those double doors

DEEP RESCUE

Those double doors of the Baptistery

in Florence, where Alighieri

was restrained from returning.  He

might have admired the mastery

of Lorenzo Ghiberti – that golden river

of perfection, surging from

Eden to Gesthemani... some

inscrutable summa of Prime Mover

spoked in parables of heartbreak

& confusion (Miriam, lifting

both hands in agony).  So bring

what you have to a blindman’s break-

fast, to her Thanksgiving feast.

From the belly of a whale

came Jonah – whole & hale

as dolphin-breach (O swift grey beast)!

The linèd forehead of Leviathan

is like your own... therefore

be not dismayed.  Footsore

mule, flinty thin Prophet Stan,

your Livingstone (still at the Nile)

holds firm against the flow

of time – your steadfast glow

upon the brow of them who show.  Smile,

Indigo!  Passage to more than blue!

– these equilibria

of gyroscape... mute

mutualità, below the soil... deep rescue!

5.16.18

Dreamsong scrapbook

Drawing near the end of another chapter in Ravenna Diagram.  This is the penultimate entry.  As  usual with my ancient habits of poetry-masonry, when I get near a finishing-point, the occasional, "found" synchronicity aspect seems to come to the fore.  For better & worse, I guess - you will have to be the judge.  (One explanatory note : my grandmother Florence was born on the 4th of July 1900.)

ATTIC SCRAPBOOK

  i.m. Sir Nicholas Winton, 1909-2015

The wonder of such strange & serpentine

inversions – the fugitive figure

of a mote-motif (Apollinaire

in pipesmoke, say) turned adamantine

ground-bass.  Children of Nicholas

trained by tomb-cocoon

back to civilization –

little seedling-waifs to distant witness

stand for a hero’s welcome, basketed

in attic scrapbook (almost

lost).  So inside-out

(a Chaplin’s chaplaincy).  O helmeted

spouse of almond biosphere,

whose pergola or grape-

vine lattice lifted up

one speckled shadow, brazen spear –

sere monarch-leaf... to re-appear!

Wave-shield for life arrested –

lacquered, casketed

sybil of Sibelius, flown clear

in V-formation, still alive...

So Dante’s Florence, my

grand motherland, might be

a molting rhyme, prairie beehive

as forth from Juliet or Maggie’s den

Earth arcs one Saarinen

cat-grin – fireworks begin

to boom at dusk (Frisco, Ravenn).

    7.2.15

the late Nicholas Winton, with one of his lambs