in the days of Ivan the Terrible

AYE-AYE

In the days of Ivan the Terrible

Sultan fought Emperor

& culture fought culture.

Faith was fervor, & power, trouble.

Lately we don’t have that problem.

Everyone agrees the state

is not about the potentate

& not about God.  It is a system.

It is a system of checks & balances

blah blah yes yes… but where,

where is the heart?  It’s there,

Hieronymo Geronimo (maybe in Providence).

I remember that whiff of salt air

off the silhouette of Roger.

A flow from Berkeley’s wager…

how Jonah might be the universal tar.

Each one of us within that law

equal as feather of Maat

or smoke of Cautantowwit

(bright sunset glow of wonder & awe).

Henry Hurricane sleeps in his dream

somewhere in Minneapolis.

Maybe taking a piss

in a treepot, on Nicollet (off the beam).

His circus is circumference.

& maybe we are Hagia

Sophia with a million…

aye.  Aye-aye, captain.  Silentium.

3.9.20

the season is Lent

LEAD PENCIL

At the most infinitesimal quantum

precinct level, trouble

is unpredictable.

Dust gathers like snow… some

galactic thread-warp effect.

The season is desolate.

Apollinaire is not

Melchizedek (the line is indirect).

The season is Lent.  Everyman

leans on shriven bones,

shaken by groans.

What will rise from such desolation?

In the river of speech, a quintessence

of dust (mixed with rain).

Shapes a diamond again –

hopeful whisper of Providence.

The metaphysics of God’s mother

(Theotokos, Mary)

is an infinite query

for blind Hobo, Henry.  Some other

realm of irenic Siren smiles

blue San Francisco Bay

over slivers of hay,

into dark monarch cedar files…

& you don’t know what I’m talking about

since the Ferrara canoe

glints gray (lead pencil #2).

Since ash flutters down (lights out).

3.3.20

Garden of Gesthemane

dimensions of Pacific promise

IRON ROOT

It’s possible we understand the common good,

since we are human beings

blessed with intellect, & feelings.

Might we live in the old neighborhood

again?  The narrow streets of Providence

for example – haunted by ghosts

of Roger Williams & his hosts

Canonicus & Miantonomi (his friends,

working out in late-night conferences

the immemorial foundations

of good government).  Nations

& peoples, grounded in the ancient senses

of those words (Pax, Libertas, Justitia)

sustained, beyond the bite

of Mammon (greed & spite)

into a vivid substance of reality –

dream-songe of every poet ever born.

Yea, Henry Acorn King

will of foundations sing,

laid deep before the civil wars began –

of Edw. Coke, bent over Magna Carta

(constitution of our civil rights

before the king, his knights,

were born); of Williams, apple of his eye

& visionary of our liberty

who felt the fiery seed

of conscience, freed

from all coercion, was the key

                  *

that opens up a box of keys –

the iron root of human

dignity (since we are one

with goodness only as we choose

to be).  & how distinct this innocence

from those manipulations

of the Mammonites, evasions

of sadistic Minotaurs!  The silence

of compassionate stars rebukes Caesar

& all his empires, murmurs

Hobo.  His abode blurs

river-mud with gravity (cold graveyard

avatar).  All density of stone

compacted into black hole

rings your somber footstool,

Everyman – refining stokehold of the sun!

& indistinguishable from hopeless hell

until the graceful whisper

of Columbia, your dove-sister,

thunders like lilting from a light-filled well –

like those Latrobes, who journeyed down to Delta

après shaping simple mansions

for America; or Hart’s dimensions

of Pacific promise… Ocean harmonies (selah).

So Hobo’s heart lingers (below the sweep

of salty galaxies, just off

the bridge).  His brooding strophe

coos from orange shadows… azure keep.

2.15.20

scribe's tattoo

RIVER WAVES

I miss the mourning doves of Providence

at the end of September

amid these amber

sheaves of wheat (gleaned evidence

of Morning Star).  A new immigrant’s

landed in Minneapolis

light gray, with neckpiece

of black-white bands.  Postulant’s

collar, mayhap?  Or a scribe’s tattoo

ably marked upon the neck

like Isaac or Melchizedek

or some Eurasian collared coo-coo

hums b-flat from the fiery furnace

of her supernatural

affection (international

orange toucan, maybe – or Falcon-Ace)

& so transfigures frozen Everyman

out of his callous armor

into another feathered Amor

winging like an arrow back to Magdalen

& turning to golden almond in her hand

like the sun beheld by Ondine

underwater (bright, serene).

As river waves lap softly overland

her clear tone modulates the earth

back to its mended origin

within your warm all-human

clasp (chastened Columbia’s rebirth).

9.30.19

with pigeon feathers for stone walls

SPRING BREEZE

As in one of those primitive

Sienese masters,

a pained St. Francis

fits inside a pastel arch.  Give

me your poor, your huddled masses

yearning to breathe free...

Over there stands Liberty

vaunting her mural crown (tresses

awash beneath W.P.A. murals).

Sister to Columbia,

dove-principezza

with pigeon feathers for stone walls.

They’re tripping a Troy-town maze

around the cave entrance;

priming some freelance

to buzz the Republic’s toxic haze.

Where Everyman is king

no man is king.

To the sheep he’ll cling,

to the underside of everything.

Like the span of a soft retina

in Providence, RI.

Like the women nearby

when they crucified the guy, selah.

Man or woman, brother, sister...

hearken to the wind.

Spring breeze, unwind –

a breath of renaissance, tongue-twister.

12.13.18

the tender green

INDIAN GRAVE

The tender green fans out in sprays

now, over the trees

by the river.  Hobo sees

a little rise, like an Indian grave (Scythian?)

through cottonwoods – a salience.

Here Mrs. Sippy Nile

meets the 4 Grail

streams – Po (Eridanos),

Avon, Neva, Voronezh.

The raven is a dove

by day.  The paths of love

merge in a lattice-nest (collage

of gray clouds in circumference

of radar palm) where Jonah,

from the salty eye

of hurricane, flutes wholeness

(restoration).  My simple stick man-

woman, caved-in

charcoal Job, has been

the universal algorithm – toon

of Empire or Democracy, depending

on the rope they knotted

(quipu linen, rotted

on the mountaintop).  Swaddling

kid, Vallejo baby.  Lincoln

logs cradle the guest

fresh from wilderness

of ruin (arc of Constantine)

               *

lit by milky Okeanos

whence a black stone

fell, judged by no one –

Petersburg akme (nostos).

Impenetrable wisdom of

Columbia... the dove

of liberty, hove-

to – an alien corn-trove

in that placid Atlantic harbor,

lifting her copper torch

of caritas (scorch-

welded like a bolted nut) over

the twinkling arbor of a bent planet.

The nations tremble, the old

Winnebago starts cold –

rumbles into mobile mercy-net;

Thunderbird circles to Red Wing

becoming human being

in the mirror of Sing-Sing

(bright angle of prism-thing).

She was woodpeckered to a tree

like some Raven-Bluejay

out Oregon way.

Crossroads of simplicity –

a monarch butterfly in Mexico

could not have sung better

with keel o’ green cedar

or almond in Quauhnahuac (ey yo).

4.17.17

something very like an H

SALIENT THREAD

In the limpid evening distance, the twin

piers of the bridge are shining

as if a smile took wing.

& something very like an H is drawn

in orange ‘gainst the azure gold –

a catenary grave

for slight Ophelia (wave

goodbye now, wrinkled Henry Gourd).

Hamlet & Laertes squabble

aching in the trench;

leaves fall... the wench

is dead.  The leaves make hibble-hobble

& the scene folds into quiet,

sea, mourning.  The ship

groans back to London.  Slip

the knot now, Everyman... knit

your soul into that oaken keel.

The ropes will fray, the mast

will break, redwood at last

keel over too... yet may this steel

needle still aim toward home, somehow.

A gibbous moon ripens

onto Jaybird’s pencil-

thin & salient thread (above, below

twine almond bears)   the crossroad sings

with joyeux Yeshua

the motes flame   Manitou

Black Elk   yahoo   the tree-bell rings

10.11.16

Jesus Thoughts (2) : footnotes & leaves

John Meier (in The Marginal Jew) makes a convincing case that the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels really were his siblings (or half-siblings), rather than his "cousins", as has sometimes been claimed.

In which case, I suppose it's quite possible (likely?) that descendants of these siblings are alive & with us on earth today.

*

Jesus appears to have at times  referred to himself as "the Son of Man".  This is a phrase from the OT Book of Daniel, for the apocalyptic Messiah-figure Daniel sees in a vision.  But to my ears it also has connotations of "Everyman".  Thus Jesus is presenting himself and his fate as representative of the fate of each man and woman.  This chimes with the later theological notion that God has imprinted his signs, his signature, all across nature.  & it reminds me of Joyce's idiosyncratic, anti-clerical fashioning of reality in Ulysses : of the layers of symbolic echoes joining every element in linked scales of meaning; of Stephen Dedalus, reading the "signatures" in things; of the pivotal encounter in the late-night bus station between the two male protagonists, Bloom & Stephen, with its Biblical echoes of grieving father & prodigal son.

If the natural and human worlds radiate these parabolic signatures of the Son of Man, then we are all caught up in a sort of cosmic mystery play of life, death, eternity.  Jesus, the "woodworker", starts out life in Nazareth as the "son of the woodworker", fashioning wood : he ends life fastened to the cosmic Tree at the matrix of all things.

The other day I was sitting on a bench at Prospect Park, on my lunch break.  Beside me I found a little curled maple leaf, its reds and yellows fading into brown; it reminded me of an old piece of parchment.  The red-brown veins branching through the leaf spread like a microcosm of the tree the leaf had fallen from, or like a dark brown microcosmic river.  I thought about autumn, and Halloween, and the mortality of all physical things...  I thought about the mystery play of Resurrection, & the role of the hero Jesus plays there.

These are not original ideas, obviously.  But I find them curiously generative... might lead to something more distinctive here someday.

Going back to remarks of a few days ago...

Sculpting the mask - molding it out of materia poetica - the timbre & range of the voice, the character & intellectual focus of the speaker.

& tying this into the vague notions of sculpture per se presented yestahday.

The poet as the salience of a locality in time & space. A sculptural bump.

As such, only the "verbal representative" of what Everyman & Everywoman yis.

The human person - and analogously, poetic speech - as geological salience. (Mandelstam was fascinated with some such notion. On "salience", see Mandelstam the Reader, by Nancy Pollak.)

To envision the human being as mute. As sculpture. Why? Because I'm thinking of this sort of in Whitman's sense of the poet's identification with "dumb humanity".

But not with the bardic or patronizing meaning of giving a voice to the voiceless. No. Rather to conceive of the "dumb human person" as sufficient unto him- or herself. Why? Because a person's deeds are their true speech. The devotion of ordinary "dumb" (mute) persons to ordinary acts of unselfish charity throughout their lives.

"Piety", in the old sense.

I am wandering dumbly far afield, a stony salience in the furrow.

It's Everywoman, Everyman. It's you, me, it's Berkeley in Paradise... the Son of Man, the Imago. It's All Souls' Eve (& Happy Halloween).