essential graphene histrionics

AUTUMN NIGHT

My biographical Brown Decades tumbled

rapidly by, in Providence.

How simply the silence

of these beseeching trees (autumn

at the Arboretum) speaks to me!

Alex Weinstein, in Mt. Auburn...

stood there with Sandy (Grecian

Urn?  Likely committed it to memory).

He played the violin at 91.

Emigré from Odessa –

fruit-fly research @ Columbia –

loved poetry & science... (thread-thin,

stooped, seraphic gentleman

of Cambridge Mass.) –

& so the fleet years pass,

callow Henry, to Thanksgiving (amen,

amen).  I put my faith in one

contextual canoe –

dry tacit Quaker taboo

against unquestioned superstition;

a sort of Boston Personalism

accepting each whorl

of conscience as the real

sign of some ineffable wisdom –

spring, source, coil, J

spiraling beneath a moon

brighter than cogitation

tonight... in a jumbled chaos of hay

                  *

stacked (by osmosis-creation)

across twistronic history

into graphene infinity.

Histrionics of pacemaker nation?

No, kid – it is the equilibrium

of a canoe or gyroscope

emanating (spilling hope)

out of the heart of the Imperium

accosting the Seizer of All Good

with adjusted reciprocity

of infinite mercy –

that normative hearth-neighborhood

established on the everlasting rock

of I & Thou, of eye

& dhou (equality

the ratio of the basic J’nah-Ark).

& so the weird Isis-receptacle

of Mirror-I-Am

fuses in twin-rhyme

with Notre Dame; so the spectacle

of male narcissism becomes unviable

at ordinary crowing

of Rhode Island Red – being,

like palm at the end of the mind, able

to hoot like Owl o’Athena

in the autumn night of

history   (the shadow of love

bending over your cradle)   Ephphatha

11.5.19

one copper penny

MAGENTA DUSK

Airless stasis of the Brown Decades.

Peto’s trompe l’oeuil.

Abe’s wound is mortal.

Funeral train; black silk parades.

One copper penny glimmers in a well,

grown moss-green.  Imago

for suffering servant... halo

of ineffable good will.  Don’t break the spell.

Was it for nought this Man of Sorrows

took upon his shoulders

our hellfire – that smolders

while his penny ransoms all tomorrows?

Even Old Abe was an infant once.

Loafing on a ship

of milk & honey, lip

curving over smiling waves... a trance

of Promised Land, a river’s dream.

So Henry’s, Hobo’s path

folds under wrath –

collapses bridges into earthquake seam.

Reminiscences of 1865.

An absinthe memory

of rancid statuary

cluttering the dead wasps’ hive.

Disconsolate, they ramble riverbanks –

until the last light breaks

the sky into rose lakes,

magenta dusk.  Let us give thanks.

2.12.19

tomorrow another American vote

ANOTHER JONAH

A solitary bald eagle, by the shore

of Shady Oak Lake

surveys us as we take

a warm November walk, where

kids went splashing 50 years ago.

28 young men,

adored by one young woman

from her lonesome Whitman window...

Tomorrow another American vote.

Steeped in the mud of Brown

Decades, Walter was known

for sharp talons, a monitory note.

Writhing oaks & the dark river

seem to conspire toward

iron & blood – another Ford

Theatre, in Dallas, forever & ever.

Apollinaire, after the war,

released one thin smoke-

column (a silver rook-

feather) toward North Star.

He mocked up Brooklyn fancy-flights

for Walter’s funeral – Walt,

who traveled (trusty salt)

to Baltimore, for Poe’s last rites.

Eureka! I have found her – Psyche,

with her agate lamp.

She climbs out of the damp

stream like a Jonah from Milwaukee

                       *

lifting her mossy torch, sweet Liberty.

The copper sunrays circling

her brow are reinforcing

for the mind’s soul freedom – see!

A ring of sparks around her tall room

spoke the wheel of Union

to the local Human –

truth & justice, woven on a loom

of reciprocity (affectionate

acknowledgement of friend

& neighbor, refugee &

stranger).  Dear Walt, I tip my hat!

The Rio slips across her limestone floor.

Time’s womb, an acorn shell,

spirals an eddy-swell –

an infant turtle at creation’s door.

Gold flecks the curve of smiling threads

anchored on air... your grave

ghost dance, your wave

on wave of feathered blues & reds,

whitecaps – flashing bright angles

through a raptor’s eye.

A raven dawdles in the sky.

Night battles echo – blindness mangles

hope with sour hatreds, fear...

& yet grey-eyed Columbia

may draw another Jonah

gasping from the deep – lift clear.

11.7.16

Palmyra, Palmyra

I heard part of a BBC broadcast on the ISIS rampage in Syria.  A British scholar was asserting that the neoclassical architecture of Washington, DC was modeled in part on the ruins of Palmyra.

That's not where this poem came from, exactly.

A poem is the idiom of an idiot, full of flounders & slurry, signifying (maybe) something.  Ezekiel saw dem wheel's a'glory, way in the middle of the air (Louis Armstrong).  Eugenio Montale waxed lyric about this particular LP.

"Nummulitic" : art historian Adrian Stokes talks about the particular kind of limestone used to build the pyramids - called "Nummulitic".  After the nummulites, small protozoic creatures trapped in Egyptian limestone - from "nummus", or coin, in Latin, because of their disc-like shape.

Somehow we got from Egyptian nummulites to American dollar bills (with the pyramid & the disc) - from money to Mammon - George Washington on the other side.

Long way from the Lincoln penny.

Poetry is a work-in-progress, like the Earth (according to divine Providence).  Ursus here is a sort of image of the State as Beast (USA, RUS, USSR).  But the bears might be redeemed.  "Without vision, the people perish."

WOODEN LOGS

August departure... evening crickets

elegize on wooden

logs.  In Peto’s brownian

study, a sad decade disintegrates

like Queen Zeno’s palm-fronds, in

Palmyra.  One wing-scratched hand

pleads Washington’s jarred band

of masons (keening for Syrian

widows, orphan sons).  Important

information inside.

Your gravy train can’t hide

from Grace, her chaste Nubian portent –

always arriving never quite,

a Paradise for turtle-

dives.  So melt the mortal

Quito coin, our double-down knight

(shy U-bird cycling her parking

lot).  Concentric wheels

of Nummulitic seals...

one bears dawn for Ursus (barking

Mammon flipping tails) – the other

gyrates toward his irate

Beatrice – oceanic

ex, Czech mate (cyclonic mother

coated in cute limestone slime).

One down, one to go

up again, Horatio.

Antique Atlantis corals rime.

8.31.15

Reminiscences of 1865, by John F. Peto (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)