paradise thirteen

ELEVATOR MATRIX

An eagle gliding motionless

& swift under the rain...

a message from the sun

outside my window.  Inverness

beyond the clouds, it says.  Dauntless

Dante beheld a double wheel

like Charlie’s Wain, meal-

sifting Hamlet’s dead-end eddies

into Ariadne’s crown of yellow

maize (Paradiso XIII)

at the center of the sun;

Dominican, Franciscan, we shall go

along with Beatrice too,

into that Minneapolis

where incognito Jesus

is a twin St. Paul (aboard canoe);

from White Bear Lake to Resurrection

Cemetery, we’ll unbury

Berryman & Mary

Magdalen right now – a Raven

intersection at Jonah & 4th,

a Jubilee bird-fest

out of the cosmic nest.

Jerusalem is raying mirth

from every corner of the universe;

the gray hide of a mule

hides one God-Jewel –

gold-sprinkled fiery agate-cosmos

      *

spiraling like fingerprint

of Everywoman, every

man.  The ordinary

ferris wheel begins to glint

with light most cosmopolitan –

green emerald of soul

freedom (personal

live-oak of Okeanos – constellation

of the Showy Lady’s-Slipper).

Be careful how you tread

this living woods of dead

leaves, sprouting crocuses – your

difficulties are not partisan,

your cures are neither red

nor blue.  The crownèd head

of King George, or the plowman

trampled underfoot by Mammon,

or the young stranger, mortally

undone by poverty,

her kids tossed into pauper’s prison

by our favorite mythologies...

we’ll mingle in the great

grain elevator matrix,

where the brightest of celebrities

& most anonymous of soldiers

meet.  Before the stars fall

through the vortex – Love

wingspans our last full measures.

4.18.17

On the shores of Gitche Gumee

Am reading a remarkable new biography of Dante Alighieri, by Marco Santagata, translated by Richard Dixon (Harvard UP, 2016).  Alongside Longfellow's remarkably reader-friendly translation of the Divina Commedia.

Where I live now is Longfellow territory : Minnesota.  In fact I live in a duplex adjacent to the Longfellow section of Minneapolis.  This is the land of Minnehaha Falls, Lake Nokomis, the Hiawatha rail line...  Henry L's Song of Hiawatha was inspired & underwritten by the Ojibwa legends recorded by his scholar-explorer friend Henry Schoolcraft (discoverer of the source of the Mississippi).  I can hear my late father even now - Minnesota Scout-camper-canoeist that he was - reciting (slightly tongue-in-cheek) tidbits of Hiawatha and Evangeline...

Santagata's Dante is a preternaturally-gifted young poeta (Einstein-like), trapped in a political combination of Inferno and South Boston.  His yearning for the authority of Empire makes (partial, recherche) sense in a parochial spacetime imprisoned by warlords, feuds, vengeance, murder, and every other circle of Hell.  These circles were closed.  Dante was like a drowning man struggling to the surface.  His appeal to Beatrice and Mary was a cry for a spiritual lifesaver - and a rescue from personal/political catastrophe.

But don't let me suggest that what we have here is a version of the mind-body problem.  Dante was more than an alienated intellectual.  He was a lot like Whitman, too.  He asserted Love at the center of reality, at the matrix of the cosmos - and found a way to synthesize all the different departments of Philosophia within the very human desire to love and be loved.  This was the gift of his mentors (Brunetti, Cavalcanti, Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle... Virgil) - but a gift he transfigured into blazing bardic fireworks (Whitman's descants on Emerson provide a parallel).

I find it interesting that during his agitated exilic (& hungry) wanderings around Tuscany & environs, Dante gravitated toward anywhere with a good library.  That early Renaissance hunger for knowledge chimes with what Mandelstam calls the Italians' (Dante, Ariosto) enormous appetite & gusto for speech, rhyme, poetry...  Mandelstam, out there in Voronezh & Vladivostok, carrying his frangled, tattered copy of the Divine Comedy around, always, wherever Stalin decided to send him...

The library was my refuge too.  I spent 30 years in the bowels of the Rock (Rockefeller Library, Brown University) - after Ronald Reagan brought an end to my 5-yr VISTA volunteer career (circa 1980).  I didn't want to be an organizer anymore; I needed to write.  But I didn't want to go back to school (I graduated from Brown - finally - in 1977).  For a brief ridiculous desperate time I worked as a "professional resume writer"...

I thought of poetry as something simple & direct - beyond academia, beneath academia; beyond politics, beneath politics; beyond po-biz, beneath po-biz.  I started a group called the Poetry Mission for that reason (stealing poetry off campus).  We sponsored events in an art gallery, organized some talks, published an anthology for Edwin Honig's birthday... but this was long ago (early 1990s).  Others have been down this path.

The library.  On the campus.  Yes.  I went back there, into my shell - and stayed for 30 years.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the dome of the Rhode Island State House, under which I spent much of my 5 years as a VISTA volunteer :


"The Rhode Island State House is composed of 327,000 cubic feet (9,300 m³) of white Georgia marble, 15 million bricks, and 1,309 short tons (1,188 t) of iron floor beams.^[2]

The dome of the State House is the fourth-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world, after St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, and the Minnesota State Capitol.^[2][3] On top of the dome is a gold-covered bronze statue of the Independent Man, originally named "Hope". The statue, weighing more than 500 pounds (230 kg), is 11 feet (3.4 m) tall and stands 278 feet (85 m) above the ground. The Independent Man represents freedom and independence and alludes to the independent spirit which led Roger Williams to settle and establish Providence and later Rhode Island."

"Hope."

This post is a throwback to the HG Poetics of old - that Minnehaha of endless gab-gab... how did I manage it?  As TS Eliot says somewhere, "Humility is endless."  I worked, managed.  Now, strangely, I'm home again.  Florence was my paternal grandmother's name - the Goulds lived about 2 blocks from where I'm writing this, in another shady apt by the river.  Florence was born on the the 4th of July, 1900... granddaughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain...

her smile shall win

GAZEBO SKEIN

Sultry evening in the Twin Cities.

The earth.  My mother’s kiln

stoked like Jersey landfill

with Dante’s willful souls – at ease

like oil on fire.  My moss-green vines

climb the gazebo skein.

Oblomov lived in vain

& died, sweet gentleman.  My light declines.

Oblomov dreamt a febrile dream,

icon of idle summer

grace.  Her lips murmur

& tickle his ear – Awake, Sunbeam...

Dante, shaken, shudders with Love

& epileptic ecstasy;

parallactic Ocean Sea

& shadowy Argo up above,

Emperor Henry on chariot-throne

of Rhodian charity.

A band of silver-grey

light-thread knots chords – the drone

of universal B-flat (Kingdom Come

with trombones, clarinet

& flute) – At Last.  FIAT.

Oblomov lifts his balding dome,

his heavy lashes... orange twin

pillars hold one Ariadne-

loop.  Pacific naiad?

Juliet?  La Paix?  Her smile shall win.

7.21.16

Cirque Planetaire

UPSTART HILLS

Gray coal cars thunder monotonously

across an old iron bridge.

Only a local image

in midwestern bleak.  Your poem will be

allegorical, of necessity

since an Earth so various

is only one of a series

on parade (sparkling panoply

du Cirque Planetaire).  Italian sun

is as a brazen shield

above scarred poppy field;

the moon a candle in Pavian dungeon...

Poema Sacra, Dante’s testament

è tutto didascalico –

a climber’s manual (to go

from shady gloom to cheerful summit

of Rose Mountain splendor).  My sun

rides low in winter sky,

chanting How Not to Die

in plain & soulful Minnesotan

(Ojibwa).  The dream of history

breaks open at its heart.

All-human upstart

hills (Superior, or Tuscany)

fill nets of silver phosphor –

your soul’s a philosopher

in love with twin Mirror

Lakes (Justitia, Amor).

1.13.16

L’amor che move il sole e le altre stelle

BLADE-POINT

You there – coiled on quiet side street

in Ravenna, your flickering

sabre-tooth tongue barely

echoing now – like that complete

grey gentleman, cornered by paint-cans

in Antonioni’s stony

Red Desert (who is he?)

mutely suffering blessed senseless

Giuliana’s windblown St. Vitus dance...

Maybe he beheld

her triple rainbow, welded

somehow over arctic heavens;

or this winter-silvered river, slowly

inexorably mirroring

its way to New Orleans.

An emblem of continuum (sea-

borne).  All things are moved by love;

thus you conclude your song,

rapt raptor, eagle-prong –

wisdom Minerva signaled Jove

among hard-bitten Romans.  Glancing

blow, ineffable blade-

point (that steely Maid

of Orleans would ratify) – slung

thread-thin from remotest eye

of polar bear (Mama

& Papa Bear... ah, now

I see!).  Heart-music.  Organ-sigh.

12.31.15 

*p.s. All things are moved by love is actually a more precise translation of a line from an untitled early poem by Osip Mandelstam, which begins "Insomnia. Homer...")