p.s. "Lucy" in previous... refers to name given by archaeologists to the famous skeletal remains of one of the earliest humans, discovered in Ethiopia....

she showed up in a few of the earlier sections of this chapt.

Gosh, this chapt. 4...!!! I been writing at the very top of my game, as far's I can see.

Hey world, get a clue. Here's how it is : there's the currency of USA poetry today, & then there's my quartetto-train, circlin' like a big grey eagle-bird way high overhead. That's how it is. No brag, jes' fact.

More wild Fontegaia-nonsense...

11

 
The old primordial spine of Providence.
Beneath colonial clapboard, college
collage, the tenements.  A prehistoric ridge.
To think of lightfoot Narragansetts here, once...

 
April sunlight.  Everything
nascent.  Expectant.  Recalling
Ptah, the mn before the 9 - thrumming
helicopter wing (with copper spring)

 
whose hipster lifts a manuscript
from Rome (for slim white buildings
by a riverbank).  Memphis.  Seedling
Parousia.  Windblown remnant.  Coptic

 
gypsy... O that old Mississippi garbage-
barge, still chugging upstream (in 4/4 time)
loaded with everything rifled from home.
March into April.  May be just mirage,

 
Junie - but let's let 19th-century Nature
take its course.  The ineluctable Lucy
will arise from Ethiopia, and walk home
free - once-jejune Logos - now mature,

 
secure.  Andromeda equality.  O Lamp,
Democracy!  It was for you the limber
Negus climbed from his light-trembling
mosquito boat, golden - assumed the lamb-

 
skin - felt his blind way (upstream
from Memphis).  Meanwhile a dram
of equilateral mood-poetry illuminates
unspoken trail (sweet Sheba freedom train).

40 years, today. 4/4. 44 is ancient Chinese number for "death".

Wrote here recently that "Life is drama." One thematic trend of recent Fontegaia alignment... I'm trying to evoke the notion that history, time & reality have already been sacramentalized, made sacred (through love, devotion, sacrifice). History = sacred theater. This is the kind of public feeling which emanates from "memorial days" like today.

(Mandelstam wrote about this, in his essay "Pushkin & Scriabin". Western art set utterly free, paradoxically, by a prior sacrifice.)

*

Writing these days feels like fresco-painting. I use a Neo - a simple keyboard designed for schoolchildren. Looks like a Stealth bomber.

Fontegaia goes da guerre...

10

 
The lunar light of old daguerrotypes.
Here Brady's trenches have become mass graves.
An evening star, suspended, distantly (pellucid
wave of tender blue)... Death grown ripe

 
to bursting (life to death, death into life).
Feral eyes in hard gray photos plead
for final recompense - and ferried over
yonder, trade one copper for the sum of strife.

 
A far-off shunting in the railroad yard
reverberates against a wall (of falling weights).
Some counter-measure lifted all that stone
to height of cloud, at windswept Chartres -

 
the wide mandala-labyrinth laid underfoot
patterns its path down to a 10-9-1.
Stony Franciscan target zone, a sermon
sine glossa... Time, unburdened, follows suit,

 
steps into light.  And ink sinks into paper
twilight, too.  Steeped in bitter chemicals,
its phantom, inching... achingly coalesces,
fixed - a Bruegel waltz, a dirge, a pauper-

 
twirl.  Meanwhile a graybeard hobo, unknown
soldier, camouflaged beneath gray skies,
reached out both hands, to stanch the rising
wound.  Adhesive love.  Unconscious bandage-man.

 
The earth proceeds in mourning black and white,
an image stayed in billowing relief; her canvas
sails toward afterlife - some stubborn Jonah's
spectrograph (green almond in midwinter night).

More dashed-off Palio obliquities...

9

 
Fern-like wing of pterodactyl memory
flickers across my still piano keys.
A tight-wound, sprightly voice (for skating
stories) glides aslant late winter atmosphere.

 
Today's bright leafless April air.
What roguish Osric sun enforced
the tale's evasive metamorphoses?
Nile Indian-mound harbors a meteor.

 
Some sweet-sad circus waltz, limping
toward lair of Boris - and Natasha's
eyebrow-temple's early-bird nostalgia's
blue-gray mini-Yenisei lone-wolf lope.

 
Shuttlings, crisscrossing strings -
knots, hefting a milkweed countryman
suspended from bronze-copper perihelion.
Mean angle, hour unacceptable.  She hangs

 
about, her gaze freezing the frieze,
arms flung high like everlasting piers.
Not to move.  Gray dove (in tears).
A quit-coin, masted, bridged, in breeze.

 
As if the catenary lift (elliptical)
of all those wheeling premonitions,
prohibitions, circled your Samson-
shoulder's own shy shadow (typical

 
eclipse).  The fresco registered each one.
Your date is waiting in the wings, forlorn
like some unlucky Frieda for her balder
Abe - an April skid-schedule for Phaethon.

Fontegaia, Fontegaia...

8

 
The light slows in the evening, thickens
like dark honey, grows more dense.
In the high room - in the quiet confluence
of silent frescos, frozen civic scenes.

 
Here time slows gradually toward stillness, too.
The moon glints through an eastern window,
sunset radiates the western view - tomorrow's
just a Washington slept here, nestled in futurity.

 
Below that tower, on a sunken stream
(imaginary Di) somebody's plucky packet 
boat makes for the source.  He plunks
half a piano, for a double-deck of dreamers -

 
weaklings, cards - dressed to the nines
(someone elected them almost at least...)
- he played the fastest 44 out East, they
said.  Curved ivory whispers in the pines.

 
Music revolves around and round
until it finishes where it began -
a double wreath of birth and death,
the milk and honey of Melchizedek.

 
A tom-tom of the doom (eternity).
Such were words he muttered quietly
while tinkling the pilot's keys, while
angling that penny-swap mosquito boat.

 
Such be the b-flat of finality.
It drones for you, for me,
it is the adamant of history...
the high room's bright hilarity.

Can I say anything more about this poem, Fontegaia, without spoiling the fun (if there is any)?

Have been at my idiosyncratic process for so long it's sort of hard to take a step back.

Is it all so dark, abstruse, obscure? Maybe. Maybe requires a lot of scaffolding, instruction manuals...

I follow certain ways of seeing things & thinking about things. I share much of this, I believe (I hope), with other like-minded people. But as a poet, I don't enjoy cliches and shopworn generalizations about deep & mysterious facets of experience. I want to see (& say) things as they are, or as they were "on the 1st day of creation". This is an aspect of the intellectual game of my poems. The serial-continuous-repetitive forms are, I guess, in part anyway, a mode of expressive contemplation or meditation. I want to express the "brow of reality", in my own way.

As you can probably tell, I've come increasingly to see things through some kind of spiritual-theological lens. (Of course, this loses a lot of people, scares them off.) There are a few mental foundations I return to, whenever I try to do one of these self-summaries.

Such as the notion that reality is "personal" in some ultimate sense. That the universe is suspended in some fairly indescribable creative consciousness.

& the idea that human history is subsumed within a (very) dramatic narrative of salvation history, which involves, on its most basic level, a promise or covenant between the Eternal and the mortal, the human; and which promise is fulfilled in the most distinct and "incarnational" fashion, in actual human history.

& the counterbalancing notion that this "salvation drama" has been, from the beginning, in some sense a symbolic intervention - a representative action : the full, mysterious, intricate, various & particular truth(s) of which cannot be concretized in language. Language - even "sacred" language - only acts as sign : pointing, directing us to look & see & understand. Truth itself (going back to the notion of the "personal", subjective quality of creative consciousness) can only be embodied. (Walt Whitman descants on this point over & over again, in great phrases : "The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything." & etc. etc.)

These two counterbalancing notions (actual - yet representative - salvation drama) find their crux, for me anyway, in the Good Friday & Easter events. A representative (unjust) death; a representative resurrection. As the death on the Cross is a figure for the death of Everyman & -woman - for our own particular mortality; and the resurrection is the same, ie., has representative meaning for each of us, personally, subjectively.

(Someone like me might also argue (& in so doing enter perhaps confusing & dangerous theological waters) that the clear recognition of both the actual & representative elements of this drama, is the sign itself of Joachim's & Bonaventure's coming of the "new age" : which was, for them, to be a change & renovation of the world, under the reign of contemplation.)

In my poems these events are encapsulated in the various "plays" I make on the letter "J", the word "Jay"... in one important example, "J" stands for "Jonah", which means "dove" in Hebrew. In this word are meshed both (1)the (comic) story of the runaway prophet in the bowels of the whale (a symbol, for me, of the existential blind travails of Everyman), and (2) the story of Pentecost, of the simultaneous and omnipresent manifestation of the post-resurrection-spirit - the "ghost-dance" presence of God (as dove) in the heart of Everyman. So in "Jonah" you have the melding of both crucifixion (the whale) and resurrection (the dove).

Poetry, in my view & practice anyway, offers a means of expressing visions of "how things are", which contrast with the methods & results of standard discursive prose, philosophical reflection, scientific analysis, etc. Poetry, as an art of "embodied" language, offers fundamentally dramatic models of reality; by "performing" language as self-sufficient play and exploration, these models suggest a universe which (somehow) underwrites & shares these same qualities - by rendering it suffused with personality & consciousness (as Whitman, again, pioneered so powerfully). In my understanding, a recognition & growing trust in these aspects of reality might help open the door to the full flowering of the love and confidence which is already hidden (in potentiality, in seed-form) in every person.

Fontegaia, I guess, is a kind of river-trip exploration of these & other realities. Along with previous extended poems (in Forth of July etc.) I try to dramatize & recapitulate these realities in the present, in the lingo of today.... and in so doing, to offer evidence for the idea that Time itself, as we know it anyway, manifests some kind of arcane ring structure - both ever-Now and (historically-chronologically-actually) symbolic - the mystery of which is in a process of continuous unfolding....

Fontegaia Space Odyssey.

7

 
A still-bare delta of branching limbs
in light March rain.  Tributaries
flecked with tiny green flotillas.
Something pulsing through those stems

 
redeems the worn-out winter grass,
trash-dotted ground.  Old unshaven
hung-over hobo season!  Even pavement
sprouts your weedy wanderlust (en-masse).

 
A momentary pirhouette.  10, 9, 8...
two billion years from now, the galaxies
Andromeda and Milky Way (say stargazers)
will marry, merge.  Black-hole checkmate.

 
The End.  So let Hobo unfold his hand.
A pocket-size apocalypse (poco al poco,
loco pard).  He'll only marry Mocha
Midge, his loony star - her wedding band

 
but a wavelength long (blood orange to
dark honey milk).  Twin doubtful wraith
those two will plait - a ghostly path
across Lethe - wrung out of range

 
of deepest light (one copper penny
pays the fare).  And we were there,
fair witnesses.  It's in the air,
maroon, marine - in Magdalen's keen

 
cleaving to your fate.  A way of seeing
April blindly home; a copper wight's green
calibration, tightening a Pvt. No One's
skull.  You paid in full, O Revenant (beaming).

Where is this Fontegaia, the poem, a-goin'?

Who cares? Not Poetryland. Their loss.

It's not work, for me. It's play, though it takes some effort.

I'm trying to blend some things, some figures & ideas. I'm drawing toward a design & thematic crux of this long poem. (There is a numerical & sort of structural design, but I won't go into that.)

What's it all about? Well, I'm trying to establish some affinities - very tentative, very gradual, very indirect.

1) there's the link between, on the one hand, Siena, as a sort of aesthetic model of the "free city", with its art and natural surroundings (the hidden river Diana) - and, on the other hand, some of the spiritual roots which have a presence as part of that history : the cult of the Virgin as Patron of Siena; the background presence of St. Francis and the Franciscan ethos (poverty, brotherhood, love of nature), and the mystical-historical thinking of Joachim of Fiore & St. Bonaventure. The notion of the millennial "city coming down from heaven", the New World. The little model city which the Emperor offers to the Virgin, in the Byzantine mosaics.

2) & there's the affinity between those things & the ecstatic-visionary spirit of Walt Whitman - very "San Franciscan" - filtered partially through Hart Crane (the Bridge, the River, the hobos, the "key").

3) & there's the "river"/fountain motif... the mingling of Amazon-Nile-Mississippi-Jordan... the interest in the Ethiopian version of the "ark of the covenant".

4) & there's the mingling of several painters & their images - Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Martin Ramirez, Jasper Johns, et al. & their connections with Crane, with all these other themes, with Joachim's drawings - his (& Dante's) spiritual "geometry".

5) & there are personal & autobiographical impulses & references.

So slowly, partially, obscurely, indirectly, I'm concocting a sort of American elixir... drawing connections with old things & old poets, toward ideas and commitments which are still important for poetry & history & social life today.

(p.s. & who's this "Frisbee"? Well, Frisbee is the name my mother gave to an adventurous little Tom-Thumb character about whom she told stories, back in the 1950s - such as the one about Frisbee sailing his paper boat down the spring rainwater brooks in the dirt road called Arthur Street, where we lived. A few years later, "Frisbee" reappeared in my family history, as the name of the whirling disk produced by the Whammo company - the copyright for which my father, a lawyer, had something to do. I remember flying Frisbee prototypes around the yard with my brothers. I suppose I've already written about this, here.)

6

 
It must have been a time like this,
in the beginning of evening.  Between
naptime & dinner, supper & night-night.
In Mendelssohn (the music of what is).

 
A circuit of happenings, a plot - a splendor
played out in murmurs, mirthful surf.
Backwater pools; tributaries
trickled over turf.  You begged for more.

 
Like a supple dancer following a tune
her story swims into your heart's delight.
Nine muses, seven days... his tiny chariot
spins faster.  Frisbee matches sun and moon.

 
Then weeks of years... weak years
of broken twine... you counted swine
while waiting.  Waiting for the tail-end
of the tale, at last (printemps appears).

 
Now sunset touches dappled walls
in the lofty room, where time came
to an end.  Twelve candles frame
a moody, shaded ricochet - signals

 
from beach to ball, from all to each -
as if an omnipresent rainbow reigned
muttering warm colors.  And remained
(uttering itself just out of reach).

 
It was in the family from the beginning,
then.  (The Negus branch - remember Lucy,
when she'd just begun to skip?)  & so will be
- see the young dancer step the ancient ring.

Fontegaia zeroes in.

5

 
Saturday afternoon.  A lambent flickering
through old porch glass.  Slight rainbow
effect against yellow-green (stealing
toward brown) wood frame.  A ring

 
of midwestern Mnemosyne (faint memory
of summer cabins?) lingers on the mental
doorstep.  This is how they call,
the seraphim (hardly there, really).

 
A pair of prophets in a sunset fresco,
silent (in the weekend city hall).
They stand beside a doorway.  Still.
Wrapt irises converge on San Francisco.

 
We hardly knew you're there.
Like mutters of a hobo sketch artist,
horsing around in solitary.  O most petite
one o'nine muses, grace his gray,

 
his patriotic zero stare!  For good.
His flag's his flagging repertoire -
a simple tune of freedom (by a shore
of IKB and salty waters, streaking red).

 
Under the darkening colors, beneath
the gray, a midnight milk-&-honey train
hoots (like wayward whale) across the plain.
Upstream, along the riverbank (its wraith

 
of steam trailing the other way).  Zigzag
retreat toward monkish habitat (gray-
green palm fronds, some Sheba-almond joy).
Sheds everything, grows light (high milky jag).

I start working on these things during breaks at work. Then, if I have time & energy, I write them later.

4

 
Providence.  Rain-soaked street.
Hesitant March weather (cool, 
gray).  Low clouds, parallel
to the granite, concrete.

 
Where fountains of ocean sky
come pouring, showering... a gray
mosquito boat floats - hovering
between the streams (evasive, shy).

 
This concrete husk of solitary walks.
Maze of temporary paths.
Revolving labyrinth,
crepuscular (within gray rocks).

 
Along descending granite steps
a wake of wayward pelerine -
maybe some muttering Madeleine,
grey-eyed Ondine (of unknown depth)

 
- within an Escher etching, inside out.
We know how Jonah must have felt
beneath Leviathan's gray pelt.  That
submersible arc light, sans spout -

 
grave of abortive prophecies,
gray cul-de-sac - sacral skull
(chambered) sounding burial
at sea.  Within a sea-worm

 
(see?).  Then a swift gray seedling-
bark of buoyant pity - one o'nine 
amazing coattails, trailing five fine
contrails - thar she blows now, peeling...

Fontegaia. To be continued...

2

 
I was lonely in the Fatso Tower.
Mangia, mangia! implored the Hungarian
waitress (my nemesis, my fate).  Someone
barged through an archaic swinging door -

 
was it you?  Or my Assemblyman?  Fair
deal, m'friend, he was shouting into his cell.
It's only a dream, he yelled.  Swell.
I tipped my left and got out of there (fast).
 

We have got roubles, methinks - right here 
in River City.  With a capital R and that
stands for Jail.  Lots of collars of a lariat
in a gray corral, Mister Fog - sheer

 
Poe-croquet, Froggy.  Malaise.  Oui.
The chirp of a pigeon on the Chom Ping
Lazy-A will never hazard me bowling
that egg scroll down me throat, Bobby.

 
Ideogram this, my Chinese characters!
Brain-drone croon-droogies - beyond pals!
The signals drip, pivot - halyards
slap, swivel - the whale-rim teeters

 
on its own spoke - Everylubber applies
his waddling gat against the shoulder, 
shirking... only, the sea is colder, colder.
Only the Transylvanian masseuse - the wise,

 
the amazing Miss Nile mid-USA (mass
Mattress of the Universe) - only she can spin
even this potted flashpunt toward one Parisian
plumb-bob.  Weave, Magdalenian - windlass!

 
3

 
Imagine, friend, a husky infant seedling
everywhere the same.  A sort of emerald
revolution, furled in jasper bronze.  Old,
yet still alive.  A kind of everyseed.

 
Coconut palm, perhaps - a milky sphere
lapped by dark and rugged threads.
Royal drink for an eagle Negus; mead
for a Queen Bea, victorious.  Sacred beer.

 
You searched for that pithy shell
like an under-Stanley for his living
Stone - paddling up, down - striving
through crystallized honey, pell-mell...

 
- but it can't be commanded, no,
nor imposed upon - only planted,
grown.  Meaning only (in the future)
what you find it locally, my loco friend -

 
the way the 2nd Coming keeps not-coming
except in your knotty heart, Pinetop.
A funny kind of phonautograph (post-op
encryption - ghost puffball thing-a-ming)...

 
She sings for Solomon's soul liberty
out of a sheepish seedling caravan -
make of it what you will, O lover-man.
It's like the storied storehouse, see,

 
of a maid on a maiden camel-trip -
like a man in the hold of a mosquito-
ship, a triple-whammy for a two-step
shamble, Sheba.  Break a leg.  Skip.

& so begins part 4 of Fontegaia. 10 yrs after Stubborn Grew.

1

 
Good Friday moon came round somehow
on the first day of spring this year.
My little swirvy Frisbee-sailor
navigates toward deeper waters now.

 
Like that babe in Nile-reeds
in a curved mosaic.  A very slow
circle eddies in the stream... she'll row
(backstroke) whence her spring proceeds.

 
And there's a courier pigeon (camouflaged
in gray cloud) with a scroll copper-wired
around one leg - some napping friar's
hieroglyph - threefold dreambird montage.

 
Her dream a melted timepiece, burning coal.
The vision of exhausted Jonah, cornered
in Leviathan.  Your end is mine (last word
in submarine? - aground).  He's calling

 
Elijah.  Yet, there - (glinting
so faintly over collar
of coroner) - a dove, a dove!  Far
across curve of everywave... ting,

 
ting... sea-bells ring... heard everywhere
at once.  As the moon lifts ocean water
toward the source of all Victorias (the
waterfall, the reign of reigns) our cruiser-

 
nut carries each wight upon his keel
(Joe Nobody, a milkman in the morning
tinkling across the sky).  Hear the milk train
moan - a miniscule echo revolve (its creed).

     
                  3.21.08 (Good Friday)

Conclusion of Fontegaia, part 3.

28

 
It seems a squareful solid world,
a daylit world, when a gray evening
moon slopes through a curtain
of grey cloud (light frigid, furled).

 
Its face bent toward pining (yearning
service, servitude).  Its pallor speaks
some excess, overflow... weeks
of years of tidal turning... purling,

 
pearling... weighted toward their end.
When the curving edge of the earth
closes that melancholy eye (a wreath,
red-rimmed, marks its encirclement).

 
So sorrow hides itself away
like love that looks not to itself -
by a relentless law of gravitation
offering up its life (O gentle ray).

 
On the slimmest branch
of the narrowest tree,
the smallest acorn - see
it break off, launching

 
free.  To drift downstream,
almost invisible.  A pigeon
in a marble niche, a bairn
in a barn.  Light beam,

 
okay?  In the bull's-eye of a rainbow
sings a solitary pine, from the taiga.
In reunion with a dome, Diane (Siena
lifted toward you on its bending bough).

Fontegaia, winding up...

27

 
Lakewater used to lap the shore
where a lonely scholar turned her back
on the glaring blare.  Awake, awake,
the water whispered.  Try once more.

 
To penetrate to the smiling target
through a knot of jungle vines (concentric
rings of shimmery spectra - pastel Olmec
mimosa crest of feathery waves - a coronet

 
of birds of Paradise)... and begin to hear
the granite roar of a Lake Victoria, falling
from the sky.  Where all the rivers are
recoiling foam, seething, moist - cleft, sheer...

 
as if the sigh of some Red River
of the North, encircled, echoed
upon an equatorial green.  Golden
ordinance, bell-governance - Love's

 
Admiral of the Ocean Sky, looped down
and knotted to a limping sailor.  Neptune-
child - inept, familiar shadow's Chaplin-
quest - your errant, midnight son...

 
a wandering hobo-star, a Francis-mule,
a river-freebooter (plain flaw, a-flow).
Touch the keyboard, star, she whispered.  So.
Out of a hole in the rainbow donut, foolish

 
one, it flows (beyond the garish ceremonies
of the day).  O sleepy wake of Everymoon...
you are my Ocean, streaming light, a crooning
dog-star Orient; the only sweetness of the seas.

This last section of Fontegaia chapt. 3 (#26, below) is a wee bit murky, even for me. May have to work on that...

Chapt. 3 is the (planned, anyway) middle part of a 5-part poem. Fontegaia is an attempt to explore certain historical, geographical, religious, political, & poetic phenomena through the lens of Siena (civic murals & artworks, the Palio horserace, local saints & other historical figures, & so on).

Elements of the city sort of shift around - like a lens focusing on different facets - in order to represent lots of other things (beyond Siena itself). If I write about the semi-mythical river "Diana" (which the medieval Sienese, always in need of a better water-supply, went searching for beneath their hilltops) - at the same time I may be writing about the moon (Diana was a moon-goddess), about other rivers (Mississippi, Jordan, Amazon, Nile), about searching for "the source" of things, about baptism (in the "font" or the spring), about masculine/feminine (& psychological) aspects of religious iconography ... - etc. etc.

Chapt. 3 (as you can see if you've been following along) focuses in particular on Diana/moon/river-sources. (As chapt. 2 focused on the Palio, and the 1st chapter on the Lorenzetti murals & other art.)

As I finish new chapters, they've been added to the Fontegaia work-in-progress, in the book titled Rest Note. Chapt. 3 will be added soon, I hope.

*

Also, I think, if you want to understand what I'm trying to do here, you'd want to see Fontegaia as the culmination of a longer "quatrain" train (as I've mentioned before). Stubborn Grew - the 1st book of Forth of July - opens with the poet-speaker looking down from Prospect Park at the "local Rhine" (the Providence River). The Providence, the Blackstone, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Nile, the Jordan, the little spring rainwater streams that run down Arthur St. in Mendelssohn (Hopkins, MN), & various Russian rivers, all play a very big symbolic role in Forth of July & some of the quatrain-sequences which followed it (like Rest Note).

I could be wrong, but I do feel I am drawing toward the close of this particular long streak of writing. So it's culminating around this little fountain (the Fontegaia) in the main town plaza of Siena (the Campo), over the supposed location of the underground tunnels & channels of the mythical Diana River.

Some more Font-mumble.

26

 
There was a voice whispering in the jungle.
Beneath fitful circles of mosquitoes.
A circuiting, a hum.  Longueurs of river-
moss, a silvery cirque - one angle-vector,

 
ivory.  Gray wave-splash in the backwash,
tidal gravity - where ingots of gold repent
to silver minae, copper mites; a stream-
bent parallax (Mammon to mimosa's

 
spectrum crown).  Summer's looming
honey locust.  Beside babbling brook
within Babylon book, cornered Acorn
John (gold oueil of Pequod-flummery).

 
A cold profession shipped sail
from paint-filled windy coin,
whirligig realm (your own);
Caesar's wilderness, or Israel?

 
Rome was not built in a dhou
nor moon pent in a milkweed-
pod, my friend - its cresting mead
dandled bumblebee's black-yellow

 
elephant-flight (copper periplus).
From such minimal rock lifted
bright wave of Abraham (soft
aching moss cribbed in papyrus

 
hippo-pot).  Archimedean Medusa
levers each flock with a simple kiss.
Its longing-latitude equals this -
hers be the heartache.  Hers the pieta.

Roll on, Fonty...

23

 
That dusklight through a southern window
(massive stone Palazzo Pubblico).
Like tawny wine upon an ancient fresco.
Time slows there; oaken beams begin to glow.

 
There easeful Pax (relaxing) yet lifts firm
her salient olive branch.  Leans back against
some sloughed-off armor.  Shoots a glance
(out of that solid scene) toward you - her charm

 
begins to work - such casual circumference
as planets wrinkle star.  Unfathomable
gentleness (as touch of air upon mobile
swings).  Complete silence.

 
In such a pause, a mantic oracle
cracks wide the secret caverns
of the earth - Antea's green
armful slips off, a catenary coracle

 
(homeward, by all the Circes of the Nile
at once).  As when a brittle film
breaks down - Atlantis turns him
back (around a horsetrack).  Infantile

 
sun-tag, dorsal dormitory murmur.
Myrrh left on a moor, lost in Vigo-
miroir.  Melchior-guy.  Your
zaddik travail (toward Sheba-star).

 
The ziggurat of moonlight.  It is near
and far, it is here and there...
it is Andromeda, Medusa's double
M - a paw in the waltz-race (purr, purr).

(note: obscure references, Vigo etc... Several years ago, I was in NYC, at Lincoln Center, watching old Vigo movie, L'Atalante. Suddenly the film stopped, started to burn a hole on the screen.... had to leave. Stepped outside - & there was Susan Sontag.)

24

 
A silver light whispers along a vine
like tippling water.  There I retrace
my steps, across harried pacing
of pavement cop (a raptor's whine).

 
Lightning smacks the merry-go-round.
Wooden ponies fractured in mid-
canter-prance; a pinwheel calved
into hungry horseshoes.  Under

 
flame, a copper stream broke free;
upon its back, Atalante bobbed
(your lost Frisbee, Henry).  Mosquitoes
sobbed like violins in Finland (balsa

 
sibilance, fey forest ambience).
Formal ship's papers flit through cold
frost breeze - midnight aurora-mold's
brief lofty affidavit (MLK of Paradise).

 
Only a ribbon of riven quaternion
(near Babylon).  Hear ye yon horses
nigh?  Where wind hilltop-discourses.
Where a font's pluperfect ratio is born

 
aloft (ringed by grenadine
repose).  Green vines.  A wheel
of labile husbandry.  You feel
it flex beside a treason-

 
scene - odd strains of being,
fortified (by seasoned oak).
Electrified folk?
or some Kush-pinon thing...

Fontegaia chapt. 3 heads homeward now.

22

 
It was summer.  Little Henry went looking
for Frisbee the paper hat-boat, down
a rainstream in Mendelssohn Lane.
The morning moon like a leftover something

 
(wedding ring or silver dollar) in the plains
bright blue.  A shadow of the Great State 
Seal, the coin that everyone had helped
create - river, horse, Indian, plowman,

 
star.  It was all there.  And Mendelssohn
your secret crown, alchemical quintessence,
infant font of fond infinity.  A vague, dense
matrix of remote wells - comet kingdom.

 
Evening fireflies, country weeds... sealed
in the hold.  Minute meow-mn in copper moon,
mild Negus-riddle of your own Nile-rune.
Where's Frisbee gone?  It's not revealed.

 
Little Henry, you must go
to the antipodes of your old slough
where strange mosquitoes dangle dew
above an Amazon... past Mexico.

 
There is an ink-path to a sky-redoubt
above three knotted quipu threads -
yourself, your friend, your enemy.  Triad
of pain, renunciation and reprieve - scout's

 
honor, civic vow.  For the slow fast,
for the sobornost, for the solid air
of winged, flighty joy.  For the plowshare
of that watcher there - her willow-mast.