Fontegaia on my mind...

20

 
It has to be this morsel of sky, an acorn
in the corner (tumbled crown).  Violent
combines (narrow blades) deflect bent
furze (X furrows Y) - a stormy

 
gust across your breast, Robin.
So in the Palio, the slowest nag
will snag a cobblestone, lug that
snail's house to the Campenone,

 
let go the ring.  They'll burn her for it.
Try to understand - the winning hand's
your own.  As when a mumbling pigeon
in a frame reverberates through infinite

 
honeycomb.  Somebody's polyglot upstairs.
If bookish Homer would sail home to her
Penelope must pen like a geographer.
Sparrow Hills will number every hair.

 
I've forgotten the word I was trying to say
(blind swallow, dive...).  As if harness
shook horse, as if the inexpressible
were simple fate.  Whack! raloo, raleye, ralay...

 
Note how in frostbound forest pools, a red moon
gallops.  Mere shuffle of thunder shakes
oaks, earth - a muttered drum takes
up a thousand tents, shrouds them in word

 
balloons of fire, smoke.  They will follow him
through the mirror (sire of Pegasus, blood-
shield) - be raveled up in clouds of
silver rain.  Your copper penny pays the requiem. 

 
21

 
The hasty serpent of the warring worlds
had double-crossed himself there
in a radar room in Ecuador.
His exoskeleton reduplicated curling

 
spirit vines - dim trees at forest mouth,
vivid lincoln logs (all 212 of them).
The Martians are not coming, Clem.
Antea's little jaguar fur slipped south,

 
so smooth, so chthonic - preternatural.
A forest black and green, invariable.
Anticipate her Great Eye, man!  Sable
glamor in an almond brow - earth poetry!

 
The tumult faded like a hosted hoax.
Only a nauseating hollow vortex
where a snakeskin dangled.  Latex
apparition.  Ghastly mist of Ahab-Rex.

 
And then the sound of the mosquitoes.
A mossy blur - ten thousand feet
above Quito.  A summer sound
complete with firefly-stars (gold Moses-

 
mites) - a thrum of give me, give,
heartbitten.  And the stretched ripple-
chord (where toiling eyes rim hopefully)
goes taut.  Plowman looks up - rivers

 
emerge, merge, murmuring.
A ghostrider tracks that marge
on pegleg steed.  Unwritten charger,
prescient, humorous.  Pure purring.

A Fontegaia Saturday.

19

 
A gray March-rainy day in Providence.
Everything evens out at last.  Moist
pelt of willow-bud releases drops as if lost
in thought, slowly, deliberate.  Immense

 
canvas of peregrine sketch-boy, hobo... 
his reigning Rainy River, gushing spring.
He pencils in concentric ovals, circling
ripples, primary shades - strange rainbow

 
anchors, fountains.  A stream like one vast
branching oak (from Dina Miss. to Moonlight
Minn.).  A candelabra, rotating (ultimate
height to bottomland - pt.A to last stop, pt.

 
Z).  A curious Mayan-Sanskrit outrider
stands upright as pin-oak, at the center
of a rain-washed flagstone target, there.
Mast of O Democracy - an Everynobody,

 
rampant.  Submariner, engulfed in brain
amnesia... one palm outstretched (to bind
a piece of string from pier to pier).  Kind
span... muffled sound of omnipresence...

 
you are that murmur camouflaged in concrete
blocks, an undertone to every unslaked heart.
Archimedean shark lure, dangling disinterred
from sky.  Curve where all the moorings meet.

 
Just willow tree.  A silver chandelier.
With myriad arms outstretched to grasp
a simple moonlit bend.  So one slight hasp
widens an April (wafer-thin) mandala-door.

18

 
Up in the quiet municipal chamber
over the burlesque of the Palio - just
a paint-smear, where the mappamundo
disappeared (gray-blue, jasper

 
radius).  And the magnetic knight
bedecked in yellow-black, astride his
massive steed, over an empty space.
Meek shall inherit mournful moonlight.

 
They go out weeping to the fields...
and hardship children to the prisons.
Meanwhile, Vienna's life-size figurines
above Town Hall emerge (on wheels)

 
from their great cuckoo-clock (the king,
the queen).  And someone must ransom
Richard Lionheart again.  That noble bum
hobo'd it to the Holy Land, a-signifying

 
furiously (nothing serious).  Foggy bottom-
land, swamp delta spring, plump Danube
Willendorf for gypsy caravans (rubes,
minnesquitos).   In the rotundum,

 
a gauzy cosmograph, a veil (with tears)
where once a year one designated hand
pulls back the curtain... scents the land
with winter petals, acorns, empty choirs.

 
Broken lilac.  In a trance, they guide
that sleepy limb toward its elaborate
ground zero (prime rib, immaculate).
Swamplight irradiates the jewel-weed.

17

 
We want the sound of equilibrium.
We want the rusty iron gate to creak
again (back, forth).  For the sake of
old heartache, we want the pendulum

 
to swing.  Over there, over the last
grassy knoll, up on the bluffs above
St. Paul - a pantomime of puppy love
plum forgotten until now (gently cast

 
from Highland Park).  Continuum-
dream - sound muffled, mollified
by atmosphere - the hurdy-gurdy
fairground, bells of heifers, hums

 
of farmers... tinkle of the carousel.
There there's a lowing going round
set to its quaint somnolent sound.
And the hand of the hired hand - well,

 
it's part of an old diurnal masquerade -
the workingman's deus ex machina,
red with a reddish light-patina
shed by his blue-ribbon shed.

 
Obscurely the painter's fingers trace
a radius beneath the horsehair panoply.
Locked in the pigment, ineluctably
a lamp is poured into the sky's dark face.

 
You will behold her, limpid countryman,
her priest of evanescence... mottled
ingenue inside a moss-green bottle-
ship from Ecuador (mosquito'd master plan).

Andiamo, Fontegaia...

16

 
Steadfast in the furnace they were dancing
sparks, undaunted motes.  Within gray
cloud formations, heavyweight
metals, ultraviolet rays.  Pong, ping.

 
The amorphous force bent the almond
limbs, the chestnut candelabra;
the view took on some abracadabra
tincture, primed by spectral wand-

 
baton.  Its name was long,
irreducible, infinite.
Hurt palpable, sweetness
close by - long was its name,

 
prevailing its mark.
The span of one brave arm
across your shoulders - come
and go with me... here we embark,

 
camerado, Jeanne-ma-soeur.
That beacon flickered through the brain-fog,
lastingly - your kaleidocosmic mystagogue
bent toward one ray, revolving, sure.

 
And lifted toward dawn.  Beyond
tumult of sawing, sighing pines,
toward an ordinary roaming-round -
toward a morning dome in Trebizond,

 
a walk downtown in Providence.
How explain yon salty commonweal?
It were a sea-bred constancy, the feel
for aslant, a-deck.  Longing-experience.

Fontegaia in the woods...

11

 
I would be opening my
wooden paint books
of oaken smoke
for a fair, or a ferrous

 
account.  A round gray
ring (protective shield
or target) welded
to sky.  Wispy

 
the Pillow-Sailor
curls back always
to Mendelssohn, his
wet bow.  Figgy, where

 
are you?  In Washington?
My Gnashington?  Weep
not, me jipper-babe,
jailbird.  We's dumb.

 
Clatter of rusty book-ends,
raucous dead-end clamor.
How tinder that armor-
tender, Hortense

 
the Orchid!  Sheep
in the burns blent
as birds on cement
or wand of Bo-Peep

 
- yet we No-See-Um,
Commodore Popsicle!
People am fickle, fever
petal - and then some!

 
12

 
The moon went under thundercloud,
shrunk to a pipsqueak at bowsprit
of shadow-ship.  A weak
ray.  Bark of Gypsy guard-dog.

 
Good Friday cried.  You OK,
cruiser?  Trailing his guide
he relayed sad rude charade.
Fiasco, sure, seems that way.

 
Waves riffled the deckhand,
the king faced the fishes,
waterlogged hobo peep
sunk for a tense sec

 
into iron fern orchard.
His pearls, aye, they, they
were wormed in her treasure -
chested, O, Miriam, immured.

 
Foreign, forlorn was the moon then.
And as if the stiff boards of the stage-
coach creaked with everybody in a rage.
You tried to pull the rough wood open

 
of stubborn doors, of golden hours,
to peel back layers of burnt Siena
scenery, the hulled mulberry of Captain
Tom's morbid planetarium, Shakespeare's

 
chariot... there was no need.
Beneath limpid pale-green willows
of the cemetery, odd mosquitoes
bobbed and dove into folded reeds.  

 
13

 
It were a tense hour or two for Man
aft the merry mirror sang at the ford.
I meant at the door to the wood,
where Pop's vassal in a sickle-moon

 
contraption.  Kind of meta-Jack, bro.
Smokin pills.  Blurred sign for fire,
possibly.  But where was Effie?
Left her beside the hot tea silo?

 
Solo maven?  We stumped...
Figured her for a frigidaire,
a Polish nightcap (arctic her
curled back against lunar

 
sump pump)...  Meanwhile, wan moon.
We was mean, I guess.  She was
- let's not discuss it.  Cuz.
There will be a countdown very soon.

 
The horologic of drumboots
preceded to elude and bust us there
in the forest.  We stumbled, sure -
it was like walking through gauze quilts...

 
There were my Palio pals on poles
in a fairy-wheel, and there were pale
rainbows tailing us, like the smell
on a snail, like the ghost of a - us...

 
A - moose?  The sickle masqued a little
Moor, lampshaded - a Roman musket-bull.
Dilated to vet you, Sal, Sol.
He'd hatchet every volt, each vessel.

 
14

 
There was a pile of silver-gray fog
all right, in the gray matter.
Wandering with a wand of wonder
in the woods.  And did you keep a log?

 
No.  Memory of fleet shades
fled, spread sail (forgot one
frigate there).  Only tentative
reach of bare willow branchlets

 
setting off on chilly early march
prompted a plywheel of outflung
batons, feelers... a sheepish string
of pussy-buds, cat-tails.  You watch

 
from your homesick L-shaped hideaway,
unpopular, forgotten and forgetting.
Through incipient gray-green netting
bedspread with magazines.  A whisper-ray.

 
From the longest arm of the oak
hung the horseshoe swing.
Just a wooden board, dividing
infant heart from sky.  Okay?

 
Strung with serpentwine halyards, and
a kid with a golden oar of some kind
encircling.  So that the blindest
of the blind kin find (in homeward

 
stretch) the baby glimmer ring
above the carousel.  It was only fair
after hairy sparky circuits, nightmare
signs.  A kind of grippling embrace.

(the section of Fontegaia posted yesterday is in part a response to a particular poem in Mikhail Aizenberg's book, Say Thank You.)

Fontegaia moves on...

10

 
A tiny hunchback snail
inches forward, cased
in a spiral spinal house.
A full retreat, and final.

 
Simple curve, mushroom
cap, camouflaged ravine
of rugged oak.  Hidden in
eye-plane, like throaty gloom

 
of turtle dove (grey
breast against gray evening 
stone).  Gradual leavening
of steady rain.  Bend in the sky.

 
Rustle of Indian foot in forest.
Breeze, or winding flute-path.
Blurred cascade or purple casket-
flower; spectrum-honeycomb (at rest).

 
The bow drawn taut, a beaded
level creaks in rain.  Almond
houseboat croons -
crowns - swoons (ceded

 
to sword).  A unison
of ewe and eye, oui, one Friday
- all in a pre-dawn naval play,
a little ark of lincoln-logos.  Done.

 
And carried on her back, a moon
gone down.  Beneath the earth.
Emancipation lips come forth,
sing like humpback whale, soon, soon.

Fontegaia, again... getting fairly wacky.

9

 
A ring of lakes, each lake
like a ring.  Frigid, with a few
frigates.  Sails full of airy
dew.  What it was like.

 
The bond of a moon in eclipse
was guaranteed by magnets,
according to the majestic
juryman (a Mr. Chips) -

 
like you or me, or more like 
you, actually - like a ewe
or a vestryman, a vraie
monad, like Eweryman - well

 
liked (at least until last
Friday, as far as I know).
She sobbed into the micro
after they drug him to the hill

 
(a friggin' no-frill spiel
or spelling bee, sez).
And a tear, a few tears...
wells from the commonweal.

 
So the adventures of little Frisbee
followed a rapid ripple down
to Mirror Lake, sometime round
sundoom.  And for you and me

 
what did it mean?  You-me.
Like a hybridized horseshoe,
a lonely-pastured Disk-a-Do.
Awhish, a rue, awry, awhee...

(p.s. it appears JL was also writing about the moon last night (or this morning). The eclipse brought it so close, so 3-dimensional - rounding it out, a smooth little pearly pebble or old-fashioned clasp-button in the sky. Cold silver radiance, taking earth on board, the shadow of earth. Going underground. Hanging up there, not far away, a sort of aloof tear-drop, a sort of Frigga-Pieta of close-lipped mournful restraint, looking on.)

Fontegaia, again...

8

 
Spindly oak, feet buried in grass.
Branches tense.  Elbows drawn in.
Giacometti in rustling iron.
History's hinge-bolt (rasping hasp).

 
The grain grows out of lightning.
Downward, jaggedly careening
leaves like leather.  Evening
parting of the ways, my

 
dear, they're whispering.
You don't know what it's like,
because mostly it's a weak
signal, mostly, you know.

 
Like a weak heartbeat.  Erratic.
How we dreamed those days!
Just dream were we.  Frail
spooks, spectators, folk-

 
art mammals.  It seeps
into the profile - the wind
mutters across its own
eye (lone cyclone).  Clasps,

 
folded-under.  Feathery flame
a-brimful of yearning -
remember how light it felt?
Like the rim of a balloon

 
about to burst...
and you were inside there,
a landed squire of oak and air.
Frisbee.  King Whammo the First.

s'more Fontegaia...

7

 
Ash Wednesday came soon this year -
not long after St. Bridget's Day,
when surly serpents lurking in iced clay
peer out (green channels in the rusted

 
drear).  Hobo tippling his jug of Ripple
leans into his memories athwart
antitheses - his Hippocrene descant -
gold and silver, Danae and Diana, supple

 
blood and water, water and oil, oil
for anointed blood... all in a sunny
stream from Mendelssohn (O cheerful
well) where Frisbee hovers over soil

 
(a wee vain Finn) and a dove dives in
between hostile armies (haughty cavalry
awash up to the crest in hawkish rivalry).
Where'd she come from?  Dunno, Jonah.

 
Weird.  Where sheets of magpies laid
in mid-USA are made, unmade under
the rumble of a vagrant iron roadstead -
some dream-horse's mercurial-curial

 
cascade - fiery bath of negatives
(forsaken, ill-starred refugees
of twenty frigid centuries).
Here is where the serpent lives

 
(bronze trickle of Gorgon hair)
and rises quivering like early sun
reflected from that glancing song's
(grey-eyed Athenian) strange lyre.

Fontegaia, on we go...

6

 
Mangered by Siena's seven hills,
intuitively the Palio braves rip round
their Campo.  Mad steeds pummel down
stable-strewn bricks - an annual memorial

 
to virginal triumph (1260 Montaperti).
She who climbs over the things we do
on earth - august ascent up to
conceptual hyperspace (see Dante) -

 
becomes minatory martial emblem.  Great-
Eyed Virgin to grey-eyed Athena.  Aerial
spear of light.  Spine-tingling peal
above that rabid, rancorous cartwheel.

 
Yet beneath incense-fog and icon-shimmer
yet-more-evasive dream-reflections
stream.  Strange backflow, that shuns
the rampant street (immured murmurmur).

 
The lion must roar, and prophets prophesy...
Grim silhouette of spiritual fright, weird lemur-
glare of recompense - O feline moon of fire
(eroded copper coin, dangling above sky-

 
bearded Amazon, piranha-sheathed) -
under your rigid radiance, an undercurrent
of impending leaps (obverse impediment;
sidewinder; vernal meteor).  Bequeathed

 
now, homing dovecote-aerie, carrier-
plied past rims of warring warnings;
do-si-do-eyed whirl of cherishing
dear Wisdom, aflame in civic mirror.

more wacky wonders...

5

 
Solomon the rainbow trout navigates
upstream, humming his hymn of hums;
he ponders (as he strokes his gills) Time
(timing the moonrise over Stephen's Gate).

 
Upstream, at the source, where crusted
snow-gargoyles begin to crack and melt.
Where a trickle slips out of a vault
of instinctual springs - a rusty

 
statue's melancholy beard of copper mold.
He ponders the mercurial curve of waves;
how the odd angle of a horse's neck heaves
mighty Troy-town tumbling down - such low

 
ambivalent ululations in that wooden fold!
The rainbow ringlets on his spine channel
a flickering repetition.  Some concealed
mass of green mountain, perhaps - retold

 
in parabolic slopes, shapes of mirage...
Or only a pert montagnard, maybe -
very uphillery (will she ever rest?).  She
is cherishing, the thought of her - a mint

 
montage, magnetic magma-load - the node,
the gnomon of Siena's flyting, flights.
She is that more-than-tidal measure, night's
chalk mate - mere swimming down the road

 
will never glom this morose mare (she climbs
limbs of Time's rim).  Solomon astrologer
caught her milking the NW Passage (near
Orion, Saskatchewan) - but only in his rhymes.

- & heading back to the jungle?

4

 
The Giantess lay on her side in Mayan shade,
beside the Moon River, that flowed and flowed,
immense and sensual, across the road
one evening.  Inconceivably begot, not made.

 
There my taut and waterloggy coracle
turns back upon itself (a-bob like putty
on a potter's carousel).  Her knotty
Egyptian-acacia ribs were barn-like,

 
barnacled with wayward fables; her bow
a figurehead rigged like a palanquin
to the nether shore, with a green
spring bough.  There were no vowels

 
stored in bulkhead, hold or hull - it was
a primitive scene (lumped in my granary).
And on the Last Day, so it will be,
each orbiting heart: tinder and resinous.

 
And drawing to a close is drawing near.
Spun round a faery mizzen, seesawed
sea-salts paddling acorn-caps raveled
a crowing cupola, on Homer's shore -

 
frost-veterans of bardic doom saw lightfall
filter through that complex tent, a whisper
lapping slow against each tender pier (their
uniondom pealed like a Russian bell).

 
These iris blades on spokes will find
your own heart also, giant sleeper.
Out of your own tiered granary, dear
Guadalupe (Teotihuacan host-figurine).

Fontegaia rollin' on...

3

 
To catch the dark meaning of the shuttling threads
woven out of old, old, senex Yule (a snowman
in July, Henry) - the unraveling plan
of surrender to yon alien love-craft... Medusa

 
heads upstream (Moon River, wider than a mile).
One plangent string drawn taut, one note
drawn out so, sostenuto... little mote-a-float,
small purple coracle (a circular bark, congealed

 
of thread, compiled from bark) sails through
the mottled shift of memories, the flaking
Madonna imagery (that photo taken by
the pool - those charcoal eyes, collecting you)

 
until the war-cries of a mortal struggle
(Battle of Lost Mountain) interweave
as overtones - the town conceives
itself as free at last - living model

 
of a byzantine mosaic curvature (Prince
Charming tenders her the toy Troy-town
surrounded by fleet morris-dancers, bound
in labyrinthine knots of amaranth footprints).

 
With sun and moon beneath her feet, haloed
by the Milky Way - so the hungry painter
(out of his ribcage-shell) depicted her:
fluttering Jonah, sister-sailor, swallowed

 
up in submarine design (breathing
Leviathan) - a levitation, inevitable
leavetaking - straddling her sable (midnight)
bridled Pegasus.  The Queen of Everything.

continuing Fontegaia chapter 3...

2

 
Over the panorama of Good Government
a brooding glow of midnight blue - so dark
against that airy chamber's Tuscan glare
(nocturnal cadence under Judgement seat).

 
In a corner of the couch, her head sloped
on her hand, in diaphanous soft silver smock,
sweet Pax, detached from civic rolling stock,
moons into the distance (a painted antelope

 
toward real mountains).  Shielded
by gentle heart, wise temperament
and nothing more.  Feminine bent
posture, leaning there; unfolded

 
field of meadow flowers, arcadian ark;
figure of the will, transfigured in a well
of all things well.  Not sundered from the skirl
of shrill desire, no - lightened by the footwork

 
of a deeper bass.  That ring of nubile girls
dancing in the street, demure, careless...
that Appalachian moonshine, effortless 
play (ukelele-dobro-mandolin)... whirls

 
you (collage of giggling collisions, jig
of visions) shaken to the roots
of every angling pine.  Somehow in cahoots
with an aerial arc-welder in T formation (Zig?

 
Little Brown Jug).  His banner under me
was sealed (toward Paradise); the plow
left off, her feathered steed sails Now (her
Soo Line siren - high horn silvery - Away).

Bright gibbous moon in the sky tonight. Started Fontegaia, part 3.

1

 
A pool of cold forest water.  Dark
and clear.  Remote slight muttering.
A rocking of breeze-waves (sinking,
rising).  Underneath an arc

 
of pines.  Beneath your eyelids.
Where images flicker, a fluttering
surf-susurrus (still moon-mooring).
A resin-resonance of prickly caryatids;

 
a pining.  Moon of admonition
for rusted memories.  Disfigured shield
harrowed by rain.  Here testaments repeal
as shed leaves, unbound, tossed adrift -

 
when your absence sets a stream in motion
(veinous pressure bent against the bow).
This is where Siena circles now -
moat-silvered cloister, cryptic ocean,

 
subterranean corona (Diana's brow).
So, in the water, one's reflected frown
turns inside out.  Hoofbeat, wing-flown,
up, down.  Slow tidal undertow.

 
Perceive, Phoebe, how it branches free
(your tributary once, now sole initiative).
Follow down (dawn-star, inceptive
dreamer) time's wide-opening seraph

 
when she sets off in her flighty car
(a nation at heart) - a Frisbee
Sorcerer, or Hula-Loop - her teetery
peripeteia, perilous - your Mayan mare.

HG Poetics turned 5 years old last Wednesday. He's learned to read the Dick & Jane books all by himself! What a good boy am he.

*

Turned a corner last night; back on track with Fontegaia poem. Maybe I was aligned somehow with the fresh air coming out of Iowa (where my maternal grandmother grew up, in West Branch).

When I start making obscure design calculations based on parts & line-counts etc., I know something is crystallizing.

Fontegaia is really the culmination of all my quatrain-hoboing of the last 10 yrs. Nobody knows about it yet. Look out, Poetryland!

*

Some constructive metaphors are also rambling into place. I don't want to explain too much at this point, though...

(The seal of the State of Minnesota shows a farmer at his plow watching a Sioux warrior riding by on his horse. I'm finding a way to think about the georgic plow of poetry and the Odyssean Trojan Pegasus of the muses and the ship of state and the Palio of Siena and the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse and Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead" and the ribs of the lungs around the heart.)



(I see MN will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of its statehood this year. "The Star of the North.")

*

The georgic plow of verses has something to do with the georgic labor, in an Iron Age, of serving the common good, the commonwealth : since rising (by way of Aristotelian "virtue") beyond pure selfishness and egotism, toward the equity and fairness of justice - justice, which is an absolute necessity for global survival - requires labor and sacrifice. Perhaps even more, it requires tolerance and mercy (always difficult for the doctrinaire and self-righteous) - since we all come up short when it comes to loving our neighbor as ourself (the foundation of equity).

So maybe Fontegaia is a love poem of sorts... Trying to show love cohering in synthesis, a "synthetic" vision. How reality itself is rooted in love. (Mostly a ponderous jumble, maybe!)

A revised, expanded Rest Note : includes new chapter of thingo-in-progress, Fontegaia.