Old quatrain-train in his hero-dotage.

5

 
In far-off Scythia, little horse-bells tinkle
in the wind, among the effigies, circling
the terror-mounds.  Effeminate soothsayers
(Enarees) plait, unplait their strips of linden-bark.

 
Air flows clear across vast prairie.
Saskatchewan, maybe.  Rattling my old snake-
rattle now, one arm swerving the daylight-radius,
muttering around the square perimeter, hey-ey.

 
Behind the skeins of Henry pilots Enaree.
Under the eyelids, dreams, wind.  Clear light.
And the woman veering away as you pivot
yourself... back into mist... who be?

 
Shoulder hunched, brow intent, eyes
scouring earth... Amazon on foot?
River-nymph on shore?  After chariot-
wheel?  Lost where my flood rose...

 
I can't bring back one who never left.
So song goes blind, just air over grassland.
Word-rods, tempered - beholding, as they bend
cities to their will, how the frail grass-waves lift

 
in the wind.  Not to speak of the broken sun-
spoke, its expectant fling across that steep
last curve.  Servants glean what remains, sweep
up the dust, murmur, croon (... will be done)...

 
How the air-flood sweeps away my crumbling
babble - what's left of ribcage holds no sail.
Only oscillating, in a hangar, wired to a nail...
icon of garden-angelus (blue eyes trembling).

So be it...

4

 
Magnetics of a blue-green gaze, out of
resplendent horsehair.  Through colored
oil.  Across lacquered wood.  Light poured.
Blonde, with casket of brune acacia (wheels

 
within Kiev-wheels, Irina).  Gift of myrrh
sent through a frame.  So she handed me
the stereopticon (old Providence in Tuscany).
Her mother, dove in local ground (my father's

 
birthday).  Strange elevator, dropping scales
(Justitia and Pax, either end of Byzantine
couch).  Mary Magdalen (Siena version) -
sea-blue, veiled glance (frankincense?) - all's

 
figures.  And eyes well with tears.  All's well.
When the local scene takes hold of its vitreous
reality, suddenly compact with very specific (US)
gravity.  Down the hill from the art gallery - we'll

 
go find Willy's original spring, won't we?  Still
there, beneath granite, iron.  Like Delphic
tripod-oracle - perennial glimmer through thick
3-D shades.  Primary crayon civilization, ex nihil.

 
Only light!  A cyclo-paean (absolute devotion).
Because I love, because I love, because I love
Frisbee traveled from fire, through mauve
dusk, back to evening star (run, run...)

 
and in the well of years harbors (like tree
from a tiny light).  Shed milk of regal
Negus-kenosis.  Hunch of equality (Lincoln-
simplicity).  Double-thing, W-ing from eternity.

Fontegaia rolls on.

3

 
That other one, with the beard, the slouch hat
of tramps, the pathetic pipe - that needy old man,
wearing out his welcome among blessed suburbanites -
where he gone?  Southwest with the Soo Line, I bet.

 
Down to the turquoise desert, maybe - watching sunrise
light the razory edge of ye planet.  Doing the ghost
dance bit with the birdcage whistle of a limberlost
vacationer in these parts (passin' through, guys).

 
A pattern in the sand, like a sidewinder mandala.
No cameras, please.  An excuse for a man,
dug up somewhere (straight from the can,
I reckon).  Better move on, fella.

 
Whistle on through, like a Hiawatha
with fins - like a Frisbee hovercraft
over a couple of stereo kids (daft
in love, falls like Minnehaha).

 
Everybody's shadow lights out somewhere, Huck.
The spin doctors the wound but won't heal
the mortal - since it was a formidable
yearn to begin with (out of a garden walk).

 
So's the story, anyhow.  Hope to see her someday,
quoth King Solomon (speaking the dark cause
of him condition).  She'm the reason I chose
to chase them varmints over the hill, agreed Will A. 

 
Who your buddy, Poe?  Lasso-Man?  (Can't we all
get a lung?)  She'll be roping up your neck
as we speak, pard - Legal Aid, I mean - heck,
she's law, f'cryin' aloud.  Sheba's Blackstone, pal.

Improv Fontegaia, winding down.

2

 
I keep returning to the same old memory -
you, pointing to those evening panoramas.
Icons of what pleased you, always. 
Remembering the Emperor, his toy city

 
offered to those almond eyes... trim reciprocity.
Song circles thus, thirstily, around its own joy.
A taut tautology, twirled tight, suspended...
(highway for hovering Frisbee dit-da-ditty-

 
datta data-hum).  Only a neurotic project?
Overshot bridge to nowhere?  Sunburst
heart like expunged orangutan, immersed
in his analysis (decomposing rancid intellect)...

 
and will it always be so?  Furtive raven
scrapes surface of the road, Poe
weaves zig-zag after... pines solo
tremolo for Whitman... weeps later on

 
for Poe... I don't think so.  Raven slices air
southwest, like a blind spot in the sun belt
of Orion, southwest... where fire felt around
wings of a Phoenix proscenium - the choir

 
belted out Messiah.  In the continuum
song circuits around its immeasurable flame
as gull-be-dove, wheeling high... terrific frame
of golden lyre, Apollo-harbinger (incalculable sum) -

 
old hobo-love burns there, over the stream.
It never ends.  It is longing-equilibrium's long
home's Big Rock Candy Mountain... simple strum
of a suspended 7th (33 light-yrs from yr sunbeam).

Beginning final chapter of Fontegaia.

1

 
The heavy-laden lilac leans and sways
toward the light blue-yellow wall.  The May day
glories in its brilliance; old Hobo will have his say.
These words like sand that slips between my fingers

 
... those first words formed, those infant sounds
measuring the distance between lips and breast...
the welling O... orotund as gentle eyes that rest
on me, grant my whole body rest... so time rounds

 
home, rounds out of mind.  So the muttering
of Everyman circles its secret sun - the word
like a primitive hunter, blinded by its own weird
mirroring (til General Davy sets Gem in a sling).

 
Homesick Eddy wanders empty Providence.  Then
a green light stops him in his tracks.  Some ghost
of springs long-gone (a-spiralling)... he hears a host
in sandy Frisco (bit by his own heart's shady evidence).

 
Beyond earthquake and fire, the approaching clip-clop
of apocalypse - the unspeakable plague of his tabloid
taboo has turned him (pearl-lined, clammy) inside-
out (twin magnetized Ligeia-orbs, under eclipse).

 
And hobo-poet stumbles, blind, his mother-wit
now branded on his brow.  It wells from swollen
veins beneath the crust - cheap sour wine
gone vinegar, an infinite discomfort

 
roiling, rustling across his tongue - the fatal crown.
Touch of hot iron sears the whole mouth now.
So near, that solar flare - where a lone crow
(raving, pivoting southwest) tastes his renown.

& so concludes Fontegaia pt. 4. (p.s. today is the anniversary of the founding of Constantinople)

27

 
Grandma went down to St. Croix on your birthday,
Phoebe, to visit a nest of potters along the river.
Spry Frisbee-soothsayer keeps on revolving forever,
almost - like a venerable Pythia-barge (109 light-years

 
away, it seems).  Your Little Boy Bohu-Pa (some
China clay?) peers out again (through his mosquito-
net) toward a winking, twinkling Ocean shore -
the river-of-riverbanks, a moving firmament

 
(tesseract dome or drinking bowl).  Where
elk-sized almond eyes (through arctic space)
lock into mutual recognition - natural grace
domesticating something else.  Grain of sand (or

 
key of clay) from nowhere.  Something immeasurable
nestled in the river-rings - purled mote of fire
in parallax.  Becomes an equal sign (9 = gyre)
whose Magdalenian eyes dove into mine.  Voluble

 
pebble on ramble up Nile - light-bauble, hidden
in humdrum clam - Jonah's wail, phonautographed
by Byzantine toy elephant... some corn-fed seraph
Ruth found (a-slumber) on her way to Rachel's barn.

 
Earth just tuning up, the way an infinite keyboard
found a home in Mendelssohn.  Five-finger exercises.
We count the cost together, local guys n' gals
figuring out Saskatchewan - but look upstream, toward

 
rainy spring (where river-whales play hippopotami
arpeggios).  Look there, look there.  Cassiopeia
and her Milky King - your mother-stream's calliope -
a muted requiem.  The universe.  Sings come with me.

     
                      5.11.08 (Pentecost/Mother's Day)

Fontegaia chapt. 4, unraveling down to finish line.

26

 
Those fibrillating frescos in an old Italian town...
she handed them to me, like 3-D shades, like some
Calliope-kaleidoscope.  Good Government their theme,
a peaceful Providence their angular reunion -

 
in the L-shaped room, where the hero circles back
to square one.  Back through green rushes, O...
back up the Nile again, unto oh-so-mysterioso
Ethiopia.  Where a triple rainbow on a tripod neck

 
taught sleepy Sheba how to riddle Solomon
with double consonance (pithy adagia).
A kind of Minnehaha joke on Hiawatha.
Odd misuse (tree-planting in a railroad cabin).

 
Homeward bound, through the scarred terrain
of hi-ho yesteryear.  All those nations, kings...
- it makes you wonder about things,
said Miz Pa to her Uncle Sam (caboosed again).

 
Em thought so too.  A hermit election... old America
wound up on a chessboard toward the end of November
- was they what the people want?  Or just an ember
on the lips of a clod?  Humpty-Dumpty?  Caw-caw

 
crowed the triplets in a cypress tree - we seed
what ye sow.  A kind of raven-milk for boho
Elijah - seal of Melchizedek on his hillbilly brow.
A raft of Lincoln-logs on the stream of minstrelsy,

 
I gather - since you brought me here, jailbird -
to the echo chamber (33 Chamber St).  Shades
of transfusion on the telepathy-phone... reeds
drooping in a semaphore across the prison yard.

ol' goofy Fontegaia...

25

 
A thin Calabrian hermit twines concentric Celtic rings,
rough plunkets of inverted eagle-dives, for his own
2nd-time Olympiad (calibrated to a lonesome
kingship, coming on).  A grey dove, practicing

 
an oboe (flighty tremolo) - paired with another
prophet, somewhere (San Franfrisco?).  Ramirez-
vagrant - tunneling crayon horses, chugging trains
around a rainbow-merry (can-can) Mother

 
(God).  They're waiting for the advent of the spectrum-
sun (like Lorenzetti with his Lorelei, in the Palazzo
Pubblico) - waiting for Captain ground-round Zero -
summa of the summer, light, lightly incarnate.  Hum

 
we with them, strum we zither, cithera - for ascents
of lilac inebriations, Byzantine zones of honey'd joy.
O taste and see.  Your body, one with every body -
brother to other, sister to sun (unusual cerements)...

 
In the gray matter, everything merges into one.
Only tremulous radiance of those triplet rings
(9-pin necklace for the Paraclete) brings
peace.  An odd disease (to plumb your own 

 
version, lambkin).  O may one hungry eagle-eye
excise the frills, he cries - O may the pluperfect
descend upon us all - the Providence (displaced,
immense, commensurate).  On the 4th of July

 
a grand mere milked that hippo train to Jubilee.
Eight limping belles danced limberly, a tender
trot around Big Edicule (ridiculous bender -
ridda-waltz).  And we were there (in lilac-scree).

zig-zag Fontegaia.

24

 
The sparse dogwood in the evening gloom out back
glows like phosphorus.  Robins yodeling like mad.
Cars stirring dust at the corner.  And he said,
ever-returning spring.  Like an old Micmac,

 
paddling himself upstream always - an argument
by neverendingness, against the tidy closure
of each lead-lined lid of epicurean and sad
composure (meerschaum despair).  Saint

 
George in his own element, an L-shaped move
among the troubadour-cicadas.  Militant
amor in armor, silvered whorl of a brow all-
cognizant (disseminated now, concentric wave

 
on wave).  Whose motion is homeward, always.
Like the tale of the sailor hidden in lamb-
limbs - Noman was his name, or Everyman -
one long-delayed and drawn-out share of Paradise

 
his scarred rebound.  What seemed elliptical
and sly was angled right - all zeroed in
toward a squared-up breathing contest (90
degrees in the humid shade - a silhouette of L

 
whirled in a J-spiral).  Where life resides
in shifting clay zig-zags; where the potter
spins her delta silt (rote rotation - water's
utter source wrung round again).  He says,

 
ever-returning spring.  And the voice shudders
like flung pigeon fleets - shucks into air,
plummeting, fading.  As if no one were there then
between 33rd and Chamber (or just a ghost-rider).

Fontegaia hoboes on.

23

 
The rushes at the river's edge, in the shadow
of a tensile span, make a cloudy rustling.
Give voice (below that rusty trestling)
to an urgent source, in shuttling undertow.

 
Where an ancient vagrant trails his fingers.
Grazing, whiling away a wasted hour, there
beneath steel talons of an eagle's aerie.
Lapsed into memory of bolder wings.

 
But let it go, let it go...
Crusaders strain toward Mizpah or Montjoie,
the paramount anointing mound, their Calvary
for thundering cavalry, a glaring chariot-show...

 
his donkey's keyed to a different, a diffident drum.
It's here, in a nondescript burbling of delta salt.
Something tumbling down from Victorian vault -
lake-drawn dawn silver skipping over the ho-hum

 
mud-stream.  Ah, he confirms, even Solomon slept.
Slept like Nebuchadnezzar on his hands and knees
until that immured wraith (among willow trees)
floated into view... deigned to descend, yclept

 
his very name : the silken spouse, the river-
nymph, a morning diorama, light as a dream is
light.  She was with him as some Io or Isis was
and is - as Magdalen slumbers in the dawn-clover;

 
distaff sceptre, volute volunteer - a Sheba, she.
As Lucy rose apace, pacing into the laggard road
of history... so her streambed (O motherlode
of all desire) repeals that rust-corona'd mystery.

Fontegaia limps forward.

22

 
When light seeps from the old albumen prints
time lingers there, like someone waiting for you
on the seashore, or the river's edge.  Small
whirlpool eddying, full of hints and glints

 
beckoning you to step through the sepia scene.
This was the feeling in the high Siena room
where frescos (radiant in evening gloom)
stood waiting quietly for you to enter in -

 
where the maidens turn their eternal ridda-
ring, and Justice (regal, adamant, serene)
holds sway (merciful minister) and
Pax, insouciant, leans on a useless shield.

 
What was it, exactly, you wanted me to find?
It must have been a twirling riddle-game -
a Gorgon-knot, enigma of the Ever-Same
(its figures veiled your whisper, undefined).

 
And like thin silver rain through the mercury
the farewell trumpet taps against a screen
of 5th-month memory - all that has-been
derelict can summon up again, a requiem

 
of history (his own).  And as a wheel
of moss-green circuitry creaks once
more (around, around), an octave-sense
lifts fifty stars toward flagging Jubilee -

 
the milk of sadness trembles in the midnight sky
again, the everlasting evening star gleams out,
still there - a folded promissory note (lone heart's
defense) sets sail, its sea-worn prow an eagle-eye.

O Fontegaia...

21

 
As the morning egret rises from a river
of regrets, the word insinuates itself
into a flow of weakling years.  Glyph
of gesturing brave guests - kernel-sliver

 
with a sail.  So your mother whispered
"go!" in every syllable of Frisbee's tale -
you, the hero, donning a chain-mail
letter-sheath, making the glinting sun

 
your sword.  It was a geste for a ghost
of honor (George, a red crossroad at night;
Al-Khidr, kidding around with simple light).
Just a return of something poured out, lost...

 
delta of streaming confluence, its source.
Eric the Red, Robin Hood - whoever it was
who sang in the crooked, fibrillating bras-
embrace (gong's dislocated endlessness).

 
It's like the shadow of a profile pent
around a mountain or a tree.  Faded,
blent... reticulate inconstancy of jaded
leaves.  Fan of limb-design (serpentine,

 
elephantine).  Dauphin in the mind
of Joan, the J in the imagination
of a springtime jig.  Someone
waiting at the end of the line -

 
Hobo or Oblomov, a maypole Juliet.
Beside the muttering ark above the sea,
the chest of secondary ribs - a perihelion
of sunken pain - golden suspense-duet.

Hopalong Fontegaia.

20

 
Green grow the rushes, oh
where everything begins again.
A circle of fifths, in the empyrean
hot stuff (original Large Boomerang-o).

 
Countdown to take-off.  Launch
the launch, Lance - step onstage.
Disseminate dandelion leaflets,
green the page.  Cowwamaunch,

 
Canonicus (Egyptian phononaut) -
I love you (ringed in Narragansett,
Roger).  A-okey-doke.  Over and out from
one evasive (pre-enthroned) clay moat.

 
Into quiet of the photograph.
The retina's retentive curve.
Unspoken spoke.  A concave
almanac (a summer cenotaph).

 
Here lies the clay of the land.
By Circe of sheepish kingdom,
sleepy orb, sunlit shalom, shalom.
South of the mouth, by a mile, of Nile,

 
understand?  Where buffalo roam.
Outside Rome, inside the dome.
Not far from home.  Salome,
Solomon, Sheba (green centrosome).

 
Infinity's the trail - path P (for poetry).
Some pieces of eight.  Double one 32-ft
(mosquito-size) bard equals a lady egret -
white mane eddying abaft the parquetry.

& so on.

19

 
Some prehistoric microlevel of the dome's
mosaic law.  Beneath the fixity of royal
crosshairs (where PT-109's red-purple
wake left the Pacific for a martial

 
martyrdom).  Under the stippled panoply
of curved Gargantua-gazing eyes.  Past
crystalline strata set in mordant paste
down to the furtive ricocheting clay.

 
Where the life resides.  Persists.  Kenosis
(unwritten law of shrouded self-
displacement).  Love's non-com - Sergeant
Elf (oldest service in the universe).

 
A gap in the fabric's polyhydral harm
(world-histrionic tragedy, a comedy
of air).  Somebody sleeping in the eye
of the sty.  Cyclone of prophet-phlegm.

 
A dream.  Old Neapolitan, melting
in rings of irrational national colors
(three, three, three...).  Nature abhors
a rotund vacuum - let him keep painting

 
descending eagles and other things, until
his bright, monkish, contemplative eye
wells up with figures so continuous (pie
squares) only the river of ages will

 
fulfill their overflowing way.  Even now
I hear those waves cascade over Victoria.
And the sun-dog suspended there, an aria
shading the area... a rosy-fingered plow.

Fontegaia rambles on.

18

 
Something curls in pale fiddleheads,
filtering green cobras out of a dank
spring swamp.  L-shaped mountebank
in bat-cape, with cure-all meds -

 
green knight, al-Khidr, bold St. George
whose penetrating transverse blade
pierces the charade of winter
murk.  The hero's urgent

 
fatal geste... Effort of the mind 
to grasp the nettle of the crux of things
finds its analogy in his blind quest.  Wings
meander just behind eyelids... unwind

 
the shroud.  Outline, profile, silhouette -
winding-cloth of one slow-wheeling planet.
Through elliptical sun-paths, a chariot
of fiery thought - viridian alphabet

 
whose chrome transmutes the metronome
- monotony to optic choreography,
mantic morphology; lips tippling topology
until they topple from their Babel-dome into

 
Mare Magdaleneum (or magma-mare).
Shadow of the curving earth
(circle of a single mother's
brow) her precinct, everywhere -

 
the potter's fluid handiwork, the mind's
unknowing amplitude, the emperor's
surrender of a miniature hill-crown
town.  To her (evasive leaping hind).

Fontegaia keeps on walkin'...

16

 
Since earliest Lucy walked upright
there remains one city, one abiding law.
Steadfast, victorious, from misty Ethiopia
she journeyed toward it, keeping it in sight.

 
12 precious gems adorn its pinnacles;
dodecagonic gates unveil each side;
there Moon wed Sun (while her bride-
groom decanted dew-lit canticles).

 
Within the midmost confines of that place
a temple dome glows like a honeycomb.
All radiant within - where waves of foam
(in silken folds) enframe an enigmatic face...

 
Wizard of Oz?  Or someone of that ilk...
hiding away in order to be found.  Like
Ptah (primordial ground, Indian mound
- the master of her manor-catafalque).

 
Here Lucy stood.  Her marriage-rite
a riddle-trial, where sparkling Circe
meets serpentine Odysseus.  Morse-
coded hero's hieroglyph - knight's-

 
move inquest - a Sheba-test for Solomon.
Their easeful teasing sparring bowls
all through the night, til Robin solos
(pretre naturel) - sums up the dawn.

 
That vine-fed honey-mead they shared
appeared merely to clear and cheer 
their thoughts... O union near!  A dear
rain-arch above deceptive falls (sun-flared).

Yesterday was a very good day for Fontegaia-poem. Reached a sort of turning-point in the design. (I knew it was coming, but I didn't know how it would go.)

You never know how such things will turn out, but in a way it feels oddly predetermined. Embryonic, & then born. Some of it you plan; some of it just appears, like magic. I feel grateful for the symmetries & synchronicity.

Here's an example : I think of this poem as a kind of companion or coda to the long poem Forth of July (7/4). I reached its pivot or turning-point yesterday (4/7).

Here's another : I planned the pairing of "1-3-2" and "1132 pm" in the framing poems (#13 & 15). But I didn't even notice the pairing of composers (Beethoven - Quartet 132; Mozart - Requiem) until this morning.

My poetry, anyway, is a kind of give-&-take, an interaction. The section just finished struck me as an example of how the compositional process can liberate the writer from his/her own preconceptions about it. Now possibly I can move forward in a slightly different vein. I have a rough idea of where it's going.

I'm simply operating an alternative poetry making/dissemination process. It's outside the usual channels, parallel. I know the poems are not easy reading on the web. But anybody who's really interested in looking at them more closely (& who has a computer) can download them pretty cheaply from here, or buy the book. The current chapter (#4) is not in there yet, but if all goes well it will be fairly soon.

So... Fontegaia takes the Big Bend.

14

 
A saturnine Pharaoh, by an empty goldfish pond
counted up his losses, mourned the absconded
myth (his darling pride and joy).  Wounded
in his nether hoof, he dreamed of Trebizond.

 
His glances lingered in the pond's recess.
A memory of black, disturbing eyes
that drew him, stumbling (so unwise) to
far perimeters of his domain.  A single kiss

 
from her, his only aim (sweet target
summoning his whole desire).  He gazed
into the pool.  He seemed to see those eyes
again.  He realized : they mocked him yet.

 
They gleamed there, twinkling, above her smile.
And then, as out of overhanging willow leaves,
a whisper came.  Have you forgotten, peevish
prince?  Never understood at all?  The trial

 
of love I bid you run - and did you fail?
You loved my image and yourself, not me.
Think how I turned your eyes away - toward
the frescoes of Siena.  Ponder that.  Farewell.

        
                  *

 
In a far well of years, in a quiet chamber
high above the rooftops of the town,
those frescoes dwell.  Through grinding
poverty and strife and plague, earthquakes

 
and bickering, still they remain - a single
figure full of figures, gesturing toward civic
hope.  Swept along (like some light bark
across time's stream) in Sienese

 
unperished hearts.  What cargo do they bear?
What whispers fidget under spectral
flourishes?  It is an image of regal
equality - pluperfect rain.  Justice wears

 
the crown.  For in just hearts, each neighbor is
sharecropper of all goodness - goodness
bubbling up like Fontegaia, from a fond recess
where buoyant, sunny Pax sheds every care.  

        
                 *

 
You pointed toward my darkness,
dear one.  Where words fail,
perish; where old private travail
merges (pangs of tenderness)

 
with a round earth's rolling drone.
It's forlorn Hobo's simple moan.

 
Look toward the southern sky.
Disconsolate Centaur frames a W
where hopeful eyes turned once (to 
you).  Papa's gonna be home, by n' by.

 
Out of a glittering, dreaming ocean.
Out of an Indian expanse... the sun.

 
Where a Frisco angel floats, mid-air
over an emerald catenary span -
a double rainbow-catamaran.
Frisbee's paper hat, still spinning, there.

        
                *

 
Driftwood lingered in the fragrant night
beneath cascades of tiny mountain bells
(in laurel leaves).  Looked into the wells
of sky, where every river takes its light

 
spring into gravity.  The Milky Way
(a kind of Whitman-suntide) tenderly
revolved - he saw the martyrs (soldierly
Venusians) - saw the Old Man of Clay

 
with the key to the highway (one
green helicopter-penny) - and then
he saw the mirror of his own
heart, flowering.  A moonshine

 
ring (suspended, circling) where
light melds everything - bends
gently, sturdily - to bear the ends,
& all begins.  Sweet bells, ring, ring.

        
                *

 
I dreamed I was a prince, once, in Siena.
The damsels flocked to me as damsel flies
to their bright day; through dense mosquito-
swarms, I led an expedition to Moon River

 
(er, Diana).  Almost immediately, all went wrong.
I lost my cosmic robe of gem-bedizened silk;
my proud equine quartet (so incomparably
caparisoned) shrank to one equable donkey

 
(stubborn old stump; still, serviceable).
My brilliant companions disappeared.
I wandered nowhere, seemingly - weird
circulation! - Paradise a bramble-stumble

 
now.  I leaned against a concrete wall
and looked across an unfamiliar plain -
a stranger to my native town,
it seemed!  And then a melody (in laurel

 
leaves) rippled, lowly, in reply :
You searched for me where I cannot
be found.  I'm not in Rome, nor Camelot;
not in Jerusalem, nor under any tree.

 
I'm in your heart.  You are the spring
releasing me; I am your fountain,
you are mine; not nigh nor high, neither 
lointain, my friend, but everywhere - wing

 
of sad weight lent flight experience.
And you will gather up all glancing strokes
in one great wheel of everlasting spokes -
one lofty arc.  I woke, and it was Providence.


 
 
15

 
Gesthemane.  The coptic sentries by the sepulchre
plinked somnolent piano keys.  It was 11:32 pm.
We slept.  A pity.  10, 9... Mozart.  Requiem.
Midnight.  The ghost is knocking at the door.

                                  
                                 4.7.08

Fontegaia's been on quite a streak lately.

12

 
It was early in the leaping-water-season,
one grey morning.  Lonesome Drifter,
like a chip of wood, squared
with his name under a see-saw sun

 
in an empty square, in San Francisco.
Played peek-a-boo with gray-tinged light
across chill blocks.  A cube of salt
from Nile-fed sea, like silt he'll flow

 
where the whispers go.  A puttering
mourning dove pecks at his feet.
On her gray throat glints rainbow light;
a band plays ring-structures (cueing

 
for flight) behind, below her feathered
fold of wing.  Music for Four Winds
dies down.  Silence penetrates the sound.
Plaque for plague victims.  Fresco, tethered

 
with a hopeful pact - sealed 
with mordant of a raptor's art.
Hobo halts there, listening (wrapt
in ragged clods).  The pigeon wheels.

 
Pivots.  10, 9... his fingers counted
down a line of graceful lineaments,
their linen governments... all present
now.  As when a morning word fountains

 
into overwhelming wave, his overtaken
heart (adoring) wondered at its source.
And then the sun rose like a moon-horse -
Ocean glittered, surging, under Golden Gate.