Family of Man

It's late at night on 5.28.  May 28.  We buried my father's ashes in St. Stephen's churchyard today (my mother was born on St. Stephen's Day - 12.26).  In a beautiful spot beside Minnehaha Creek.  My mother will be buried there too, someday.  She says she hopes the creek will flood sometime, & wash them all downstream.  My mother had her first drink (sherry) at the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (in Portland, Maine) at the age of about 12 or 13 (ca. 1940).  She was pals with the daughter of "Laughing Allegra".  "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee..." (- just a little further downstream stands the statue of Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha across the stream...)

5.28.  May 28.  I finished the long poem (about 600 pp.) Forth of July on 5.28.2000.  The poem circles around (among other things) the early New England Anglican minister & freethinker & librarian & orchardist & Seeker William Blackstone.  First exile from Boston.  Early settler (pre-Roger Williams) in Rhode Island.  He shows up in many of my poems (see the books Lanthanum, Dove Street...) - even a poem celebrating my father's birthday (4.12.27).  In fact a lot of my poems are numerically structured around the numbers 5, 28 (28 is a perfect number).

Forth of July.  My grandmother (John Gould's mother) was born on the 4th of July, 1900.  Florence Gould was the first Episcopalian (Anglican) in the family.

William Blackstone was buried on his property in Cumberland, RI on or around 5.28.1675.

It's kind of mysterious how life imitates art & art imitates life & the structures of the imagination are worked out in the dust to which thou shalt return.  All these strange shadows of many lives well lived (in the "Family of Man")!

The William Blackstone who keeps turning up, hovering in & out of my poems, is the same Wm. Blackstone celebrated in Conrad Aiken's great & seemingly-forgotten poem, "The Kid". (I've probably mentioned this before here. & also previously noted the thread linking Aiken - Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano...)

oh... & Forth of July was finished on 5.28 (2000).

5.28 (as again I repeat myself) : the day William Blackstone was buried in Cumberland RI, on Study Hill, 1675. Also St. William's Day (the day Guillem de Gellone - crusader turned monk made saint - died).

5.29 : The day Study Hill was burned to the ground by a Narragansett raiding party (all W. Blackstone's books & notebooks vanished). My birthday. RI Statehood Day.

On 5.28 ('35?) the Golden Gate Bridge opened for traffic.

There's a sweetness & humanity in Williams' A Key Into the Language of America. The idea is to get people to learn Narragansett so they'll actually go be with them. & in the process discover the wild Indians are at least as kindly & "civilized" as, or more so than, the saintly English. & what that says about church government. See Perry Miller on this.

Williams, Blake, Yeats, Mandelstam.... scholars of the wheel of fire.

"Ye shall all be salted with fire. Salt is good; therefore have salt amongst yourselves, & be at peace with one another."

What does this mean, scholars?

According to Williams, throughout human history there was & will be only one true, real, authoritative social covenant established by God with Man, and that was through Moses; and that covenant was dissolved by the crucifixion & resurrection. [This, it should be understood, is not current standard Christian doctrine, which holds that the covenant has never been abrogated - but rather taken into a new dimension, a new step in the process of divine unfolding.]

Thus all human government - especially theocracy, perhaps - is error-prone, a blind muddling-along, & sometimes utter pretense, fraudulent. This from one credited with establishing the first civil state based on precepts of free speech & complete liberty of conscience.

(Then William Blackstone, ensconced with his moldy manuscripts on Study Hill, looks into his alchemical flask & asks... but how, in fact, was that 1st covenant established? Who laid the cornerstone behind Shakespeare's Head? Where is Atlantis, Hart Crane? The rest is silence.)

Yeats is a very hard act to follow, forgive me. Here's some more alchemy (Grassblade Light). Sort of addresses my grandfather, my uncle, myself, at the same time. An elegy for my uncle (Juliet's father) really started the flow of Stubborn Grew. My grandfather built grain elevators & dockyards in the midwest & Saskatchewan. "Balthasar" has to do with a painting by Bruegel ("Adoration of the Magi"), which popped up early in Stubborn.

26


 
There is nothing but cold and dark,
as at the bottom of the sea.
As winter in Saskatchewan would be,
eventually.  And so castles made of sand... sink,

 
now, into this infinite sea, handsome
sailor boy-o... drift, now,
drift... with Minnesota snow...
flow... let go the oars,

 
drop from the transom, the huge
flat outline of your grain elevators
now, old man... old man.  Sow
the wild grave prairie with your centrifuge,

 
separate the waters from the waters,
night from day; and from the regal span
of life’s love-surge, constrain one
standing sound... your daughter’s

 
laughter, once again.  Once more.
Now droning cicadas in July
exhale one body – sigh
toward the vault... soar

 
together, merge – a water music, as
your mother’s father’s sun moves down the Thames,
an evening lightship, borne upon the flames
of flowing water.  Balthasar prepares

 
his final epiphane:  out from his naval green-
gold golem draws a ruddy gem.  His glittering
eyes reflect each burning facet floating in
his hand as he presents one gleaming human soul.


           
                                   1.5.99

- here's something slightly alchemical, from Blackstone's Day-Book (the last chapter of Forth of July):

 4


  
 Ultramarine being the diamond of all colors
 a glazing pigment out of lapis lazuli
 (background painted with dust and clay
 become a lively cornerstone, elect and precious)

  
 applied to the low prison cell, with pale
 moonlight through the barred grill
 over the old bruised boxer's skull
 as he wonders at the releasing angel

  
 obliged to use pure Naples yellow and
 vermilion for the lights upon the nailheads
 of the door (asphaltum from the Dead
 Sea region or American Bottomland)

  
 and directly below the cross in the lower
 left corner stands a dark vessel with
 shroud-like cloth – Bishop Berkeley's
 oily tar and water, or mercurial

  
 salamander vegetating in the fire (sulfur).
 It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
 And a pale green shamrock gracefully
 resolves... into a little Indian red or

  
 vermilion and lake, deepened by black.
 You must have observed the difference in
 lustre between silks woven from different-
 colored threads... luce di dentro.  Mark

  
 how that heavy angel moves the stone door
 with downward cross laid over his shoulder.
 And he will walk into stone-shrouded Rome
 and bear – (lilied footpad, Troyes mummer).

      
                            4.20.2000