dimensions of Pacific promise

IRON ROOT

It’s possible we understand the common good,

since we are human beings

blessed with intellect, & feelings.

Might we live in the old neighborhood

again?  The narrow streets of Providence

for example – haunted by ghosts

of Roger Williams & his hosts

Canonicus & Miantonomi (his friends,

working out in late-night conferences

the immemorial foundations

of good government).  Nations

& peoples, grounded in the ancient senses

of those words (Pax, Libertas, Justitia)

sustained, beyond the bite

of Mammon (greed & spite)

into a vivid substance of reality –

dream-songe of every poet ever born.

Yea, Henry Acorn King

will of foundations sing,

laid deep before the civil wars began –

of Edw. Coke, bent over Magna Carta

(constitution of our civil rights

before the king, his knights,

were born); of Williams, apple of his eye

& visionary of our liberty

who felt the fiery seed

of conscience, freed

from all coercion, was the key

                  *

that opens up a box of keys –

the iron root of human

dignity (since we are one

with goodness only as we choose

to be).  & how distinct this innocence

from those manipulations

of the Mammonites, evasions

of sadistic Minotaurs!  The silence

of compassionate stars rebukes Caesar

& all his empires, murmurs

Hobo.  His abode blurs

river-mud with gravity (cold graveyard

avatar).  All density of stone

compacted into black hole

rings your somber footstool,

Everyman – refining stokehold of the sun!

& indistinguishable from hopeless hell

until the graceful whisper

of Columbia, your dove-sister,

thunders like lilting from a light-filled well –

like those Latrobes, who journeyed down to Delta

après shaping simple mansions

for America; or Hart’s dimensions

of Pacific promise… Ocean harmonies (selah).

So Hobo’s heart lingers (below the sweep

of salty galaxies, just off

the bridge).  His brooding strophe

coos from orange shadows… azure keep.

2.15.20