compact Mayflower

ACCORD-HARMONIUM

Memorial Day.  The little flags

for birthday boys.  A vast

lime hillside park, just

north of Harriet.  My scraps & rags

of memory.  Twilight apartment

in the 50‘s (60 years

ago).  Mahogany.  Grandpa’s

brass shell from France.  The scent

of pipe tobacco.  Suntanned print

of Washington & Lafayette

skipping a minuet

après la Revolution... ancient

icons of a Constitution, hereby

animated (in the flesh).

How to start fresh?

For the remembrance of me...

for 1st Minnesota, Cemetery

Ridge (clumped there

after the last full measure).

Play with your toy soldiers, Henry.

Hawk-wrought republican scriptures

underwritten by compact

Mayflower... covenant

of friendly fellowship (yours,

mine, ours).  Underscored in turn

for soft flute melody

out of forgotten Gypsy

music-box, deep August forest (yearn

                *

for startled stars, green, coppery).

The absinthe reminiscence

of a Peto (Still Decades).

Time’s overrated.  It’s your history

that’s in your making, Liberty.

Out of Itasca spring

a major serpent thing

treads sinuous Welsh-knotty

tanglements, under lightweight bridge

(it’s only gravity) –

your shadow-play, Psyche,

Eurydice.  Reunion.  To the edge

of black-&-yellow double-eagle

eggshell canoe (viceroy

cocoon?) from stony

Petrograd (oscillate, seagull).

Black-orange monarch of your soul.

This little mustard seed

of pilgrimage (Venerable Bead

or Columbaa) will ravel up the whole

into an Okie safety catch of swinging

carousels – Francesca

slanting out of Rimini

(doggèd by Pound) is bringing

Beatrice in her wake – a hurricane

accord-harmonium,

an oriole some-hum bonum

renewing memories (Van Windowpane).

5.26.17

Geoffrey Hill, Yves Bonnefoy, Elie Wiesel

SMALL EMERALD ELEGY

                      Geoffrey Hill, Yves Bonnefoy, Elie Wiesel

Light at dusk across the grass

salted with white crosses,

poppies... graph of losses

rounding up the Somme.  Mass

for the mass of young men gone.

On Cemetery Ridge

the plowmen made a bridge

of bone, unbreakable – and won

the day.  Coraggio, amigos.

Somnolent River

Time will shiver silver

when the last full measure flows

from infant veins, against the grain

of human servitude –

that dominant X (rude

chi-rho, nailed up in the brain).

In the barranca (by the monarchs’

den) the battered Consul

penetrated to the well

of Golgotha.  His mind sparks

like the last firefly of evening meadows...

a small emerald octagon,

or 4-leaf clover – moon

over Eire, over the raging shadows

of the nations.  Clue vero, Ariadne-

yarn.  A catenary

arc, or smile – an airy

rack of clouds, threading the Neva R.

7.2.16

George Bellows, Rain on the River (RI School of Design Museum of Art)