she is a mason too

FAMILIAR EYE

When the farmwoman goes out to sow

a scattering of cornseed

or fleurette africaine (dark weed

flung wide), she is a mason, too –

planting a cornerstone at dawn

to the northeast (between

the subtle nightshade of illusion

& nuanced elaborations of the sun).

Hope being the common denominator

of all our troubled labor

buried out there, somewhere.

Does language know?  Prickly pear,

prickly pear... where the shadow falls

across an exact location.

33 light-years... (someone

WW knew – at Kitty Hawk?).  Tiny candles

flicker in the hot wind from the crypt.

Presently details of the little

room emerge.  Her title

to the seasoned sailor, found amidships

after the ashes scattered like black raven-

doves into infinity –

where Mr. Sunborn’s akme

of knowledge curled its crown toward heaven.

This the mandala the builders left me.

Jenny with her Book of J – my

golden lamb of Ghent... familiar eye

peeled back, unvarnished (dyeing history).

1.30.20

relativity behavior at the end of May

NEF-TUNE

& what if all the Seekers, Roger’s progeny

– that prophet-salt of the earth –

assembled in an ark (Bertha

the birth-canoe)?  Like an almond eye?

Like tall Sophia-Top, spiraling from sky?

The quintessential star

of relativity behavior

in the Great Congregation, at the end of May

(5.29.1919, to be exact).  When Albert

raised a toast to the memory

of time & space, & we

felt that fire... like Baked Alaska in the desert.

Birthday for Ocean, constellate;

malingering little reprobate

always castigated by Bay State,

always flaming in a pentagram – complete

salt sea-bird tugboat-gal

who lofts Old Ironsides

to cosmic shipyard one Ides

of July (my Galilean madrigal).

It is the nef-tune, from the underside

of the sea, of the mind;

Love’s ecliptic incline,

like one grain of sand.  Wave, light... abide;

to launch us from our shadowy shells

& melancholy corners

into this brilliancy of yours...

all-human cradle where the hearth-fire dwells.

1.29.20

a gargoyle versus Mars

ROSE EYE

Henry, Seeker, trails Hobo down.

Molting to Hobo in his sleep.

A baby spring flows deep...

soft ripple, brimming delicate renown

amidst angels, & water nymphs.

His almond lens mists over

out of focus (blurred,

all out of blue red).  His eye limps.

High in the dark sky chant the stars

above distraught Columbia.

Arcturus, Regulus, Spica –

framing a gargoyle versus Mars

(opposing men-o’-violence, that Man

of Lawlessness); a trio

in the Dragon’s Head (O

money jungle, African fleurette).  Tin pan

for Paris ghost-dance gold... your own

damn note, hunchback Igor

(boom boom Guillaume, poly-

poilu).  Viol sez, follow me down.

A purple prince from Minneapolis!

Adonis of grain elevators!

Lapped into clay (all yours,

A-frame).  A rose eye came – his sis,

Iris-Sophia.  Whorled full of vertigo,

gaunt San Francisco...

floored in the adamant, so

grand.  Your sky-blue motherland, Hobo.

1.27.20

for Dina Tagliabue

SUNNY SISTER

                                 for Dina Tagliabue

I never made it to the Mimbres Ranch,

Dina – though Alex & Phoebe did,

& brother Jim did, too – up

in them hardscrabble cactus hills, with a bunch

of hippies.  You chugged out there back when

in your VW bus, dragging along

stray hitches from Michigan –

getting the farm going, the pottery kiln...

Bob was there early, I guess, plying

the seasonal pickers’ fields

& his carpentry (& sprout yields

from the bathtub hydroponic mung-bean

enterprises).  Early & late he was –

composting with you to Sicily,

your garlic plot of earthy

transplants (care of kind Erica, & Grace).

It wasn’t my life, it was yours –

tied close to soil

by musing love-wrung toil

until this planet glazes bronze, & grows...

your joy, your blazing smile, Dina!

You were the sunny sister

to my moon’s iris – her

Inca-mauve Sheep’s Clothing (Francesca);

& now I see you foot the potter’s wheel

& knead your human clay

into a memory of joy...

molding earth to sunlight, in a laughing reel.

1.26.20

quirky rustic poet battles orange Goliath

MEMPHIS FLOOD

It was the winter of our ill-advised

& misconsent.  Embouldered

Julius the Quartered,

housed within his wanton witness,

raged (a savage orange walrus

full of fetid fire) against

that bad news feminist

in flight from Rus (hilarious!) –

while he, with his false staff, embarked

upon a cross rubes’ con

(some matryoshka manikin!)

against Old Ironsides... which worked!

– for temporizing (time... & two times

at a time).  The war was on.

“Where is the server, then?”

barked Julius again, again.  Crimes

filtered down like snow from Kremlin

gremlins.  Stark treason,

trickling out its own raison

d’état, took aim at Mississippian

Columbia.  One fiery wheat grain

in her heart – one star-

quintessence of her

pyramid – opened its eye again;

the child she harbored in her arms

across the Memphis flood

cried – “Human brotherhood!”

– & smiled.  Light pierced the storms.

1.25.20

winter gematria

DEAD RECKONING

Henry drooped with the blues, his head

on his hand, his wings folded.

Gloom gathers the Gould

with something other than ghost dancing –

rustic farm implements, tongs

in a crucible of heavy rain.

He knows Great Congregation

= love x God+neighbor, yet... wrongs!

The prophet speaks goldenly of such

in his report (Jack

Joachim).  He saw black

where the red-squash bore would touch

his tender rib with a poignard – that son

of a coagulated sow! –

but he rests easy, now

in his little room, in the Forest of Ravlin

I reckon.  Jacques & Jules, Jack

& Jill, tumbled off the wall

& down the hill... so we all

fall down, sang the old buried hack

full of Fathom Fifth.  His vanishing pint

fled like a bat, through a gap

in his rainbow tooth; sap

dribbled from his dank sepulchre, his mint

of 43 years (32 + 11).  She was only 17

when she danced the tyrant-

teller – poky little Calabrian haunt

who yet might spread her wings (sweet halcyon).

1.24.20

beam against klepto-autocracy

HERMETIC EPISODE

A little portable communion box,

bedizened with a coral reef

of gems (wheatsheaf

engraved on its acacia locks).

Gray pebble – miniaturized

more than a thousandfold

from that rock stronghold

whence it rolled (Paradise

Mountain, milky Jerusalem).

Or tiny grain of wheat

sifted to ground (infant

metropolis), from off the hem

of starry Virgo, Lady Liberty.

Her gown of purple (streaked

with gold) rustled... & sparked

such rays of justice & mercy

that the fickle wind of red & blue

(pushing our pennants back

& forth) fell slack – &

the Janus-faced Minotaur (just you

& I) curled back into his golden urn

within his clammy cave,

& promised to behave;

the strong man was tied up again

with his own silver spiderweb,

& dropped into the Seine –

one convoluted sign

of violence, reduced to tiny nub

                    *

of seedy violet.  Her sea-green eyes

gaze from the bottomland

of human clay, the river-sand

of human time; she is Persephone’s

Corn Mother, she is Cathedral Mary –

with her Sophia-torch held high,

armed with stone tabulae

of wisdom & knowledge, she will be

the restoration of democracy

rooted in human sovereignty;

from calm civil society

bring judgement on kleptocracy

with care for that bright seamless web

of mutuality her Memphis prince

proclaimed, magnanimous –

with love beaming from Mount Horeb

& intergalactic Galilee (a waterfall

of Washingtons... a rainbow

prism of Jerusalems).  So

the cartouche at the foot of soulful

Garfield – on the brow of mournful

Abraham – in the eye

of emerald JFK –

gleams with this glancing parallel :

off the prow of the Ark of Covenant

& the beam of Old Ironsides

shines the light nothing hides –

Beatrice’s look (Thunderbird’s lieutenant).

    1.23.20

a woman in a hammock

DROWSY SONG

The earth waits, like the source of the Nile

on the periphery of the capital.

Behind its porphyry wall

princes perform their tragedy of control.

The earth sleeps, like a woman in a hammock

dreaming of a happy home.

Crowds gathered in the New Rome

to print their great seal on a marble rock.

The Minotaur strode back and forth

sleepless as a pumpkin seed –

his labyrinth a putrid gourd

of fireworks orange (Julius the 4th).

He fought the dragons in his nightmare sea;

he clutched the basket of his swollen

head; his world was stolen

from a woman’s arms – bound to tyranny.

Hobo droned his drowsy song in unison.

The earth still turned for him.

Saturn & Venus, in their stream

of light, grew calm.  Night was for everyone.

The enormous clay wheel spun her sarabande.

The great ship shrank into the distance.

A tiny needle in its compass dance –

the apple of the capital (in Hobo’s hand).

Her shadow was a cloud cast on the evening sky,

a handful of benevolence.

A mystery of loving Providence

instilled in hearts by art, with eyes from Aye.

1.18.20

Song of Songs in a snow globe

SWEET SNOW GLOBE

The twin foxes & three pine trees

on honeymoon (in a sweet

snow globe, in Norway).  What

use your Solomonic sarabande, these

loopy solemnities?  & the echoes

far into the motherland

Cahokia to maid’s Gravesend

your Adonai, my Adonis   a Memphis

trial by fire (intricate clay bark

buried in salt harbor).

O serious Nile laborer!

Nephthys, Dark Lady, mark

these fathoms of thy bottomland.

Snow was general over Ireland.

Strum the steel mandolin

then, Mary – plectrum in hand!

We climb out of the clay to shape

this Royal Arch, for St.

Latrobe & Son.  See the faint

wave-trace along its rim (crêpe

for a funeral train; flute-song

transcription).  Grain

melts into wine again –

the living man or woman prong

from earth.  We called it love

& swam into the circle

where snowflakes speckle

dark green live oaks (O crooning dove).

1.16.20

sketchy star-map

GREEN PYRAMID

The idea of Janus.  Osip is born;

war saw.  The tiny hexagons,

whose bite is bitterness

& valediction, zigzag down

here, in our Cerealian Capital

(Pillsbury, General Mills).

Grandpa, in Saskatchewan

wills grain elevators toward the pole.

Above these winter clouds, invisible

Venus the flower-star

describes tobacco-petal arcs –

Gravesend’s Dark Lady – indelible

cartwheeling Corn Maiden – springing

& sovereign rite of way;

dewy washerwoman, our MVP

lifting the horizon over D.C. (washing

everything).  Verily... except a corn of wheat

fall into the ground & die...

Over the green pyramid, an eye;

red rose for Memorial Day (complete

now, finished).  Elvira, out of Ravlin

opera, spins toward blue clay

herself.  We go that way

with snowflakes, with January’s frozen

squeaky violin... we go together.

At our reed-muddy center

she alights on the perimeter –

Adonai cornucopia, our milky tether.

1.15.20

from David Ovason, The Secret Architecture of the Nation's Capital, p.190

so Pocahontas might emerge again

PONTOON BRIDGE

The timid sun blanches behind these clouds

of January dim.  The miniature

ice-floes speckle the river

as they move south.  Chilled Hobo nods.

Yes, Henrah, there’s sleep-work to do

in this hibernation.  Dream-

boats a-building.  My trireme’s

a ship-in-a-bottle (of Irish brew).

See through the glass?  A beauty she is.

A bloom of almond petals

like a round of Grumman metal

canoes (nickel-dime aluminum Kris-

Kraft, maybe).  Like a micro-tuned

pontoon bridge, bent

from Iron Range to Ghent –

gildered from Gravensteen to Gravesend.

Henry slumped on a frigid cottonwood

stump, stumped.  The lantern-

bark in Hobo’s paw turned

green... little nef of oaken holly wood.

Cathedral Mary mine... he intoned.

Turn back the puny gangsters

of the bleak – these drugstore

Minotaurs – high Fraudulence enthroned.

So Pocahontas might emerge again

& roll Rebecca out of Gravesend

lifting her golden wave of corn

enchanted, vertical... toward Washington.

1.13.20

in the shadow of Notre Dame

TO YOU

To you who have walked with me

all along this many poem.

I would translate my diagram

of raven wing into quick algebra.

As daylight stretches into spring

I would head to Beltrami

a worn-out refugee –

Itasca hearts to weld by wring.

The Iron Range is as our life,

cold for sunrise, fire

by dusk.  Evening Star,

Dove-Bird, be thou my wife

                 *

whose effigy is coppery Peg

centered in Big Muddy silt

at Pentecost, green to the hilt.

Cahokia palm (with Easter egg).

She danced in the shadow of Notre Dame

a firebird, on 5/29

with flammable cardboard mural crown

for Apollinaire to remember (at the Somme).

& she wheeled across flat American clay

from West Branch, a circumference

of byzantine raven-sense...

to lift sad Earth toward the Realm of Day.

1.8.20

from a painting by Phoebe Gould

one foolish man & three Magi

TURTLE-SHELL

Henry wakes from an old man’s nap

with a child’s sense of space

& time.  Heart’s relentlessness.

Here be the river; here the wide gap

between whispering grassland, distant sky.

Epiphany.  Three Wise Men

camel out from high Tehran

to find one homeless king, in a spare pig sty.

Tonight the belligerent intelligence of war

sent guided Minotaurs

heat-seeking vengeance.  Stars

were collateral damage (kids no more).

The ragged tent-flap & the drafty stall

are Henry’s flimsy turtle-shell.

His mind & heart a broken spell –

a wasteland shack, no longer fit for Grail

or Calabrian hermit-monk, or Parsifal.

Only bring me the gift, Melchior

of your toy myrrh-nef – your

river-sense, emerald, mercurial;

like a 4-leaf clover made of almonds

interlaced... like 4 canoes

bent to the whirlpool’s

mandala (Itasca spiral of palm fronds).

This Providence of tight-coiled J

anchors the Pacific Ocean.

Knots its rose-clay revolution

to a bottled ship – ensign of Milky Way.

1.7.20

in the entrails of the nation

RIVER-SCOW

So Henry hearkens to the sea-wash

over his meandered house.

From District C to Minneapolis

his terramara whorls, to Washington

& south to Frisco, lap after lap

of wave on wave, sea-green,

serpentine.  A Berryman

for Julian’s Bower (Juliberry nightcap,

mayhap)?  Osiris, in the entrails

of the nation?  Sleep, now

microcosmic river-scow –

everything grows smaller in the whale’s

rib-cavern, everything a miniature,

dioramic Minnesota (at the

end of the last knot, minute-

man).  Cold as a Viking vulture-

sepulture.  These bricks might save

the planet, Henry mumbles

to the museum baubles

in his sleep.  & then her hand will wave

to him, from waves of his dream;

Columbia the sister-dove,

his Tyche-tyke from above...

over the Father-of-Waters with a beam

of smiling light.  & suddenly the vermilion

shades atop Sunset Mountain

& the orange orangutan

threatening our rusty tub of human

communion (Old Ironsides to you)

are dissipated shadows

in a rosy dawn... & Henry’s

crown rests in her ark (shalom, J-rue).

1.6.20

lingo & experience

SMOKING PYRE

O the glittering golden champagne world

the sparkle of human Honigwein!

& Henry skulking on the margin

ever – shy & sluggish, owlish Thunderbird.

At the intersection of Congdon & Morris

in the Honig house, in Providence

whereat Berryman lay, once

with his books, bourbon & cigarettes

a smoking pyre of lingo & experience

where the poet stands – a matrix

Jessifying the cosmos (X

raptor).  & Henry maunders after... silence

& gravity his only friends, he thinks

(1132 feet down, beneath

132 6th St).  Bequeath

his Sloop John B. to them steeply drinks,

drafts of your Ocean State, O bookish

Cesca-Fay!  Where Cautantowwit

calumeets Columbia, knit

together in your Seine – sweet swish-

mel Arno-Androscoggin – rosy net!

As the planet in the distance,

like an intricate replica, spins

its miniature J (illustrious Celt)

you cut your figure on the dancing floor

(smooth sliding all-akimbo

smile) like a capital C, or O

out of Jericho – my Tosca to thy Carib shore.

1.3.20