DOUBLE WHEELS
Lone robin yodeling his evening threnody
plaintive, solitary
on June’s last day
what would he intimate to me?
That summer was immense & infinite
beyond the figuring
of our (almost) unerring
memory of planetary things. That what
our dreaming signified was plain
(glory beyond our ken).
Tomorrow’s now & then
only a ghost might fold again
into the origami of a labyrinth
of Chartres granite, Mary
blue – like this contrary
stubborn root, trapped in cement
blooming, bleu Ming, nevertheless
along an Ariadne thread
signed (calligraphy by Ted
the Mason) in a matrix of finesse
by its ineffable Makar (aye
laddie, on a tear
shed from everywhere –
like Ocean River, or the Milky Way)
& the stone drones below human hearing
it rhythmous b-flat bass
someplace in Memphis
where Osiris met his fate, shearing
*
Love from its neverending source
(like Jackie K’s wing
saddled to her hat thing
flying off convertible, in Dallas).
Was it a Lincoln? Was it a star
mobile, from galaxy?
Something moving in the clay
rotates like Ezekiel wheels – where
Louis Armstrong melted to el P
& X marked the spot
(Montale’s really not
at home – it’s Giorgio who has the key
to the garage, muttered the lovely
Michal of Ferrara dunes).
We don’t recall these tunes!
Ecclesia et Synagoga cousins be –
double-wheels within wheels, sez
Zeke, in Minneapolis.
Where Juliet was, once
before she lost face... fell from grace...
– how tender floats the human form,
ephemeral! Until
we knot yon safety spiel –
until that lightning robin find his worm
& like a Caliban, or Jordan weed
begin to mold the clay
into slow-moving roundelay
(American)... Cahokia high meed.
7.2.19
