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
