Don't ask me

Not much to say about this, except that it's part of a series, and that Stephano and Nunzio are father & son from Sicily (my regular haircut here in Providence).  "Agnes" is Agnes Eizenberger, from Vienna, my Uncle Jim's onetime companion.  (Also thinking of another icon-maker & diagram artist, Agnes Martin.)

VIENNA VEINS

Klimt was a kind of crooked wicket

out on a creaky limb

in Cricket City (rim

of Rimini, Parisian rivulet).

Gold.  Vienna veins of Ravlin

violins (we were there,

Agnes).  Do not compare.

It’s only an American Robin

Redbreast, hooded, yodeling...

he’s calling out your name.

Not Stephano (fair game

for Fame) nor Nunzio (clipping

the locks that flood across your face)

– though they are near.  The Boot

strides on.  The man is moot.

Your Crown is Everwhirr – mesh-lace

of spy-veil, ambling the source...

a poverty of materials

in a land of burials

& sunshine (Italy, of course).

Klimt limns the anguish in your eyes.

Through vales of Solomon

or Sheba, all the broken

kingdoms, poppy-fields (Grandpappy’s

ripe Epiphany).  Pain circulates

through straitened means

somehow – corny Earth-scenes

beyond our ken (Thanksgiving plates).

8.17.15

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907)

Sunk too deep for publication

Still here in Providence, for now... still on the poem (Ravenna Diagram).

The "mule" who appears in Verona has been noted by the bona fide historian Ernst Kantorowicz (legend has it the "foal of an ass" Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday somehow ended up there... where of course Romeo & Juliet takes place... Juliet being also the name of my cousin...)

Sail on, Rolando...

ROLAND WAVES

She hides now, like a bit of clay

dissolved in the Pacific.

& you hear my heartsick

braying, like that sovereign Sunday

mule – foalish, stubborn, somehow

barnless in Verona

(down the trail from Dante

à Ravenna – è finit).  How now,

Ariel?  Where to, Joachim?

At the end of the third aevum –

crowned with the cosmic hum

of a trillion honeybees (Love’s hymn)?

There’s some empyreal raisin

soleil, raison d’état

in my four-legged squat –

stray goose-honks trying a bassoon

for the implicate symphony to come.

Maestro di colori, turtle-

dove monarch of universals...

flame-whisper, omnivagrant kingdom-

Sikh of butterflies... Vladimir’s

Veracruz (shy

brown bird, swampy sigh

of cedars).  Single yarn (gray hair).

Grey sea.  Matière de Bretagne.

Whole whorl in curl

of eyelash (salty pearl) –

Roland waves (to Charlemagne).

8.14.15