in the dawn mirror

SINGLE SPOKE

These quiet late winter days.  My mother

lies in her small bed.

The past is not restored

but rows to its island across the water.

I see it in the distance, there –

dark rocks, pines wrapped

in mist.  What happened

to those springing years?  Vibrant affair

of VISTA volunteers… Rhode Island

skipping in my early heart.

JFK’s Newport.

A tiny sea-casket of azure, sand

in the dawn mirror of a rose lighthouse

casting Roger’s heart’s eye-

beam – his Providential replica

of conscience-liberty (human Cosmopolis).

You elevate my Minnesota grain

toward your red-violet wine

welding human & divine

on the river’s leaping arch – then

paddle further… through green pillars

from Columbia to Gravesend,

Pocahontas Williams (raven-

haired pilot for milky stars).

Where the Wain of Charles is chartered

to an evergreen holm oak –

your Ocean State a single spoke

spinning my reel & sarabande, wholehearted.

3.10.20

like San Francisco vertigo

PAINFUL CORNS

Henry’s inching toward the center

of his poem – bright high gyre

like William Golding’s Spire

(splintered, keening, full of ire).

In the Cathedral at Rodez, we saw

its balsa-wood replica

(like seedling, or amoeba-

virus) – Jocelyn’s vanishing awe

lifted to depths of infinite regress

like San Francisco vertigo.

Yet it shall not be so

with you.  Your realm is humbleness.

Your solar crown, a crown of thorns

your aureole a poor halo

picked up (after the show)

by crotchety vets (painful corns).

Somebody tell me where we’re going

with all this, Henry!

The acorn in an almond tree

makes not much sense; canoeing

(not a major sport in Italy) is

unlikely to resolve the fight

between the mining money’s might

& piping pioneers of wilderness

(attainted Oz).  Henry dozes

in his miniature oak tree –

a mythological Charlie...

& will he wake?  Check JB’s glozes.

6.29.19

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

How to be God's friend?

JUST BEYOND

The lifesaver : a fruity ring

invented by Hart Crane’s

father.  Across the plains

yawing wind-wagons roll.  Something

akin to Grant Wood corn, maybe –

an icon.  All’s figures,

counsels holy Zero

Summer.... Burchfield parody

(complete with feverish Light-

in-Gale).  Deep swampland

heartland, over sand-

fly latitudes.  God’s outa sight;

Dad’s a kind of Kingfish, generous

in all the wrong ways.

Those were the dog days.

Rain... unlikely hymn (so mysterious) –

another author, just beyond the pale.

Moses climbs from his dinghy

ready to shake that thingy –

waterspew from Rock (a Word, set sail).

How to be God’s friend? ask

the Friends.  Williams hectored,

but he left on record

how to walk humbly (high shellfish task)...

Friends gathered in a Rhody cave.

Silence is best response

to Charlie’s dalliance.

Our Author is a friendship trope – to save,

not to condemn.

5.8.18

round which we merry go

LIGHT GLANCES

Now, at dusk, the early lilacs

breathe out their scent.

Tired crabapple’s bent

limbs burst into a climax-

galaxy of blossoms, pink & white –

rhyming those slight cloud-

petals overhead

like Botticelli’s passionate

notations for the Paradiso

(Beatrice’s dancing

flame-spirits, candescing

in a last heaven-crescendo).

Old splendor of May-month springs

anew.  None shall judge her.

Like Osip’s meteor

flung suddenly through Saturn’s rings

Ophelia steps from a weedy break

wearing Ariadne’s crown –

grace, honor & renown

clothe her again, out of elm-book

of Primavera-life – primordial

Persephone, sharing

one diamond ring

(soul’s Solomonic seal, octagonal).

The river’s profile of limestone

reflects its lambent flow.

Each wave curls now

light glances toward one flint Person

                    *

the intellect sees through the show

of leafy cottonwood sheen

(black limbs lean toward one

point round which we merry go).

It’s personal, in a fleeting, refugee

sense, mumbles Hobo.

The stone beyond Cosmo.

The source of lightning & oak tree –

where little Henry hid one day

like Bonnie Charlie in a bole

of mossy acorn-meal.

The soul is preternatural, he say.

Soul is King, & Queen.  Mary

floresces rose, in bloom

beneath almond moon...

Hamlet, Ophelia marry.

Adamantine chair of motherlode...

gravitational pull

of con vexed out of Hell.

Adam’s evening (nails in road).

Looming in the linen of the dream,

the dawn fleece of time...

the scapegoat’s crime,

the victim’s cornerstone (walled

without seam into apex of dome).

This your chink of light

through the long jail night.

Your Camelot (milk-train kingdom).

5.5.17

on the verso

HAWTHORN BLOOM

There were verses on the verso of 

the parchment, leaching through

like spidery veins (blue

robin’s-egg hen-scratches... mazel tov).

Imprimature of sovereignty.

Blood-red wax of Charles

sealing the 6-foot chart

of Little Rhody liberty;

beehive of ancient freedoms

rooted in that right

Coke labored to indite –

of persons to their own kingdoms

of thought, & conscience, & truth.

For Roger Williams,

riveting I AM –

rhaptor soul Nazirim, forsooth.

Because that bird circling the oak

is like a thread that knots

the agate to the plot’s

ripe dénouement.  The thunder spoke

& stone rose   like a double-ax

out of the mountain-wave

laddering Jacob’s cave

a grail-casket   for sweet St. Max

whose dream became   a vernal tomb

across the womb of Magdalen

& made of Joshua   a wren

& Henry Sol   a hawthorn bloom

1.21.17

experimental Restoration Play

RAVEN-SPELT

Cedar shade of Galilee,

Aesculapian shepherd

staff of serpent-

skin, shed (leafing royalty

in vernal memory).  Magdala

Stone of good deeds done

O spouse of rustic sun

& witness won... lowly Messiah

come & gone (& come again).

Time flowers on the lips

& salty fate slips

into diamond lantern (homespun

dream of overflowing glee) – a shout

of joy from a windblown seed

of newness sown (whorled

Jubilee) – canoe-galleon, afloat

round Milky Road (unquenchable

Eternity) – that lights

gold Magna Carta rights

welded in smiling crucible

of Manitou.  So on this day

Canonicus & Charles II

framed (raven-spelt) new

Charter, for primordial Way –

experimental Restoration Play

within green cedar

fane – firm oaken chair

of planetary cheer (our Ripening Day).

7.8.16

Roger Williams Memorial, Prospect Terrace, Providence

* Note : on this day in 1663, King Charles II of England signed the charter creating the new colony of Rhode Island.  Written, and sponsored (in London) by Roger Williams and Thomas Clarke, the charter pioneered a new form of government, founded on principles of religious toleration and popular sovereignty.

Steady as she goes

VERMILION FLEM

Late afternoon.  Light sound

of soprano bell, from bass

drone of freight train

over river-bridge.  Nothing profound

(just slightly wistful).  A poet keeps

time.  In the ear’s recess,

faint heartbeat-stress

marks passage of the sheep

over the dream-track.  Nothing more

nor less.  Down N’Orleans way

the Indians are gay

tonight, beaded with coronation Flor

del Rio del Espiritu Santo.  Amen

& hallelujah, hey-

ey-yo.  Let us pray

for the grain of wheat, the salty bran

of liberation (touch of soul,

Touchstone).  So dance

your way into the trance,

Hal Marie!  & remember, all –

tomorrow’s Lent (already).  The square

of ash upon your brow

a sailor’s salty vow

to steady as she goes (fair,

kind & true).  His hand waves from

the deep – he’s called Acorn.

He wears an English crown

of oakleaf (he’s Vermilion Flem).

2.9.16

Royal Oak

A few years ago I began digging into various writings on anthropology, from The Golden Bough forward & back.  One of many things which fascinated me was the resemblance between archaic kingship rituals, from around the world, and the rites of Christianity.  It's a strange way of putting it, I know - but in some ways it seems as though the early Christians had struck a taproot leading back into human prehistory.  The story of Christ's "kingdom" (or anti-kingdom) and sacrifice - his giving of his "body & blood" in the Eucharist - was like a reflection of prehistoric human social rituals.  The King always "stood for" the God, or the Source of all goodness : he was the channel of the life-force (anthropologist A.M. Hocart expressed this quasi-governmental role of archaic kingship in his classic study Kings and Councillors).

It's as if the Biblical testimony - itself stretching back into earliest Judaism, offering a cosmological picture of the source of life - was reflected in a kind of "royal seal" or template : a gold coin with two sides, showing Past and Future...

MOSES-KAYAK

The soul’s a kind of mirror, they

used to say – the old

mystical sheepfold;

you’ll find it on baptism day

refracted in an oval, seen

through water.  Incidental

angels rim the cave-wall

(all elongate, string-bean

apparitions, seraphim)

till harvest ripens

& a scythe descends

dividing wheat from empty flim-

flam... everlasting Judgement

Day.  That Galilean

gospeller, Samoan

wrestler, flipped oval Testament

into tight spring – a seventh wave

reversed the Jordan-flow,

the eye of Moses-kayak now

recursive back to Adam’s grave

(SW of Lake Victoria,

no doubt).  My Mirror Lakes

were Mendelssohn out-takes,

rehearsals for a Globe-historia –

the young king, hidden in an oak tree

still, waits for his mother’s

signal – climbs from a mummer’s

moth-shroud – floats to the Sea...

9.18.15

Descendant of the Royal oak at Boscobel House (courtesy of Wikipedia)