wolf spider bite

I used to play a "tarantella" on the piano... I forget the composer (Mrs. Elledge, my piano teacher 45 years ago, would know).  I grew up in the Mendelssohn neighborhood of Edina, MN (named such by its early settlers, musicians with the Minnesota Symphony).  The tarantella has very ancient roots - it was originally an ecstatic, Dionysian dance meant to drive out the effects of a "tarantula" (actually, European black widow) spider bite.

WILD WEED

The monuments tremble in the mind

like shuddering leaves... the dun-

grey flesh of Russian

olive shoots (wild weed you find

along grey highways).  Clouds

resemble ships passing

(or sheep).  An everlasting

turtledove of new beginnings crowds

grey folds to elegant mosaic –

peacock splendor, rainbow

tarantella.  Help me now,

Ancient of Days – the mortal ache

of this wolf spider bite is like a prod

in the bull-dance arena.

I must rotate – ah,

Pocahontas handstand! – God

reward your goldfinch serenade!

Thunder & lightning speed

yon seraphim-steed

across acorn crucible (blade

pillaring smoke & fire upon hill

at Glastonbury, or

Golgotha).  Now you are

whittled down to walnut mind-rill...

pirouette... red veins of iron

rivet into diamond.

Bran-matière.  Pond-

ripple osprey, ranging (arak-golden).

7.5.16

Painting by Michael Gould (Elmer's glue & acrylic)

Along the Minnehaha

Poetry enlists the descriptive, inscriptive, epitaphic, encryptionologous powers of writing - which are obviously formidable - in its campaign of resistance to time.  The poet stubbornly proposes a spiritual orthogonal (an upright L) in opposition to the horizontal flow of history, events, distractions, decay, necessity, time, death, chores, etc, etc.

Perhaps I'm delusional, yet by the same token I do have a sense of being one of the most indomitably resistant poets in America.  Everything I do in this realm seems to oppose the practical, the social, the amenable, the common-sensical, the professional approach.  It's been like this for so long I've lost all perspective on it, anyway.  I do what I do, it is what it is, it's become second nature.  People may object to the obsessive-repetitive characteristics.  Perhaps they're right.  I have no way of knowing.  Let the chips crunch where they may.

STEELY PRONG

Heidi, it’s been many a year

since we went a-Maying together

down Arthur St., in Hopkins

(Glastonbury? Mendelssohn) –

but next door, in the autumn rain

a misty hawthorn silvers

bright chartreuse berries

for the birds (windhover, crane,

starling) who may alight someday.

Just down the ancient lane

my father’s granite urn

abides, along the Minnehaha;

ravens stitch the cooling air

above the stream – a shade

those oak-leaf hands once made

over our heads (good chevalier-

Samaritan).  Yon turtledove

coos from a russet square –

fieldstone embrasure, where

vaults rise on sable ribs (alcove

beyond alcove, into the light).

Bring me your thorny ring-

around-the-rose, Heidi;

I’m ready now to dance & sing

athwart the maypole-chariot.

One drop of scarlet raven-

ink, one graven letter’s

steely prong... (one grail-griot).

9.30.15

Hawthorn in the rain