after looking at Joan Mitchell paintings

SIMPLE BUBBLE

The battle for the blank white page.

To start anew, Joan.

Pale-bright field of corn

shaded by grey to black paint.  Rage?

Minnesota summer wheat

outside New Ulm.

Bohemian hum

of Anton Gàg?  Felt like defeat

for everyone.  Hungry Dakotas,

heimlich Bavarians...

local George Washingtons

banked on cheap lots (take theirs).

Everybody trying to shill Big George

back in redcoat London.

Not to be outdone,

Tidewater gents – that’s our land, by George!

Learn some Narragansett, maybe.

Milton did – from Roger,

one hot frozen winter.

To love, not to betray, your neighbor?

Somebody tell me how to get from here

to there, America.

Too used to being honcho

number one?  Come to shore;

wash in water.  À bas.  Restore.

The level’s golden measure,

simple bubble of air...

sea’s middle C, beyond all war.

10.13.18

Traverse des Sioux

LITTLE CROW

Down by the Minnesota River

choked with fertilizer –

shallow brown water of

Traverse des Sioux.  It was here

the white man stole the territory

with treaty signed in smoke

(fake handshake, mock

friendship).  We didn’t mean it – sorry.

Eleven years later (1862)

starved, dispossessed

the scar broke open (led

by blue, reluctant Little Crow).

Extermination of the buffalo

echoed the reservation

camp.  To build a nation

all these savages must go.

The lightweight arc of birch canoe

is like an eyebrow (wingbone

frame, sutured to one

Rose Island – lamp of Manitou).

We’re limping back to Providence.

The whole grotesquerie

of violence & perfidy

to be forgone (washed in the silence

of the sea).  Down Mississippi way

you feel a salty shell wash

through fingers... an eyelash

leach one tear, slowly.  Hey ey.

12.11.17