February, face-to-face

VERTIGO-CURL

It was a night of misty melting;

Hobo, the boho, sawed

through his dark glass so

in old St. Paul.  Janus was hinging

everything on sister Sue’s nag,

at the racecourse (Mordish

Hippodrome) – his wish-

ful thinking left him holding the bag.

The sky mottled gray, like a blurred

chessboard of dirty snow.

An alleged RI rainbow

filtered through Amina’s pocket (mirrored

Pocahontas), while a Balkanized

cannibalism consumed

the demos, knocking Sue

Mixam to the maximum (paralyzed).

Irma admired the Emir’s muscle

from her stolen distance.

In that mossy manse

with her ear to the hearth, the hustle

all over the earth seemed a triangle

built by Souperior Deo

for a bonfire canoe

– his own, by Odin’s kayak!  & to bungle

it was Man’s bad gamble.  Sal

Miniato & Silo

Paennim could tell you

as much – ‘twas comet Groundhog’s tail

                        *

after all.  So they went eel-gathering

all over Galilee for that

matter of Bretagne, mate –

the official King, along with his blathering

& corny Maid Minniver, his lovey-

dovey yaw-way L-vessel.

She would sail through hell

for old Ossifer Osiris – hand-in-glovey

with him, all the way!  Ecstatic Itasca

purled in the tiny whorl

of her Vertigo-curl,

like a Topsfield spanner in Alaska!

She was very moving, that sheepish yak

shellacked in the clay.  Like

an emerald in the smallest tyke

of a state, of all states – the Union, Jack!

She dwelt in the heart-hearth of Odd Eddy,

looming through mystic slips

like Evangeline E. Nilegnave (skips

across rocks down Jeannie’s Mississippi);

like a raven over Neva, like Anna

acting the dove in our eye

– is you serious, Rus?  Why

risk ice for Osissyshipiris?  In Louisiana?

Hobo says, I see our sis Lady Liberty

surge like Old Ironsides

through the fog, on this Ides

of July.  Let’s go find her, Henry.

02.02.2020

the true poem always comes from elsewhere

NEAR KINNERET

This is that ancient harvest night.

You bring a refugee inside

– might be an angel of God –

& find participation is the true delight.

The otherness-&-love of God

deflects the local stream

from its own banks.  A dream

intrudes – disturbs each land of Nod.

Bright Dante, growing gaunt & gray

steps into a seashell

– beached, like him, in exile.

Tall haunted shades of Sant’Apollinare

gaze, raining compassion

from wide almond eyes

like springs, like Beatrice’s...

he feels at home.  O prodigal son!

Poema sacra must be reconfigured.

Maximus in prison

by the Black Sea... vision

like shadow of the Argo soared

– an Easter visitant, come dawning

far above Firenze, or

this rusted blue-red frenzy

ferrying Rubicon (Cain-abling)

& you are weeping, you are smiling

far beyond sacrifice,

climbing that hill-face

near Kinneret (life-reconciling).

11.2.19

Down the Mrs. Nile

BLACK MARBLE

The slow green river is historian as well, 

moving with time from here

to there, yet always here

same as ever, with detritus of fossil

shells – eroding palimpsest

subject to misquotation,

willful erasure, mistaken

readings...  Observe that anxious,

fretful archivist – thin railing Ez

with his fistful of heroes

impaled on total loss

(a maze of smoking Flanders trenches).

Like a Minotaur in the bughouse

with his Schifanoia grid –

hierarchical, to put a lid

on greed, by force (his Musci-Louse).

What then’s this chaos of bad dreams?

Life’s horror-show?  Not so,

not so.  PAX.  What thou

lovest well...  After the steamboat schemes

Latrobe still floats his capitol design.

Cornstalks, tobacco flowers...

Virgo, with Isis-powers,

on the adamant of time, will shine –

black marble out of Nile (West Branch).

Not abstract or Pythagorean,

but human, Galilean –

shepherd in Ravenna – beaming avalanche.

5.16.19

golden lanterns of Osiris

BREAD-BOAT

May Day.  The ancient wheel of the earth

lifted on a pole of flowers

by a ring of skipping circlers

wearing flower-circlets.  Distant mirth-

song, childhood in Mendelssohn.

Light primordial.

From before the murky Nile-

punts, beneath waves of Heracleion;

older than those golden lanterns

of Osiris, Ezra

beaming from the deep your

imperial star-bar patterns.

Yet the axial pivot is not a dazzling pillar

but an imperturbable muddy

river, rolled into clay

by palms of your servant, Hathor;

into a ring or a bowl of Providence,

a lowly bread-boat

for carrying each soul-mote

out of its nightmare toward deliverance.

The soul is humbled by redemption

undeserved.  Not light

of brazen copper, but of heart

that passeth understanding, O my son.

Light from before all things, who smiles

into blue depths of rosmarine;

who leaps to Galilean

shore, sings out, & hoists the sails.

5.1.19

Morning to Evening Star

CIRCLE LAKE

Blindly, Hobo inches toward

the Keys.  In Florida.

Toward the delta,

in Louisiana.  His handy old

eye-in-hand in hand (light

portable fire-drill).

Ply all your skill,

Hobo.  Hi huraru ra’a,

Hi awari ra’a.  A muddy ray

from cold Atlantic

like some frantic

foundering Santa Maria

threads yarns toward that western

Garden of Evening Star.

Across his eyelid, sure –

like Sire Henry, in his baby coffin

(six weeks encrypted with Guillain-Barré).

Hi huraru ra’a,

Hi awari ra’a.

Autumn leaves of disenchanted

authors, sighing in their libraries...

(the Roger Williams version,

for piano).  Dispersion

through each mental prison (Henry’s,

yours).  Dread of ocean void

spirals up from deep

Le-Hev-Hev keep –

Coatlicue (the cut-up) is annoyed

                    *

& threatens Everyman – her sheep

is black & bloody red!

– Nana, you might be dead

before you know it.  Go to sleep.

The dream song reconfigures all

within its top-spin

in your heart-garden.

Your father was a gentleman narwhal;

your son was dancing on the shore

of Circle Lake, in Midway

Mirror-Land (in Galilee).

The crucifixion of the Evening Star

will not unveil her night-reality.

Observe this family

photograph, Henry.

Miss Padgett’s ancient book quarry –

the massive double-panes of glass,

a mandorla for owlish

Actaeons (Horus,

searching for Columbia?  Atlas,

looking for the moon?)  Nana,

dancing Sophie calls me.

Grandpa.  Hiawatha

had a friend, Hart Ibis Artemis – yah...

yawning from the deep, Jonah.

You must become the dove

still dancing, love –

spun from the heart of things.  Selah.

11.30.18

unbreakable chords

HUMAN ECHO

Your nostalgia for the aristocracy

of childhood, Vladimir,

I understand.  So here :

infantile tyrants bear it away

in sappy cerements of innocence.

Galla & her golden boy

& their brief beehive day

drowse in Ravenna, under silence

of mosaic stars; Dante too

sleeps there, still far

from his Firenze mère –

the milky galaxy of midnight blue,

his babble-realm of splendor-joy.

A fluent melody

pours endlessly

from thine ineffable benevolence, Blue J;

a spiral at the cave entrance,

an everlasting sign

of all Creation

(ceaseless, calm, majestic dance).

Those unbreakable chords of Mendelssohn

at the end of the trolley line;

the sound of the violin

lesson, the neighborhood of children...

& the shadow of the Thunderbird

in the immense oak tree

the dark green sanctuary

of Morning Star   dolphin-shepherd

                     *

out of deep-twined memory

by the cistern heard

rose-enfolded Word

out of Ocean’s fond   Jonah-infinity

Instinctive fright becomes aggression,

dominance abets revenge;

since long before Stonehenge

each weak scapegoat endures oppression

& the tantrum of the infant

replicated by depression

each political occasion

filters through both mob & tyrant.

But it shall not be so with thee.

I have no wrath, the Ghost

murmurs; I am the Most

High Heartbeat, mild Invisibility –

indivisible reply

out of the crystalline

& quintessential Union

at the source of Earth & Sky.

I am your human echo, come to be

among you, in my realm

of love, mercy, wisdom –

I am the Nazir, chanting out of Galilee.

& then I saw her, Jonah-Shadow –

wings extending over all

of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Ghost-heart we feel, ghost-bird we know.

7.18.18

the poem is a sort of Edicule

MODEL DOME

So then, the poem is a sort of Edicule?

My allegory’s all unglued.

Runny gouache, stewed

river clay.  Some no-count school.

The building, trembling in devolution

shored up like a veteran

with iron-rivet skeleton.

Metamorphosis by desperation.

My babble-model of the cosmos –

molded on a mini-dome

within a dome (Jerusalem-

fond matryoshka doll).  The keys

to a box, where lie a bunch of keys.

Over meleki limestone

slab, one forest olive-green

icon.  Your madre of collapsing gaze

rains down (with her clay ointment jar).

He is not here, he

is not here.  She’s

muted as trumpet, or Morning Star –

an eye-in-hand, an ocean tear.

Light blazes (calmly

coruscant undying day).

He is not here, he is not here.

Wind mews in muscular oak tree.

They’re up in Galilee,

maybe Cahokia... you’ll see.

Inventing deeds of agape – live poetry.

7.2.18

yodeling in Mendelssohn

LITTLE MIRROR

The mind is like a little mirror

& the word is like

a mirror in that lake.

We skated there, one ancient year –

across the icy glass, Heidi.

In Mendelssohn, sweet

neighborhood (complete

Garden of Cyrus now, in memory).

A melody of day-lilies cheers Henry

Hobo (by the Mississippi).

He might be somebody

you know – booked into penitentiary?

Sol.  Solo.  Absent Sheba

browses in another aisle

(archived in old Rhode Isle).

Her ship’s in search of Colchia

lambswool – seamless gold web,

mute mutuality –

griot reality

lofted to laughter (on Mount Horeb).

Square triangles of pyramids

fit into portable log

cabin logarithms, Mag.

Your stone’s a tiny tablet, hid

beside that lake, in Galilee –

a solidarity

sodality, a party

writ on water.  Fountain, artistry.

6.27.18

tutelary loon

MURAL CROWN

The river rifles arctic blue today

beneath nippy April wind.

Hobo his way will wend

downhill, ahoy, with the current, hey.

His notebooks stew in crumpled chaos,

like a Burchfield swamp in June –

half cricket calendar, half jejune

palimpsest (July stinks Janus).

Bleak melancholy in Ohio.

Spooks in lean eaves.

Storks bundling wet sheaves

across the ‘30s.  Good material, O.

Hobo looks up from bottomland.

He holds an eye-in-hand –

muddy Cahokia (one grain

of sand).  Just Clay’s j-jug band.

These bricks are 28 feet thick.

A pyramid, almost –

only Hunky Ghost

(Ho-Chunk) could make this stick-up

stick.  Like Killers of the Flower

Moon.  Getch’r Manitou

(just one gris dollar few)

before she get you.  Evening hour

now.  Mire-flowering almond tree

out of Voronezh (or Galilee) –

your mural crown, Tyche.

Hyacinth madeleine (waiting for me).

4.6.18

for Martin Luther King

DEEP SPRING

          for Martin Luther King

Late April snow.  A blinding white

50 years after Lorraine

Motel.  Memphis, again.

River-Land, seeking an Ocean State.

Rich port-of-call – the 51st, maybe?

Lost Black Sea pebble,

gray whale in trouble

(silent in the silence).  Who is she?

Grace filters into Providence

through stubborn darkness.

Rose Island light – less

diamond than dawn translucence –

only a signal for a wayward eye.

A Chartres chart, or maze

from Notre Dame (haze

mollifies her frozen sky).

The sleepwalkers smolder through smoke-

machines.  Father & son,

their colder war passed on –

unfriendly history (life’s but a joke).

Still roses bloom, in Galilee –

galactic Okean

become a local pond;

folksinging Nazir calling me

to dance, & calling you as well.

Deep spring’s Unknowability

leaps into charity –

a little Noah-boat skims out of hell.

4.4.18

mumbling toward spring

EARLY CAVE

To trace the plummeting ellipse

of these post-Easter flakes –

the hexagon each makes

a microcosm of the temple’s

lightweight, hollow honeycomb.

Awaiting his parousia...

ghost-dance Messiah,

Nazir out of Galilee-to-come.

Far-off tumult of primavera.

Genesis of purling springs.

Pale intermingling things

in punished neighborhoods (era

of Pharaoh, or Caesar).  Signals

from an early cave, or tomb.

Eternal vault (the womb

of patient Lazarus, of Jonah’s wails).

Natasha’s limp.... Clover’s marble

Isis-veil.  The keening

eye of Magdalen (far-seeing

heart).  A Galilean stable

where animals & refugees

breathe the same air.

Earth-time halts there –

her catenary thread a breeze

lifting twin pillars (Alpha &

Omega).  Planted so

in graveyard snow...

grain of renewal (to the end).

4.2.18

painting by Nancy Hart

pavane pour une enfante

LIMESTONE FRIEZE

The river’s running high.  A tattered

linen cottonwood leaf

would lief be drifting

down the bronze serpent, toward

New Orleans.  January ice

will buckle on the iron

bridge – kids’ tongues on

frozen playground bars (cruel vise).

Hobo’s pal, Billy Apollinaire,

will mime an Orphic flute.

Satie, Ravel... sweet

astringent melody (pure air,

unseeable).  Pavane pour une

enfante défunte.  Meanwhile

male bondage is in style.

Our Master fabricates jejune

disgust for all things feminine;

his orange bonfires meld

fright into towering shelled

walnut eyries... flight from Someone

unaccountable (strange, uncontrollable).

Within a bomber’s O-range

now (I will arrange

accommodations for my sable

granite safety crypt) some Bluejay

whistles like a soloist

through sea-pine mist

sparse knotty blue-green (sotto voce)

                 *

memory.  The threads are fractal,

earth-quick.  Escapees.

Some limestone frieze

of Aphrodite, out of Rimini (or Hell)

feinting assaults above Sault Ste. Marie

(Lawrentian divides

shift icebreaks, tides...)

until the copper icon of green Liberty

lifts torchlight like Hagia Sophie –

her living harmony

of agape, for you

& me, enthroned (Okean-sea).

So like the sun lifting from azure salt

the fellowship of wisdom

born of mute charism

(Love’s lightning catenary vault

of steadfast blooming adoration)

lifts healing rescue-signs

for desolate young queens

& kings of darkened mind, O Solomon;

the little princess Shining Star

pirouettes all morning

in her stone-circling

agate labyrinth (somewhere

near Chartres, Oklahoma) – Ariadne

slips the woolen thread

around your wrist – dead

spring to life (Magdala, Galilee).

10.11.17

like a Balinese cock-fight

FRISCO CROSSROAD

Poets’ business, like a ring

round a Bali cock-fight –

goodbye to all that.

Shake your kaleidoscope thing,

ping your kalimba – your bricolage

a grubby grab-bag

(seven pounds of brag

& rage, mixed up with garbage).

Meanwhile that flesh-tone bridge

(crossing my Mississippi

song-&-dance) will be

morphing some spider’s double-edge

Venn diagram – a stick figure

at hobo train junction

where sunny Everyman

remembers split Coatlicue.

Rumors of an impasse, whispered

through a chain-link fence.

Barbed lozenge of insistence

scarring Rome, Jerusalem... the word

made fishy (west of Galilee,

east of Athens, Georgia)

as a picnic smorgasbord

laid out beneath barren oak tree.

That smell gets into everything.

Like something baked

a week in a canal – like

messy string theories, untangling

                  *

a knotty plot of pots & pans, banging

the human family

to kingdom come (really?)

from seedy tribes to Nero’s hanging

gardens.  Shady Rome, where every

cosmic veil is torn –

& a black rock is borne

upon recalcitrant shoulders of slavery

into the center of a black hole’s

starry honeycomb.

What ass bears the whole

sum?  What shoe of prophet’s mule?

Maybe an offshoot of Coatlicue

wearing a flimsy linen

Joseph-coat.  A woman,

patient Pietà... La Pia, Psyche...

Ariadne or Arachne, raveling

path P... that rugged,

ragged Francine – plugged

at Frisco crossroad – traveling

freight.  Sometimes you meet a person

heavier than time & space.

Rough wind carves well-faces

lined with laughter, hope... pain...

She steps forth from black stone –

stirring bears in her arms,

palming clay amid storms

of adamant love (makar-maid, shown).

10.4.17

a little air

ALMOND MEAL

A little air, a melody

out of Mendelssohn, maybe –

like a wisp of smoke you see

afloat above Red Wing one day.

Like pipes out of Apollinaire,

trompette marine – sole

zigzag rigmarole

of an enigma (serpent’s lair).

You walk the blank maze, Oedipus.

With ghost of Ariadne

by your side.  Keen

pal, forsaken thesis – surplus

collateral, original

betrayal.  Henry Adam’s

dusky twilight madam’s

mad, quiet... a virgin owl

nested in stone Columbia.

Only her bird’s eye

as the crow flies

correlates phantasmagoria

out of the desperate heart of Cain

into clay valves

where muddy stars revolve;

through the dawn labyrinth again

from light, toward light, with light

blazing mild power –

like some firefly bower

mowers glimpse of a summer night

                  *

beneath remote aurora-shower

bearing fathomless delight

miraculous & right

to chastened human hearts in flower.

So I behold Dante & Job,

David the King,

hedged by ironic ring

of instinctual violence – the mob

of envious, avaricious rivals

circling their prey

to make King for a Day

once more.  Florentine hovels

I see transposed to Catlin prairie,

vertiginous Beatrice

mingled with Platte clay.

To the horizon’s elegant Bluejay

molts saturnine Cawtantowwit

with amorous Jenny-

Jonah; they buried be

only to soar in monarch-flight

O harbingers of Milky Way

whose kingdom is an Ocean

Stream – salty communion,

sea-green flock of Liberté!

Out from the massive turning of the wheel,

where Miriam churns the cream

of every starfish dream

into her almond meal (Messiah-seal).

5.16.17

then you shall have some pie

PIE SQUARED

Down by the Rio del Espiritu

Santo, the sun ignites

the pileated woodpecker’s

red-feathered crown.  The sky is blue,

the river flows, a serpentine

spark-shimmer, bending

rainbows to the engulfing

sea.  Dido’s shade will lean

forever toward the perimetric

oxhide rim of Carthage,

choking on her rage

with tears.  Dante’s epileptic

yearning for supernal Grace

paces her transcendental

number round a circle

of circles – like Angela Mace

Christian, or a greyhound, hunting

down that palimpsest

of muffled tracks (geist-

hand behind the arras bunting)

to find F. Mendelssohn at last –

well-tuned, unlucky sister

polishing her Easter

song (spliced to her brother’s mast).

& as my poem’s radius inches

toward her hemisphere,

its eigenvalues (fear

& hope) rhyme where it pinches

                     *

here in Mendelssohn, where children

in the shade of worlds

their parents made, unfold

a bruised & tender leaf-pattern.

The family circle is a dented

sphere.  Your twin cousin

became a ghost – the other one

a cryptic cosine (marginal)... prevented

on path P to blossoming, somehow

(obliquity of bad faith,

lack-love).  Now each wraith

in Dante’s bowl of wrath & woe

will step into your Mirror Lake

as into Galilee,

so you might slowly see

circumference of eternity – & make

amends.  Dido weeps by cave-door.

Moses goes home free,

his daughters over Lethe

summoned, as in play (Cleo,

Ophelia, Jessie...) by paddle-wheeler

quick, now, here, gone

like a Mississippian –

irrational Thanksgiving number

Guillem d’Orange (not neon, now,

but international,

beneath his Provençal

shade-grove) beheld – her wavy prow.

3.14.17

shade of fig trees

OAKEN ARK

I remember the tall shade of fig trees

on Observatory Hill

in Sydney, their colossal

spread feet lifting leafy memories.

The diamond hologram glinting

upstairs – the Southern Cross

a silver doubleness,

a micro-mirror (winking, hinting).

Dante in Ravenna, on the coast

of swamps & tamaracks

the scars of Whites & Blacks

scorching his palm (a sulfur-host)

felt a light flute-breeze ruffle

his conch-shell ear

whispering draw near –

beheld Matilda waltz the Buffalo

(an aboriginal design

painted on granite

for Woodpecker-flight

framing two Thunder-twins benign)

& plumbed the gravity of clay

that wheels so slowly

through mortality

toward candescent kiln-fired Day

of Jubilee   the metamorphoses

of starfish realms to stars

the green & gold pillars

of corn & wheat   Georgina’s

laughter in the new-mown fields.

So her green-almond eyes

drew Alighieri to Vitale’s

arc of Paradise (welds

souls into an infant baptistery,

a fan of everlasting

life).  Interesting,

murmurs iconoclast Henry

Hobo   but I would bend the lens

slightly   enfold the ray

into a Bay of Biscay

alphabet soup   Beguine begin-agains

based on an anchored oaken ark

of milky bread & wine

the whole human communion

in the sun of mnWmn (spark

from a Galilean jewel of light).

Inside the delicate crystal

gently circling... still

potter’s whirl from infinite night

around the whisper gallery

Twine Monastery

pregnant humble glory

of Francesca (Piero’s poverty)

leaves mutter in the sea-breeze

just beyond the orange

bridge   Georgina’s Grange

the dusty gardeners   Maria sees

1.24.17