenly gasp
like an infant breathing her first air –
where oak-leaves chitter
beneath Roundhead October;
a restoration from crypt-keeper’s lair.
Hobo, following the copper shoreline
bends toward St. Louis
& his bark of Jessie, O.
Light churnagogue (twin trees becoming one).
10.16.19
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