on Holy Saturday

RIVER-TOY

On Holy Saturday, the Great Sabbath

when Jesus murmured, It is finished

& in his grave (like Jonah’s fish)

rested… as in an Ocean River bath…

When 12-yr-old Henry grandly admired

his glue-stiff model (Old Ironsides)

alight with joy, & tired pride…

– as just now Sophie dashed across the yard

to him, 50 years later – to display

the paper flower boat (sky-

blue, & Clizia-giallo) she

runs off to let fly, down the Mississippi…

her tender river-toy… her revery, her rest.

& while Henry gyred – wacky

as Coney Island in Waconia –

like Hermann Gödel, in his final nest

of parenthetical limit (righteous exactitude

of unknowing) – across the path

from Sarah’s parents (math

of relativity – some spousal quark beatitude)…

Where the world ends, & begins again;

at Swan Point, where her mother lies

who died the day his father’s eyes

first opened.  Amid the Great Congregation

of synagogue & church (pain-bearing world)

one pearl-eye opens at the prow

of raven-beak Argo.  Mark thou

how contrapuntal matrices of love enfold.

4.11.20

like an 8-ball in a canyon

HELIUM BALLOONS

Thus the poem is a free agent,

loosed from its cannon

like an 8-ball in a canyon.

We could go on – what they meant

you know.  Dante was getting on

when he stopped by Sant’

Apollinare.  The slant

of loneliness caresses its panopticon

of painterly rainbow eyes & forms,

afloat overhead

like a Macy’s parade

on Thanksgiving Day (enormous

helium balloons of adoration

under an umbrella

of matryoshka nesting-

dolls, like an infinite function

in rose granite aegis, arcs-

over-arcs).  In her eyes,

the grace of God buys

time with molten agape-caritas.

Jesus emerges from the cave.

Mary faints in the garden,

dream bent back again

to Gödel (his suspended-7th grave).

Her incompleteness theorem

is like Easter in 2020,

always there already

(gleaming ring, undying diadem).

12.29.19

one last hurdle, Amelia

DANTE CHAIR

The gazebo’s grime-filmed mosquito net.

The black chain-link fence

in backyard Providence

climbed by Clem (mock-orange? Nyet).

Elegant quincunx in Cyrus-orchard.

Natural calculations

for dames in Netherlands –

to sieve the flux of spacetime (hard

homework).  Oxidized old photographs

curl to brown negatives.

A lime-warp cosmos

rolls up like a scroll of epitaphs

on fire.  So memory seems to curdle

too.  Gödel’s fetal pose

(knot of incompleteness).

Here’s the Pacific! – one last hurdle,

Amelia.  Archival snapshot

lost at sea...  your back

on deck, maybe?  Ack-

ack survivor?  Unknown soldier?  Dot

gone a-whaling vast expanse,

revived in some albumen

album.  Icarhea, return –

amaze us.  Dad is dead.  All US

mourns you, lass.  Jesus the airman

in a Paris dream   floats

through rainbow dust-motes

light checkmate   first the grain

                *

then the ear   then the grain

of wheat   in the heart

of your ear   lost art

of flying flute   solo   Dakota plain-

song   Black Elk   pilot-fish

naturally Christian

(more so than mission-

school)   so dream your spirit-wish

when the brutal tide of inhumanity

recedes   we will stand

by the shores of Mini-land

bullets   baby hummingbirds   no-see-

ums now   old Green Man chair

of Old Man North   unseen

now too   copper-sheen

bright mold of Liberty   still there

like curule seat of Caesar (Jules)

a Dante chair   Mom spied

in the PX   at Salvation Army

& dragged back home   April Fools!

It’s very rocky   in Armenia

an Abyssinian ark   sleeps

in Paul Bunyan steeps

a Tuscan nurses   meek Elephantea

with yellow ivory   fantasia

folk tales of the sun

shining   for everyone

through rose-glass coracles (acacia)

7.12.17

Sunset (Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls)

slow crane-dance

SQUARE DANCE

The beech, a symphony of copper & grey

shimmers her palimpsest

of summer light.  Her host

of rust-green leaves filters the day

with fleecy shade.  In Providence

her hidden rings girdle

a slow crane-dance, a Gödel

harmony (irrational coherence)

stepped on the diagonal, a zigzag

pattern toward the center

while her limbs counter

equivocal winds.  Like a limping stag

the Minotaur (a forsworn king)

marks ink-scratches in concrete

with his third (wooden) foot.

They cannot be erased – the bee-sting

on the tongue of that stung beast

is like a humming bumble-

bird, bearing his humble

master on a mule (the least

shall be the greatest in your midst,

Great Scot).  When fair

is foul, weird sister,

and a hole is in the wholeness,

& the onion odor of this Union

hovers through the orange

facade of rough strange

battlements... the regal One

                   *

comes drifting like an eagle-sun.

Immaculate integrity

of breathing Truth will be

the seal on that bright Lincoln-coin –

of the people, by the people, for

the people... after the .44

that brings black milk before

the beech flowers (in Mendelssohn).  Our

infinitely gentle bunny Rabbi

– sire of reconciliation,

smiling Sun of Man –

shall stand again in one rose eye

of green & copper Liberty

whose burning torch will come

to this dunce inane – wisdom

will shine from Bozo Nana (dotty

Henry with his dancing bear,

jaded whit-knight from

Column B) despite him-

self : because a solidarity there

glows like green limestone from the depths

a city of straight pines

out of the matrix shines

where Jason is plowman   & Jonas

mans the prow   & merry Magdalen

raises her almond lens

yodeling earth-&-heaven’s

rhombic square dance (Topsy Ravenn).

4.3.17

Greyhound to Galilee

SWEET CHARIOT

You rode the midnight Greyhound

through American backwaters.

Past hobo squatters

inside their high lonesome vault (profound

infinite firefly field).  No one

forgets their bent magnetic

North, your epileptic

adolescence (endlessness).  The sun,

the moon, the Pope, the Emperor...

some bright Hiawatha rider,

beaming father-figure –

Federigo in Jerusalem, hugging an Emir...

History slides by on billboards,

Burma-Shave proverbs.

The Greyhound hums, curves

down Vanishing Road – the Lord’s

a baby buffalo.  Around the track

the sprinters skim – a blear

of fog machines, the air

nine tenebrae.  One shady (humpback)

tesseract glides into Galilee –

Gödel infinity

or Miriam smile (she

saw her tall cousin suggest a V);

the mirror of authority

in heaven & on earth

wells supernatural mirth –

sweet chariot of Lady Liberty.

8.11.16

Your Persian paradise

LOST PHOTO

Spotty grackles swarm the dogwood,

chatty starlings nibbling

scarlet berries, quibbling

around each drooping leaf (old

ruddy father).  They traipse a happy

nonsense o’er the remnant

garden.  Sir Thomas Browne,

strum softly til I end my Rhody

nap (it won’t be long).  Your Persian

paradise (precisely drawn)

will do for Gödel, Dante –

not so simple to sketch that Abyssinian

abyss, encircling the human plow

through history.  Your soul

is touched by lost photo

whose courteous artist limns her now –

an April child glimpsed through November

shades (All Souls, Grandpa).

One unicorn grace, selah.

O woe to me, that scarred the moon (her

face still gleams from autumn grass).

A soft Franciscan Rimini

rhymes in the memory

of your basilica (on ne passe pas).

Dear evening Matilda, 1-3-2...

(Beethoven, fowled & quartered –

decussation – weathered

sprite).  All shall be well, hums Manitou.

10.5.15

laundry line, old lilac, light Brownian diamond

Rhody backyard I must leave ere long

Why do scientists have such trouble with the theory of time? (Einstein turned it into an aspect of space; Godel seems to have denied its existence, except as a kind of subjective illusion.)

Maybe because time is not a thing.

Time has no tangible properties in itself - it's only manifest in its effects. It's not even a mathematical object - it can't be quantified (except in "relative" terms - & the theory of relativity has nothing to say about time as we know it subjectively).

Godel's interpolation of the General Theory of Relativity hypothesizes "closed timelike circles" open to "time travel" (though it's not strictly time travel, because there is no time).

Fiction (& sometimes poetry) - & not just science fiction - provides forms of virtual time travel. As we write, we relive. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Reading some interesting books on Kurt Godel, the mathematician/philosopher. Happens he gave his last public lecture at American Math Society, here in Providence - hope I can find a copy of that somewhere.

You think poets are crazy... just read some of these math biographies!

I'm not saying KG was crazy, however. (Though extremely paranoid & eccentric toward the end - died in Princeton of "inanition" due to lack of food. His wife, & Albert Einstein, were just about his only friends, and things went downhill after they died.) He was brilliant. A few pithy pages changed the course of mathematics, & possibly philosophy too.

I can barely follow the math, logic, physics. Good brain exercise, though. Gets me thinking about what sets poetry apart from philosophy, etc.

Last Sunday was Kurt Godel's birthday (Cantor's successor).
[correction : Monday. April 28. The day I was posting about Faith & Reason to Anastasios. At 1:32 pm, same time as this post. 132 : the number of Stubborn Grew. (Why? Long story. I used to live at 132 6th St. It's the number of a waltz (a 1-3-2. . .). It's the number of Beethoven's most beautiful quartet. It's the number of rooms in the White House. It's the number of acres in N. Main Cemetery. It's the # of square ft in Grace Church, downtown Providence. Add "one" and it's the secretive number of Finnegans Wake (1132).]

Creation like a mobius strip, because:
there exists no set which contains everything (since a subset of this set would be the set itself, and it would take a yet larger set to contain the set which contains everything). Cantor equated this vanishing pt. with God, the Absolute.

Poor Cantor ended his days in an asylum, alternating between the riddle of transfinite numbers, and trying to prove that Bacon was Shakespeare. Maybe he was reading Ignatius Donnelly, who also turned to the Shakespeare puzzle when his career (politician, in this case) was hitting the rocks. Great orgone boxes think alike.

Mysteries of the infinite continua of the line.

((Rudy. Georg Cantor, a persecuted Jewish mathematician, who showed that infinite dimensions were contained in a 1-dimensional line, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named Rudy :: Leopold Bloom, a persecuted Jewish Irish fictional character, contained within the lines of a microcosmic verbal Dublin, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named))