toward the 4th of Juliette

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

my Bruegel panorama

AUTUMN AIR

The little gold galleys of the butternut

navigate through autumn air.

My Bruegel panorama

of proverbial bird-wit is fading out.

The motherland calls Hobo.  Every leaf

a chaste canoe... Rus, Rus.

The enemy be us,

pugnacious Pogo cries – war is grief

between brothers.  Apollinaire

drifts in gray whiffs

of wistfulness... his skiff’s

more tangled up with Minotaur

than was before, sighs Psyche-

Ariadne.  That graybeard

on Ravenna guard

surrounded by gray paint-debris –

he might be me.  Ocean is gray

as wing of turtledove today.

Way in the middle of the air

Ezekiel saw them wheels a’glory

Louis sang (on path LP

somewhere in Tuscany).

Leonardo da Vinci

drew Vitruvian Man like a Kali

on a microcosmic wheel of fire –

he was such a star!

& in the Last Supper

Judas & Jesus in sfumato-mirror

                  *

reach together across girlish Jean –

or do they reach for her?

Shocked faces of the men –

is it betrayal, or espousal sign?

Some knot of gravitational waves

whorls into matrix-vortex.

Beloved spindrift Rex

emergent from that sea of graves –

a eucharist or mystical body

encircled by a palm

inscrutable as that helm

of Jonah, breaching the cloudy

surf of Ocean River – O font

of soul-transfigurement!

So rooted in the fundament

we rise as citizens of Turtle-Tent –

when the Eternal comes, & we

are summoned to a wedding-

feast.  Melodious syrinx

of Orpheus-Nazir... blithe epi-

thalamium from sparkle-profundum.

Wrath of Kali-Coatlicue-

Moloch subsides away

& Leonardo frames his simulacrum

of one vernal smile... Mona Lisa

bubbly as Virgin

on the Rocks.  Come in,

she says; God’s blessing in persona.

10.19.17

my circuit is circumference

HONEY-OAK

Sunshine in June – one whole note

melts into the chord

of summer.  In the old

garden of Time, the poet’s boat

extends its shade toward evening twilight.

The golden ratio of the sunflower

stretches to the nth power

(its perihelion); clay speeds to insight,

cartwheeling uphill into angelic life –

that bright-gated City

whose anti-gravity

magnetic North amends all strife.

Through this fan-feathered diapason

of a planet, the limpid figure

of a limping friend, your

sister-dove (gray pebble, midnight sun);

her hazel eye takes in mortality

as a grave garden absorbs

the one whose goldfinch orb

will bend, in parallax fluidity

as rivers from Paradise stream forth

or a mustard seed

flares – life’s high meed –

a sunny gyroscope (balanced from birth).

So the Messiah-bloom of Israel

like Joachim Fiore,

Henry Flower (ey

hey yo) anchors goodness to the Pole

                 *

Star, steadfast over midnight waters;

so Infinite Presence

arcs into salience

turtledoves & fiery matières

de Bretagne (Arthurian hide-&-seek

the Once & Future King

resolves, into a ring

of riven oaks & golden fleece).

The One Who Rose from the Dead

lives in our midst –

Who left his Holy Ghost

as marigold, to blaze undaunted

Hagia Sophia (with a million eyes);

American peacock (turkey?)

or Aramaic poppycock (see

how archaic our ways – how wise!) –

only Phoenix-Turtle comprehends

how from dream-song flame

Reality revolves the same

again... as when a potter bends

her starfish over azure sand

& lofting clay from seabed

into galactic Roundhead

Cavalier (old Charley-Horse le Grand)

curling himself into green honey-oak

until the lightning stroke

flashes – where thunder spoke

the wheel that spun Ezekiel (Rose-Boke).

6.20.17

down here on the ground

CHILLY BLOWS

A red-tailed hawk shows white beneath,

sloping high in the cobalt

blue – pivoting afloat

on air – freewheeling in the teeth

of chilly blows (from Canada).

Down here on the ground

clay thins to the grind,

shatters like ice – power’s arcana

plates a hard face on the mirror,

the barrel.  His scapegoat

brands our feet by rote,

his toothy mustache splinters the car.

In the cosmogram from Amen Corner

another bird hums

through dusty spokes – drums

emerald beryl-wings across your

grave circumference, Columbia.

Your adamant cheer, Mother –

whose fleet flute-font rings here,

rings there, rings over yonder... ah,

brave wings!  Braiding Ocean River

with an Esperanto-Roma

glossolalia

hums into the matrix – shiver

these bony timbers onto sparkling

shores!  Nested in Galilee,

a grafted refugee

on new-found land... thrush, darkling.

11.9.16

Palmyra, Palmyra

I heard part of a BBC broadcast on the ISIS rampage in Syria.  A British scholar was asserting that the neoclassical architecture of Washington, DC was modeled in part on the ruins of Palmyra.

That's not where this poem came from, exactly.

A poem is the idiom of an idiot, full of flounders & slurry, signifying (maybe) something.  Ezekiel saw dem wheel's a'glory, way in the middle of the air (Louis Armstrong).  Eugenio Montale waxed lyric about this particular LP.

"Nummulitic" : art historian Adrian Stokes talks about the particular kind of limestone used to build the pyramids - called "Nummulitic".  After the nummulites, small protozoic creatures trapped in Egyptian limestone - from "nummus", or coin, in Latin, because of their disc-like shape.

Somehow we got from Egyptian nummulites to American dollar bills (with the pyramid & the disc) - from money to Mammon - George Washington on the other side.

Long way from the Lincoln penny.

Poetry is a work-in-progress, like the Earth (according to divine Providence).  Ursus here is a sort of image of the State as Beast (USA, RUS, USSR).  But the bears might be redeemed.  "Without vision, the people perish."

WOODEN LOGS

August departure... evening crickets

elegize on wooden

logs.  In Peto’s brownian

study, a sad decade disintegrates

like Queen Zeno’s palm-fronds, in

Palmyra.  One wing-scratched hand

pleads Washington’s jarred band

of masons (keening for Syrian

widows, orphan sons).  Important

information inside.

Your gravy train can’t hide

from Grace, her chaste Nubian portent –

always arriving never quite,

a Paradise for turtle-

dives.  So melt the mortal

Quito coin, our double-down knight

(shy U-bird cycling her parking

lot).  Concentric wheels

of Nummulitic seals...

one bears dawn for Ursus (barking

Mammon flipping tails) – the other

gyrates toward his irate

Beatrice – oceanic

ex, Czech mate (cyclonic mother

coated in cute limestone slime).

One down, one to go

up again, Horatio.

Antique Atlantis corals rime.

8.31.15

Reminiscences of 1865, by John F. Peto (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)