my circus is circumference

AGATE PATH

A camouflaged Eye of Providence

hovers over the pyramid

like an acorn emerald

planted in oak-leaf munificence.

The Geneva Drive is in Ravenna.

Its clock ticks in a circle...

twin circles... minuscule

mosaic tesserae resolve into Divina

Paradiso.  So Jesus-Orpheus the shepherd

pipes Eurydice

free of that ceremony –

Flee, Morning Star, into thy molten Word!

So Raven-Cautantowwit mounts up

like chunk of cave-shade

out of Narragansett glade.

History will halt here (full-stop).

The wheels... the wheels... from Sepulcher

to Joachim’s Eagle...

a 33, at harpoon angle

spins gravitation for a falling star

into reverse, Hartley.  Your 9th-month

manger – energy

transformer – tyranny

to liberty – Caesar to pigweed (amaranth)...

in our eye, blind soothsayer.

Dreamer.  Beware the Ides

of March, jewel!  The tides

wind up your record player

                 *

wrapping American wolf-hides

against endless winter,

before pale blue Easter

cracks the shell’s snowline... abides.

Two boats in Gloucester rock against the pier.

Twin meditations on a feast –

Thanksgiving yeast

to lift this clay into a Gaiasphere.

Light leaning down from high Polaris

filters into Catholic Oak;

Blackstone’s wheel-spoke,

planted in Pawtucket – ferrous

axle, trimmed by Roger Williams –

fortified by Edward Coke

to be King Charlie’s nook

when he eludes Roundheads (skipping exams

for exile’s exile – double-cross).

I’m whorling a rusty-russet

agate path, Juliet –

for you (muttered George Henry Loess).

Out of circuiting clay, no less...

out of the mid-month

warbling of Bluejay (29th

of May, no doubt).  Camelot is

something else.  The Lady in the Lake

of the Isles raises

Excalibur aloft... says

Hiawatha is a sacrifice (oak-thirst to slake).

3.1.19

leaves of shades

ALMOND PROW

Snow was gentle over Rhode Island

on the birthday of MLK.

It fell on tenement & highway

& on the gravestones (Irish & Italian)

near Mashapaug – where Narragansetts

warmed by winter fires

sang for their ancestors.

Henry remembered how sun sets

there, flaming the cauldron west of town –

suffusing with rich violet light

(flower of Ocean State)

seven hardscrabble hills.  Raven has flown.

Memory like a lonesome sepulcher

is quiet as the dust.

His loves (merged in one ghost

dance) circle Blackstone’s Catholic Oak.

& he walks by dark brooding Mississippi

through brown scrub

like Hobo in an empty tub,

or Orpheus without his head – see

the Maenads turn to friendly tadpoles

wriggling alongside, as

he wails downstream?  Alas!

High in his Ravenna dome, haloes

of milky starlight crown a shepherd’s brow.

Mosaic over Memphis

(or Atlanta)... Isis

enthroned, or Miriam?  Jonah’s almond prow.

1.15.19

poem for Father's Day

John Gould rowing in Oxford, ca. 1995

COPPER SEAL

Father’s Day.  Here’s a quiet hallway.

Grandpa’s twilit apartment

on Delaware Street.

Cozy, gemutlichkeit, OK.

Grandma’s old Revolutionary print

over the dining table.

George Washington & nimble

Lafayette – their filial détente

confirmed in pizzicato minuet.

Grandpa’s brass cannon

shell shines dans le coin –

Et nous voilà, sieur Lafayette.

So the crimson seal in melting wax

like Hamlet’s father’s ring

purls out, expanding

into undiscovered final acts –

Pacific reconciliations, palm-

print circumferences...

the moss-green salience

of Liberty’s majestic calm.

The Son of Man looks to his father

as to an anchorage –

firm stay against dry rage,

banal amnesia, unruly weather;

history would lose its thread

& be estranged, without

a commonality of thought,

that human constancy – dead

                *

center of the curly sprout

who springs up (fed

by seedy Shakespeare’s Head)

to brazen River of the Holy Spirit

(Father of Waters).  Before all times

the soul looks out in joy

upon a wide Creation Day

like mossy meadowlands – rhymes

with Honest Abraham in his

absinthe mandorla – bright

JFK & MLK – light-foot

Truth come marching in (this

copper seal of Peaceable Kingdom).

Light of fathers everywhere,

the milky dawn-lair

of the race, breathing soul freedom –

like whisper of Lipsanothek

(cross-braced in elephant

ivory from distant

Brescia) – a life made perfect

sustenance.  So a little acorn

from William’s Catholic Oak

(in windy Providence) spoke

to me once, as father to son;

as a green man in emerald coat

smiles from a heart of sunny

gold, so dauntless – funny!

Lifting my heart to his coracle-boat.

6.18.17

John Gould, U.S. Navy, 1945

it's not the actual statue

COTTONWOOD FLUFF

The poem curls out of the soil

of speech, an idiom

of natural freedom –

not the symbolic Rose (Étoile

du Nord) but the actual rambling

pink thorn-petals

pendulous stained glass

welds to parallactic lightning

(baptism of liquid fire).  These two,

the symbol & the thing

itself, twirl interlacing

through the June weather – like Hobo

& actual Providence, the scrappy

burg Rog Williams named.

Free habitation, framed

by metaphysical hope; happy

locution for Rhodos-location.  Only

an Ocean state of mind,

maybe – where you might find

your inner JFK, sailing toward Galilee;

only a craggy Catholic Oak

whose simple fortitude

cools tempers rude, &

opened ears when Blackstone spoke –

lifting his anima naturaliter christiana

to chant that common law

inheres in English & Ojibwa –

sponge of manna-Minnehaha

                *

drifting like green Columbia

or cottonwood fluff –

adhesive, light enough

for grave thread-whispers (ahh...

I understand).  Radiant Naiad

à New York, lifting her torch

for Liberté... hopscotch

of bare feet round hummingbird

maze-vat... such were smoke signals

for a wide corn-dance –

pregnant sum-trance

of orbic humankind, out of deep wells

(perennial realtà).  It’s not the actual

statue, the actual state

but what they indicate

(A-frame of Lincoln-log) – rational

celebrations of Memorial Days...

Thanksgivings (4th

of July an afterthought

of fireflies)... myriad ways

a Union of republican consent

gathers (in common sense,

civility) at the tense

apex of divine intent –

buffalo tepee of Providence,

Manitou table

of justice; peaceable

kingdom, benevolent, immense.

6.7.17