Black holes have rings of light straw hair

SCRIMSHAW TRINKET

                    It’s the past that tells us who we are.  Without it

                    we lose our identity.  –  Stephen Hawking

A raven carried heaven-manna

out of the ark to lonesome

Jonah – him just come

from under the whale-rib (manna

overboard) stranded on sand

off Galilee, RI –

& it made him cry.

Those crispy cackles he couldn’t

understand – like low gull-talk

sent through a black-

hole paradox;

light straw climbed an orange rock

from the event horizon up to

null infinity –

it was all catenary,

looped in one wave-smile... – who?

Gravity? – or Grace?  Eurydice,

maybe.  (It was her cave.)

Spoiled meat you crave

is portioned by division – say,

two doves for every plowman’s mule.

Queequeg in his casket

(like a scrimshaw trinket)

penned our sempiternal Rule –

each rustic Penny in the well of night

was tender out of love.

Her vernal sparkle-trove

is polyglot – Euphrasia (eyebright).

6.8.16

Monk's Mound (Illinois)

My open road (happy b-day, Walt)

WHEEL-ROSE

Memorial Day.  A good man’s ashes

hid in stone by-way,

two steps from coppery

Minnehaha.  Her long eyelashes

(Florence) his.  Only a mile or so

from viridian jungles

of springtime (Mendelssohn).

His father (Edward) fended the blow

at Saint-Mihiel.  & Katherine,

from Reading – with a red

peony, under a shed

in Belgium.  Only 29.

Red Cross volunteer (unselfish 

clear-eyed gaze).  Poppies

in a man-made sea

of miseries.  The human wish

for Providence is octahedral

diamond.  My open road

is riven motherlode,

adhesive gossamer.  Vein-trail

of cottonwoods, bent by the wind –

a flexible thread of silver-

green, a gusty poplar

grove.  Slight syllables will bind

this dream-sail to a Temeraire

leaving Galilee harbor

(bound for Superior

beneath the wheel-rose of the Bear).

5.31.16

River trail (with cottonwood fluff)