it's only gravity

SEA-SALTS

… an astronomer consulting the stars to-day would announce

                    that the most favourable day of the year for weighing light is May 29.

                                       – Arthur Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation

The brightness of the light shines more or less

in various fields of stars.

The Hyades, for instance, are

magnificent – rays bend around the sun’s eclipse

according to their gravity (1132?)

& their displacements make

a parallax, will shake

the skies – like that black hole in Virgo

where the whole cosmos in its photon rings

as in a coelostat on El Principe

looks back from a funhouse mirror

mired in the cryptic gloom one Friday brings

(in April, in RI).  So when Prince Hobo Hal

sets out upon the Ocean stream

paddling his gyroscope-trireme

his dim reflections shade his violet pal

Jean-Jo, behind their glare.  It’s only gravity.

They glide along past green Cahoki-o

beneath a soaring Gateway prow

toward topaz Gulf (ineffable Mardi Gras)

where Jean-Jo’s mild humility

(like unknown soldier or

grey pebble on the shore)

emerges – lightweight solidarity –

& swathes him in a dove-grey cloud

of granite apses, limestone

spires… an airy congregation

of sea-salts (& makes his father proud).

4.7.20

serpent ocarina

RED RIVER

Dante calibrated to the nth degree

the classic perihelion

of medieval civilization

simply to retrieve the smile of Biche

out of nine coils of Cerberus

& that sulfurous pit

known to Cautantowwit

who cauterizes death with raven caws.

More things in heaven & earth, Horatio.

We’re all caught up in this

wrestling match with the abyss;

there’s no detachment of the mind from woe

nor from the body’s final strife

– breathing with agony

at the crossroads (in RI) –

where Red River meets Sargasso Gulf.

So the poem of America embodies

Juliet upon the parapet

Ophelia with hairnet

(download Vertigo for double-whammies) –

the tensile span of every suicide,

waiting for someone to reach

them (eye-in-hand) – teach

HOPE to hollowed-out children (pied

serpent, surging back to Mendelssohn).

Observe the valiant

canoe, she said.  Plant

almonds, quincunctial.  Amen, amen.

6.27.19

Hagia Sophia with mermaid eyes

TATTOO-BASKET

                                    for Sophie, on her birthday

She shines like a little smile of light,

your happiness.  Shot through

with violets, with rue

of yellow-gold... a sea-green Amphitrite.

She swam from a box out of the bottomland.

Big Muddy concept –

buried in refuse, inept

mentalities.  Blind eye-in-hand,

dread fright of bloody bandage-men.

I stood on my headwaters,

the only Falls that matters –

Mill City, where they grind the grain –

a nauseated Hamlet, dizzy

with green v-vertigo.

Boxed rivers overflow.

He’s Hobo now, or Ishmael, fire-fizzy;

curled up in a tattoo-basket,

floating in the womb

of his own dream-doom

to Gulf of Mexico (Nantucket?)...

where butterflies of poetry

emerge as monarchs

from sea-chrysalides

& sketch fine arcs on pottery

insouciantly, with haunted grace.

Winking tesserae,

unscrambled... Hagia Sophia

with mermaid eyes (each facet-face).

8.21.18

Rose Island Light

HIGH C

Hobo takes his descending path

sloping to the great river.

What can he give her,

steady Delta Queen, to stanch the wrath?

Past frigid walls of enmity

feathered with graffiti –

a rust-red major C

like an iron magnet... Rimini

or Cleveland?  Venice, maybe –

where the blind king lies,

his crazed hawk’s eyes

closed (petrified) beneath the sea.

The crane dance of the manic poets

circles the salted harbors

of the Gulf.  The Earth bears,

pining, their smoldering caskets

toward one windy maelstrom-vortex –

matrix of Rose Island Light.

Human massif, beaming bright

rotating manna-sun, whose Artifex

is spoked with rays like peacock’s eyes;

radiant Ancient of Days

out of the heart of praise

within a ring of living creatures

breathing fire against the cold

accidia, the starved

& shriveled souls carved

with the scar of Queequeg’s mappemunde

                   *

the raven-star, the midnight sun.

& the Nazir of poets chants

one Galilean entrance –

lacustrine circle, Aquarian –

out of the sea as rapt Columbia,

planetary bird of clay;

cloud-shade of Day

for restoration of Terra Incognita.

Hobo beheld this mighty mandala

like a rose wheel of limestone

light, through human bone

& muscle, limbs & ligament, figura –

tattooed by Piero della Francesca

as a mirror for your glance –

as Miriam in moody trance

harbors the light ray’s umiltà.

Like the Hart of Marsden Hartley

in a rose from the sea,

in a sea-knell’s 33,

out of the sunken chest floats free

the vision of immortality –

Love’s salty clarity

spouts from the clay

enchanted unison, octave’s high C.

So Hobo lay in his muddy riverbed

south of St. Louis.

His clay revolved; his

turtledove hummed overhead.

2.28.17