Mussolini shoals

MARBLE FACT

Long way from stones of Notre Dame.

We haven’t that feudal allegiance

to a field beyond France.

Bright poppies blister over Belgium

where conundrum of Isis in Iowa

came from.  She is, and was

mysterium of Osiris

on the Mississip – Ezra’s mirror-delta;

hard marble fact planted at West Branch

in Herbert Hoover’s memory

(who would not have taken kindly

to any meat-locker Muss avalanche).

Ezra yodeling the alpine Swiss serene

of his muse Circe Clementine

Vichy (& all the swine

she mesmerized, so spotless clean)

erasing all that history of filthy usury

& black boys handing Bibles

through the bars... Abel’s

your bro, Ez – cain’t you see?

Ah... the shudder of absurdity.

Knife-stab in Marlowe’s eye

– over the Jew of Malta,

of all things!  It cannot be.

It is.  Villon grins in your face,

King Flibberty-Gibbet.

Grimace may be safety net

for every reprobate.  O prodigal race...

5.4.19

 

speaking the poetry of dense & difficult

GOLDFINCH APTITUDE

In the late afternoon, old Emperor

Henry the Ghoul lies abed

beneath the wallpaper’s red

roses (spread by his late father

for his mother).  The sun is not a god

nor is his Uncle Ez,

despite the pitchmen on the rez.

Frayed tribes will not succumb; Benito’s rod

is not benign, nor ever shall be.

The motorized dream, from

vortex of survivor-shame

after the panoramic slaughter-sea

of Ypres, Somme, & Meuse-Argonne –

like a neoplatonic fantasy

of utopian autocracy,

with phantom Isis Medusa-icon

wailing like siren out of Empyrean

over the shattered spectacle

of your culture-chronicle,

Ezra – so who shall have the succession?

The special providence of a sparrow...

the goldfinch aptitude

for simple gratitude.

& when the Eternal comes, you will know,

Osip (along the axis of the earth).

The covenant of love

donated from above

for good – so we might share it forth.

4.29.19

Old Man of Concrete

LIMESTONE BROW

By the Somme, a century ago

a sum of desolations.

I had a visitation

in a dream last night.  Harsh old

Uncle Ezra – driven mad

by madness, muttering

corrections, versing

disenchanted elegiacs (sadness

in my head).  After the trenches

he would pit force

‘gainst greedy Usura –

high-boot it over squamous stenches,

inky pyramids of mental fright.

Let your barefoot Daphne

skip the alfalfa

down the nave then, rancid knight;

your whisper’s contrapuntal now

through salty reeds (remorse).

Francesca’s creaking hearse

in Rimini.  Cracked limestone brow.

Our errand in the labyrinth

is brief, & mostly blind.

The mirror is unkind

to the unkind.  A little terebinth

will slake its thirst, where lofty elms

once reigned; our monarch

is lowly – yet in his park

wings fan that once were casket-worms.

2.5.16