Here's more strange stuff that nobody will understand, from Autumn Door. (I re-post this in order to rid my blog of what appears to have been a spam comment, which has showed up on several poetry blogs. Have to figure out comment moderating, I guess. My apologies to Andrew Shields, who sent an authentic comment to the same post.)

9

 
The murmur of the tree, the consolation
of the air.  When you've finished all your assignments,
after the last test.  It rustles through the tents
of Abraham (your dream)... the Shekinah, the One. 

 
I too am a jealous guy – I too have a heart
(corrupt desperado).  Heap dust on your brow,
then, princely one – no time like now
for self-abasement, snarls the shopping-cart

 
lady, she of Lebanon cedars, whose twin
towers (swelling roses in her blouse) navigate
the raging, reckless nations.  Her familiar fate.
Deliver us (Virgin, Saena Julia) from our vapid sin.

 
A flowerpot fashioned on the fastest wheel
in the West or on the Nile goes into the kiln
for the kill – by kinfolk driven (everyone
wondering, Everyman).  Your Achilles, heel.

 
When you lose your job.  When the air
feels clammy, absent.  When you lean your head back
and peer up toward pinpoints in the black night,
on the prairie, on the steppe.  Cold, bare.

 
At the last moment.  At the midnight hour.
Up (down).  To you (alone).
Keening wind.  Frozen
lake.  Weeping willow.  Empty tower.

 
So shape up your conjecture (17-mile donut-
loop under the Alps) – Kaluza-Klein
gluino squarks, or sleptons for the winos in
dark matter horns (Swiss chocolate, Big Bang).

 
The cosmos whispered in a willow branch.
It was the timbre of your crooning voice,
compagnevole Jonah-tree – sweetness
in the creaking of a rusted latch.

 
As every wheel reiterates itself
so I rekindle your itinerant ellipse.
Vagrant heart... feminine apocalypse...
your potter's clay my zed, aleph.

Despite the severe practical problems and existential suffering I experience as a low-level unionized library worker in an Ivy League University on the Eastern Coastline of the United States of America (just kidding), I continue my heroic (kidding) effort to produce new episodes of my epic (kid) poem Autumn Door. Thus :

8

 
That which is infinitely far is also infinitely
near.  Beguile me, then, with your
singular aspect, Gypsy songster - for
two is only one in the mirror, so.

 
Across the remoteness of a frigid lake
two skaters, gliding, arm in arm
who leave their breath behind, still warm
in crystal form (with streaks of icy wake).

                              
                 *

... another little putt at Nicky de Cusa's Mini-Golf (ie. Autumn Door) :

7

 
A sparkling of snow, the air grown featherweight.
This is the earth, we may see no other.
A ball bobbled in a children's game, somewhere
suspended... pendant, over-under the infinite...

 
An anxious bluejay squawks contingent plans
for now.  But we will revolve, you and I,
on this trim pivot that upholds our sky -
drawn as we were out of the bookish plains

 
toward one transparent parapet, a ziggurat
of smiles.  Its coil retracts to vertiginous heights;
its labyrinth of particolored slates
a nowhere-palimpsest (at zero climate)

 
and with such pitch the crusted compost-mound
disintegrates in layers... flaked limestone
streaked with articulate foam, Shoshone
medicine bones, plate tectonics ground

 
up and moving in infant array - earth's
loyal dust-mote children - early, early, eagerly 
engaged in morning, honoring seared ugliness
beguilingly, half-grasping each pennyworth

 
incalculate and prodigal - innocent idolators
plunging tenacious fingers into frangible soil.
A scarab rolls its microcosm toward the Nile
(fragrant little lifeboat buried in funeral barges)

 
as the thought of you rotates beside the kiln
where the sun growls and the stars gesticulate
and the thought gestates, a guest of state...
(eyes bent toward snow along a windowsill).

The previous poem is not meant to be simply a melancholy reflection, an elegy for someone far away. The idea that "the autumn door leads nowhere" has another side to it also. Relates to this concept of "the empyrean", which I'm getting from the book about Dante noted earlier here (by Moev). It is not "anywhere"; it is an intellectual, non-physical space - the beginning, the origin of space. The "uncreated".

Slow to glob (I mean blog), slow to write these days. I love my new little poem, hope it keeps going... but everything like this takes a big mental effort on my part. There are many distractions as well as obligations on my time.

I have to get into a state of mind. Poetry for me is very different from talk or prose. I know that doesn't hold for everyone, obviously. That's OK.

6

 
The little autumn door leads nowhere.
Set against a hillside in a fresco
fading on a wall.  Tiny square of yellow
flame, a single leaf.  Twilight atmosphere.

 
It was you who brought me here
(by way of a passion for obscure painters
from Siena - by way of the black-iron fritillary
in the campus gate).  Here to nowhere.

 
Nothing behind the supernal colors
on the wall.  Nowhere to turn.  Send back
the Antikythera Mechanism (Hipparchus's
hunches no help now).  Somewhere,

 
through some word-hole, we wormed across
between empire and empyrean, making the sign
of black sheep on a parallel (dim gnomon of
lulled hearts, importunate (with     )).

 
That blackened wooden frame around the icon
was the smile around your lips.  Which was
your arm across my shoulder.  Which was...
which was.  Like Russian dolls (infinite

 
recession.  Fine recess).  The little door
flames in its woodwork (limpid, desolate).
Simple primary colors.  Light green, involute
pine-needle blue, sand, solitude.  No more. 

[p.s. for the "Antikythera Mechanism", see today's NY Times article (by John Noble Wilford). Coincidentally, also came upon this today, in Chapt. 1 of Moev book mentioned previously : "Hipparchus's discovery of the precession of the equinoxes about 129 B.C. implied that the motion of the sphere of fixed stars too was complex (there was a slight west-east slippage in its daily east-west rotation), and so an invisible ninth heaven, 'which many call Crystalline, that is, diaphanous or completely transparent' (Convivio 2.3.7.), was posited..." (Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, p. 16)]

5

 
There is an evergreen in Providence
whose needle wins the duel with every leaf
in the library.  Her spine an arrow-sheaf
of thorns.  Her grim patient taproot rends

 
the granite.  Meanwhile the library, collegial,
collects the congealed logic of the leaf-pile
conscientiously.  Bright-eyed scholar-cowboys
squirrel it away (homey arrangement, intellectual

 
corral).  And bookworm-servant, in the sub-
sub-basement, reads on her side.  The hole
in her heart gives back the cavernous whole
the word makes in the world (dub-dub-

 
scriptoria).  The outline of a forearm
lifted to prop a sleepy brow shifts
into the dream itself.  The arm grows stiff,
turns spiny, subdued, arctic, aquamarine...

 
and what the dream unfolds for turning worm
is picture of a little tree, foiled in milky air
and rain – tree lush with frail leafage, shuddering,
stuttering – green tree, evergreen, ever-warm...

So begins a new turn for the old worm...

AUTUMN DOOR



 
 
1

 
This November day, saturated with rain and twilight.
In the backyard, a cardinal, almost camouflaged
by moldering leaves.  A little breeze emerges
from the other side of thought.
                                          
                                            11.16.06


 
 
2

 
In Nicholas of Cusa's Game of Spheres
each toss of the ball might bring you closer to the center
of the nine... but maybe not.  Enter
the game.  See how your cautious throw veers

 
(slightly askew) in the plotted direction...
Its track traces the outline of a satellite's
ellipse – like Kepler's polygon (not quite
your omnipresent sphere without circumference –
                                         but near).


 
 
3

 
I know you're able to read me like a book.
Enlighten me, then, with those almond eyes.
My abject secret, everywhere despised,
you decipher with a single glance – look,

 
there's nowhere I can hide.  My riddle game
a round dance from Siena (oblong and
infinitely long) – and when you recognize
its cryptic meaning, you'll translate my shame.

 
So this ovoid sphere (shaped like a pear
almost drawn out of shape) in its unending round
begins to resemble those autumnal browns
glinting with green highlights... (please don't stare).



 
 
4

 
A worm inches toward hibernation-life.
A worm in the cold womb, Lazarus
of compost.  And womb and worm coalesce
in an almond shape – bent spiral, winter glyph.

 
When the two make one, when the canoe
from Twin Lakes portages eternity...
wearing the wedding weeds (borrowed plenty
from burrow-boroughs), piping a tuba, anew, anew...

 
Like that palimpsest of voluminous vellum
from Byzantium scraped clear of its cleaner
scraps – peelings peeled back to one keen
peal of Athenian demos-voice (deep hum).

 
So the astigmatism of servant time
serves at the will of earth's upturnings.
These mumblings of double vision – rings
of wedding vows... (still curve at well's rim).