Song of Songs in a snow globe

SWEET SNOW GLOBE

The twin foxes & three pine trees

on honeymoon (in a sweet

snow globe, in Norway).  What

use your Solomonic sarabande, these

loopy solemnities?  & the echoes

far into the motherland

Cahokia to maid’s Gravesend

your Adonai, my Adonis   a Memphis

trial by fire (intricate clay bark

buried in salt harbor).

O serious Nile laborer!

Nephthys, Dark Lady, mark

these fathoms of thy bottomland.

Snow was general over Ireland.

Strum the steel mandolin

then, Mary – plectrum in hand!

We climb out of the clay to shape

this Royal Arch, for St.

Latrobe & Son.  See the faint

wave-trace along its rim (crêpe

for a funeral train; flute-song

transcription).  Grain

melts into wine again –

the living man or woman prong

from earth.  We called it love

& swam into the circle

where snowflakes speckle

dark green live oaks (O crooning dove).

1.16.20

so Pocahontas might emerge again

PONTOON BRIDGE

The timid sun blanches behind these clouds

of January dim.  The miniature

ice-floes speckle the river

as they move south.  Chilled Hobo nods.

Yes, Henrah, there’s sleep-work to do

in this hibernation.  Dream-

boats a-building.  My trireme’s

a ship-in-a-bottle (of Irish brew).

See through the glass?  A beauty she is.

A bloom of almond petals

like a round of Grumman metal

canoes (nickel-dime aluminum Kris-

Kraft, maybe).  Like a micro-tuned

pontoon bridge, bent

from Iron Range to Ghent –

gildered from Gravensteen to Gravesend.

Henry slumped on a frigid cottonwood

stump, stumped.  The lantern-

bark in Hobo’s paw turned

green... little nef of oaken holly wood.

Cathedral Mary mine... he intoned.

Turn back the puny gangsters

of the bleak – these drugstore

Minotaurs – high Fraudulence enthroned.

So Pocahontas might emerge again

& roll Rebecca out of Gravesend

lifting her golden wave of corn

enchanted, vertical... toward Washington.

1.13.20