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

where the wheel pivots

VIA FRANCIGENA

My path of J, my Via Francigena.

You can read it on the Q-

line train, between St. Lou

& Monk’s Mound (clay Cahokia).

Choo-choo, J-J, Joanna, Giuliana...

on the milk train way,

your dewy morning ray –

autumnal hoot of helmeted Athena

(hooya-hey).  Fled with her child

from rude dragon.  Nightmare

tyranny (unveiling there

the root of human woe).  So the scald

burns his tattoo into each trumpet call –

the empty mirror of the king

crowns him equal to everything.

So gather him weird into your iris squall,

milky Sophia – gold sunflower

stretched into an almond

ark of mustard limbs (wand

blooming with abject surrender).

Because I love, because I love...

Behold, my child, I have

no wrath.  & in the hive

of clay lips, trace her architrave –

tacit surrender to a violet

sown by storm (below

these wars of villain & hero).

Where the wheel pivots, my river-pilot.

10.26.19

the stubborn Acmeist

AMERICAN THING

The way a stream flows around a piece of granite

rough gray in the water, winking

with rose quartz, mica (splintering).

So the stubborn Acmeist would honor that

which is, that which exists.  & Osip

would agree with Oscar Cullmann

as to the meaning of Redemption –

it’s already happened.  So right worship

is a thing of joy – ample gratitude

for being, & the hope

of Restoration (its full scope

a celebration, braiding bread & wine).  You’d

barely sense the almost-infinitely distant

echoes of a first Thanksgiving...

everyone hoisting something

to that scrawny picnic table (ancient

light).  So as we J-stroke forward

let’s return to New Orleans

with B. Latrobe, who kens

the old French buildings there (mired

in mosquito nets & drainage swamps);

where he will follow his own son

to his malarial grave (one

body, bread & wine).  Under yellow lamps

like fireflies in the harbor (swaying,

soaring).  Scintillant mosaic

for one lugubrious Republic

(hopeful, Creole).  Clay American thing.

8.6.19

rattlesnakes & wild hogs

woodcut by Mary R. Gould

BLANK MIRROR

Hobo & Henry (mirror lakes of ice)

hunker down by the Miss

in apocalyptic freeze.

Global worming – ain’t nice,

offers Hobo.  Henry stands on a log

of spongy cottonwood,

to speechify.  I would

gather everyone in D.C. – slug

it out with themeny!  Hobo : Who he?

King Henny Gowanabe?

Beware Coatlicue,

m’deer!  She got that panoply

um rattlesnakes & wild hogs,

rootin’ all around –

Iagoons, Macboars... ground

Z for Camazone swamp hellhound dogs!

In the blank mirror of unconsciousness

the stone-cold powers

& the lotus-flowers

collide in a collusion...  Heartlessness,

she mutters.  Hobo sunk down.

Cheer up, old boy,

sez Hank.  My Book of J

opines beneath Cordelia’s Crown;

she shone me that Madonna del Parto

flaring like Indian mound –

high Sophie’s dancing ground

(who shall restore our humane Beneficio).

1.30.19

beneath gray Bruegel sky

WAVE-CRADLE

Crows ink beneath gray Bruegel sky.

A line from A to B

zigzags spacetime – see?

So raven vanishes in Noah’s eye.

Between two points, a yawning Ocean.

Infinite intensity

of black-hole density

draws yesterday into its spin.

What is your personal specific gravity?

The poem is gray pebble,

obscure soldat (trouble

for no one).  Ordinary Smitty

whose greatcoat pocket holds an agate.

Lodestone of a jay

tracing King’s Highway

into the calyx of a ruse (checkmate).

It is Path P, the chi-rho

branch – diamond

mandala of almond;

Black Elk milk road (ey yo).

Love is the tread between twin pillars –
only a glance of weightless

spiderweb.  Inverness

of vernal tenderness... wind, stars...

when the bow sways in its wave-cradle

& Ithaca, Iona, Eire

lift like green fire

Skye-perpendicular – familiar grail-dreidel.

1.25.17

I can't really abstract a perfect illustration for my comments of yesterday. It's a poem or caterwaul that goes in a lot of directions. (Remember the photos Jonathan posted of Vallejo/Lincoln?) Here's something from near the end of July:

 12

  
 Deep drone of train   or iron cicada
 across an infinite prairie   steppe or
 taiga   and where do the past
 and future   of these parallels   ascend?

  
 Accompanied by mute organ-pipes
 in Voronezh   or an anti-telephone
 in Moscow   (making superluminescent
 waves)   or just my new triangle on the barn

  
 banging and banging like an old tin can?
 The rapture of the universe   is on
 the radio tonight   everybody knows
 it   (even the D.A.R., Grandma)   it’s Marion

  
 singing there   in Washington
 under the Depression   and the shadowy
 long hands   long face still   washed
 with kindness   twinkling like a star

  
 his homely lonesomeness
 is in her voice also tonight  a silky
 charity-chariot   with   malice toward
 none   we’ll ride it home Bluejay   forget

  
 the bondage of the 44   rail-split and
 quartered in a milky map
 rivers and forests in your palm
 life-lines and   spirit-trails

  
 deep into tracklessness   a limber
 timbered   everlasting habitat
 we’ll make it home   to bathe
 again   in that spring water   Abraham

  
 as the drone rises   to the tops of the oaks
 in an arc of praises   love and liberty
 are married there   a tribal tree of
 tribulations   crowned   a little school of J

      
                                      2.8.2000

... bringing me to the diagram with which I began the previous post.

What might a "neo-medieval" reading of Stubborn Grew/The Rose (Forth of July) involve?

ut pictura poiesis. Most of my long poems have paintings all through them. (My mother is an artist - I grew up with the smell of turpentine & canvases.)

Think of poetry as occupying a middle ground between painting and the unrepresentable (God's name, Simone Weil's "decreation"). Ekphrasis : in two directions at once.

Chinese characters/brush strokes.

Stubborn begins and ends with "J". (Bluejay : the bird, the man; Juliet, Jonah ["dove", sister-dove], Julie, July, Jubilee, Jerusalem...)

"J", the letter, comes from "i", iota, jot, yhod : the smallest letter of the Hebrew script, maybe going back to Egyptian/Phoenician pictograph for "hand" or "arm". In Hebrew, it's the 10th letter, the smallest letter (jot or tittle), a little dot or black wing-stroke or swirl. A J-swirl.

The whole poem can be understood as an ekphrasis-expansion from the letter J. (When I was beginning to write it, I was heavily influenced by a particular Melville study, titled Game of Creation, by Viola Sachs, which goes into the scriptorial letter-symbolism deeply encrypted into Moby Dick.) A Book of J.

This practice is maybe a new-old kind of neo-medieval classicism : in which the individual imagination is not stifled by dogma, but tempered by the necessary impossibility of representing the Invisible, the Unspeakable.

from the long poem somewhere...

 9
   
                  we never step outside the portals


  
 Now if a six
 turn out to be nine
 I don't mind...
 Let's play pick-up-sticks,

  
 kids – bones.
 Because it's really
 early-late, see.  And
 I'm no yesman

  
 or gnomon –
 I'm a soul man.
 (Not really certain,
 understand...)

  
 Here's the black
 bare cueball.
 Duck.  Rabbit.
 Here's the trick:

  
 square two thumbers
 like so, behind a curtain
 and then wave your ten
 clay beachcombers...

  
 gradually...  See?
 It's a live butterfly!
 It's a handmade moth!
 Will you marry me?

  
 I'm only ten.
 I'm eleven.
 I'm Hen –
 I'm your cousin!

 
                3.28.99

a "9" is an upside-down "J". both are spirals. fascinating, isn't it?

I'm looking at various emanations of "9" in relation to the Siena poems. "The Nine" was the name for the commune governors during one period (when Lorenzetti's murals were done). Siena has 9 gates.

I'm thinking of the nine circles in Nicholas of Cusa's "Game of Spheres", too.

"J", of course, is very important in Stubborn & other places.

I'm looking at the spirit/nature, divine/human, substance/image, nature/art dichotomies... in terms of number & geometry.

Duccio's (& many other medieval & renaissance painters') designs were based on ratios having to do with the square & its diagonal (an irrational number, the square root of 2).

N. of Cusa, I'm sure found this of interest. Creation/incarnation (or Cusa's "infinite", for that matter) can only be analyzed by means of "irrationality" or immeasurability.

does a J reflect 9, or vice versa?

Dante, somewhere in the Commedia, writes: "Beatrice is a 9". (Beatrice, of course, was a sort of avatar of/from that other "J")

Holy Roman Emp. Henry VII, Dante's messianic Arrigo, died near Siena on a Friday in 1313.

I gotta finish muh poem.

from July:

 11

  
 I saw Eternity the other night   said Henry V
 once more   unto the breaching whale
 for often as I stretched my lips toward
 the lucent wave   so small a thing it

  
 is that separates   our loving hearts
 the darkness had materially increased
 hereupon Nu-Nu stirred   within the secret
 unfailingling J.A. J’s omvalejoss   stretched

  
 postpartum   like a red seed   from
 now-now   to yes-yes yesterday
 deep in Maxwell’s stirry equanimity
 a little kip o’thorn goes o’dell   morphed

  
 the length of a tinier tin plank   forth
 Hendrix   (in tune with a low-rent
 transformation)   (turning
 toward the wall and)   walks on through

  
 Lex Luther’s bilking paradox   (using
 simple OM radio junk from the shack-ham)
 he shows if Shakespeare types out Hamlet
 on his tachyon transmitter, Bacon receives

  
 (in sing-sing) the transmission
 at an earlier time (via chronocomputer)
 settin on a photon clock   spacelike
 timelike and   likelike   Sommerfeld’s

  
 first apple-fall of free-falling world lines
 in a lightcone tipped over by Tippecanoe
 Tipler into the river   just a bit   o’Henry-
 phlegm   caught in the throat   (between

  
 wormholes)   (mouth a and b)  like a frog
 couching for flight through a fog or griffin-
 like surfaces (what exotic matter!  Figure
 it out yourself!) an undersod of the rogue

      
                             2.8.2000

3


 
 
These letters, rolled like drops of sap along the spine
of a spindly cedar (hardened into crust).  My letters
to you – you, who have no need of letters
among your mirrors and lights.  They seep
toward you, and love you, sensing
you love them just as well.  
 

     The moon
was faint tonight, behind a smoky cloud.
Pale, bloodless, not quite round, yet
shining anyway, it lingered:  held
in the branches of a willow tree
like an empty goblet.  Silver
leaves lay down below – a crowd
of masks, a flock of repentant souls
from a Sienese fresco (surging around
the Rood of Heaven).
 

      Without you,
dear, my knowledge disintegrates, a new
encyclopaedia of dust.  All pledged
to rigid silence, under useless stars.

 
But if you were here... you would point
to the warm lights of a house nearby.  And
your other hand would reach for mine
like the sun.

2


 
 
We were walking through the cemetery.

 
It was about this time of year, as I recall –
when the earth itself seems only a graveyard.

 
We heard a far-off sound (pattering rain,
puttering pigeons, mute piano notes?).

 
We saw, over the river, the silhouette of a figure
throwing dead branches on a tall bonfire.

 
Perpetual twilight.

 
And in those days, it seemed, everyone wore masks –
except for you and me.  And now I see only masks.

 
Halloween never ends, it seems –

 
unless you come back again, unless we retrace
our steps over the grassblown graves. 

1

 
 
In mid-November, a dark autumnal day,
leaves shuffle underfoot, drift in the wind.
Each leaf a little hand stretched out –
a letter, inscribed with tiny branches,
limbs.  A letter from a tree gone bare,
expecting no reply.  Soon snow will fall.

 
Each day I walk down Dove Street
with your shadow – talking to you,
talking to myself.  Drab gray alleyway
cluttered with crooked telephone poles...
here gray pigeons waddle, wavering
and purring, across gray asphalt,
underneath gray skies.
      
                        Shadows
of turtle-doves, wings flitting overhead;
glimmer of gold oak and maple leaves;
desolate, diminished Jack o’lanterns
huddling with crazy smiles against
gray doorsteps (lumps of faded orange).

 
Hidden in the twilight season, camouflaged
in gray, whispering down a hidden street
with you, my phantom (leftover from 
Halloween).  Toward the harbor – where
dim light from a low star threads
across gray water, and doves collect
along the iron rail, and shuttling leaves 
float, mutter... whirl against the pier.

I placed the mask firmly over my face: the mask I had been fabricating & fiddling with for the previous 20 years.

& then Russia, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Pushkin, "white nights" Petersburg, Elena Shvarts (ie., "shining/black") became a master theme-&-variation, through the next 1000 pp. of that poem (Forth of July, in toto). Mandelstam = "almond branch". (I found out about Celan's parallel interest later.) The almond - the tree that flowers in January. Eliot's "midwinter spring is its own season". The Biblical branch. Magdalen, amygdaloid. The embodied, the rooted Word. The other one, the ghost, the Bride, the J. The meteoric stone fallen from heaven, placed in the otfe (bedouin tribal camel-tent shrine) as tablet of the Law.

& you have to recall that the "narrative" plot proper began on Halloween, with a search for a "lost black cat" (Berryman sidekick?) named Pushkin.

I left out the most basic "structural analogy" between poetic language and theism : the fact that a poem or work of art is a "creation from nothing" : somewhat autonomous and complete-in-itself.

Thinking unsystematically (that's for sure) past few days about these issues. Keith Ward leaves out feminist perspective. The maleness of the Trinity (at least in most of its representations, which admittedly are only representations, but same are powerful).

Theology of Dante, pivoting cosmos on his memory of girlfriend Beatrice. Joyce in Ulysses & FW.

The poet, the artist, seeks happiness(?) in state of equilibrium which only creative process itself provides. And this process hinges on emotional resonances, love & desire, which are at least as much feminine as masculine.

Jesus (imagined) from psychological perspective. Man without an "earthly" father. Orphan.

(Presence, role of "J" or "Juliet" in Forth of July.)

"Enarees" were the effeminate soothsayers of the Scythians (cf. Herodotus).

Effeminate image of "poets" in American culture.

(Giving birth to a poem. The 3rd vol. of Forth of July is titled July.)

this is how new things start, possibly (always a maybe). from Dove Street draft:

Close your eyes   and step into my summer garden
(empty, small, forlorn)   come into my cloister
built of whispers   among chunks of dove-grey stone
from Guillem-le-Desert   and listen, now

 
to the cicada-continuum   hidden in leafy shade   overhead
a droning one-one-one   of winged heartbeats   eyes
closed   the threads of sound proliferate and
lose themselves   and then   (returning)   come around again

 
and where the small courtyard   (behind your eyelids)
contains the world   a heavy heart spreads canvas sails,
takes flight   like a gray brush-stroke   toward Yellow Mountain
or   as a fiddlehead uncurls   in chilly mud   toward the sun

 
In the abandoned cloister   your gnomon leads the way
toward noon   thus   at the vanishing point of appearances
a warmth exudes   light flashes in a spring   wounded, unwound
there   and gathering the earth   and all its dusty paths

 
into a balance   graceful, just   barely   there
afloat   like gnats in the evening   over a wide river
the particulars of every dream   that ever was
were there   with you   empty-hearted Orpheus

 
waiting   for the light-fall   the wing-beat
bringing word   of your beloved
from the grave of winter   embedded
in the purling spring   a sign   (J-fragment

 
from a fiddlehead)   the only sign
shrouded in murmurs   of mourning dove
or some Shoshone June   ghost-dance
here   in the empty garden   (at the entrance)

        
                            2.18.04

possibly the only other non-Russian poet comparably preoccupied with Mandelstam was Paul Celan.

note "Magdalen" reference in Voronezh poem quoted ("For Natasha Shtempel").

mandel (almond), magdala, amygdala (seat of memory in the brain?)

almond tree : ancient emblem of Jewish people

mandelstam - "almond branch" (blooms in January)

little tree (cf. Forth of July, various places, & this from Island Road)

David (poet-king), Messiah : "the branch"

cf. the section of July quoted earlier today, some of the layers: it helps to know that Mandelstam, in exile in the late '30s in the little farm-river town Voronezh ("raven-knife"), listened to Marian Anderson on Moscow radio (Marian Anderson, the black diva whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial was almost cancelled by the D.A.R.), & wrote a poem about it (the poem is also about a Leningrad singer whose husband had just been sent to the camps). #45, 2nd Voronezh Notebook.

the reader should be aware by now that I find Mandelstam's Voronezh poems extremely beautiful, like the 3rd movement of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132.

(incidentally, the "arc of praises" where "love & liberty are married" through the trials & tribulations of a "little school of J" is a pretty good summa of the "law of identity/tautology" poetics I outlined last week.)

1st & last stanzas from the poem, in the McKanes' (clearly inadequate) translation:

I am buried in the lion's den and into this fortress
I sink lower, lower and lower,
listening to the yeasty cloudburst of sounds
stronger than the lion, more powerful than the Pentateuch.

 
*

 
My time is still limitless,
and I accompanied the joy of the universe
like the quiet organ's playing
accompanies a woman's voice.

from Dove Street:

Now the snow (pure, blinding).
Water slown down, retarded to
star.  Yet I know you're there,
under the gleaming ring,

 
unseen.  Where images fade out.
Puffy doves purr, tut-tut, bunched
on the ridge of a tree-branch.
Having you left... you're all I've got.

                          
                *

 
The war goes on, outside the brain.
Where the grey dove of Bran or 
Bretagne once dove in.
The mirror's extra dungeon

 
for X, of X, in X:
stage envies, accomplices,
maybe lateral damages.
Machine read-out: You're next.

                          
                *

 
As if you were there with me on the branch
I'll mumble and purr, puffed-up in the cold.
Because you're not here doesn't mean
you're not there.  Unfold, again.  Branch,

 
little tree.  Tomorrow's always,
and always is your birthday
and this is all I have to say -
your birthday, always (little tree).

 
                                     1.29.04

I just want to say one last thing tonight, before 28 becomes 29, which is, that, beyond all my glibbery explicationary activity hyarabouts, there are 1 or 2 or 3 levels or aspects of Forth of July which remain & will remain classified. I have not discussed & will not discuss them. As Akhmatova says about her long "poema" Poem without a Hero, "it's a casket with a triple-false bottom", or some such. secrets of the life-raft (or Nile barge, cf. OM)