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