his ping-pong twang

WINTER HARBOR

John Berryman, at the Guggenheim

with Robert Lowell

(twins of the groundswell

‘60s – gyrfalcons of the time)

relates a cutting parable

to illustrate poetic

speech.  Paternalistic

hot-shot banker plunks edible

& butler-polished gift-apple

into tot’s trick-or-treat

bag... You big shit!

yells kid – you crushed the crap

out of my cookie! (Guggenheim

giggles).  Jokes take place

in Minneapolis – this

much-derided mini-apple (rhymes

with Big).  Poet’s last home.

Dust-devils & tornadoes

fill his Oklahoma shoes.

His ping-pong twang off spiral womb

booms (sepulcher-recording)

up the ascending ramp

of modern art (Duchamp

is, Mr. Bones).  & there be something

weird ‘bout Henry – year-long

yearning in the yearling

lurching at spring –

light from Evening Star (so long!)

                  *

glancing toward Morning Star

across a black-iced

Mississippi (nice

Minnesota teeth, or solar flare).

The holm oak is an evergreen.

Turned inside-out, grief

lifted underleaf –

a pale moss-light, Nativity scene.

Like that Natasha veering toward

her lonesome labyrinth,

whose airy terebinth

fills sails of summer shade –

whose fluttering eyelids well up

with incomparable

change.  As in the parable

of viceroy in treetop –

evanescent black-&-yellow

wings’ twin semaphore

your sign-lingo, your

promise of new life (tomb-slow,

lentissimo).  The snarky raven

& the tremulous dove –

the starlings’ chatter-trove

amid bare, barren limbs... Olympian

Zeus rattling his thunder-oak

will never leave this winter

harbor – mangy splinter,

tuneful cove – spooky light-spoke.

12.22.16

I wonder if that "pebble cabinet" I liked so much in the Guggenheim Russian show was, in part, a sly nod to Mandelstam. There are so many "stone" & pebble images & themes running through his poetry! The "stone fallen from heaven", the stones along the Black Sea shore, the "unloved grey pebble" (unknown soldier), the sand sifted from hand to hand (in the poem for Tsvetaeva), the stones of Roman builders & other architecture, the title of his first book (Kamen, "stone", acronym for AKME), and so on.

Sarah's German tutor (from Russia) gave us a box of (terrible) Voronezh chocolates for the holidays - she said "Henry will like them". Well, I liked the brand name. I asked Sarah to bring my copy of the Voronezh Notebooks to class tonight, & have her read the last poem out loud ("To Natasha Shtempel") in Russian. I hope it wasn't too much to ask.

I went down to New York to see the Russian art exhibit at the Guggenheim. My favorite things were the Guggenheim itself, and something from the 70s - a little museum case with scattered pebbles inside, covered underneath with old faded exhibit-cards (like library card-catalog cards), hand-typed with various odd (numbered) descriptions. I should have written some of them down, & who the artist was. ("This pebble fell in love with rock #12"; or "Found in Mesopotamian tomb after falling from Mars"... like that, only better, funnier).

Interesting how Kandinsky, Malevich et al. were doing NY Abstract Expressionism 50 years earlier.