my circus is circumference

AGATE PATH

A camouflaged Eye of Providence

hovers over the pyramid

like an acorn emerald

planted in oak-leaf munificence.

The Geneva Drive is in Ravenna.

Its clock ticks in a circle...

twin circles... minuscule

mosaic tesserae resolve into Divina

Paradiso.  So Jesus-Orpheus the shepherd

pipes Eurydice

free of that ceremony –

Flee, Morning Star, into thy molten Word!

So Raven-Cautantowwit mounts up

like chunk of cave-shade

out of Narragansett glade.

History will halt here (full-stop).

The wheels... the wheels... from Sepulcher

to Joachim’s Eagle...

a 33, at harpoon angle

spins gravitation for a falling star

into reverse, Hartley.  Your 9th-month

manger – energy

transformer – tyranny

to liberty – Caesar to pigweed (amaranth)...

in our eye, blind soothsayer.

Dreamer.  Beware the Ides

of March, jewel!  The tides

wind up your record player

                 *

wrapping American wolf-hides

against endless winter,

before pale blue Easter

cracks the shell’s snowline... abides.

Two boats in Gloucester rock against the pier.

Twin meditations on a feast –

Thanksgiving yeast

to lift this clay into a Gaiasphere.

Light leaning down from high Polaris

filters into Catholic Oak;

Blackstone’s wheel-spoke,

planted in Pawtucket – ferrous

axle, trimmed by Roger Williams –

fortified by Edward Coke

to be King Charlie’s nook

when he eludes Roundheads (skipping exams

for exile’s exile – double-cross).

I’m whorling a rusty-russet

agate path, Juliet –

for you (muttered George Henry Loess).

Out of circuiting clay, no less...

out of the mid-month

warbling of Bluejay (29th

of May, no doubt).  Camelot is

something else.  The Lady in the Lake

of the Isles raises

Excalibur aloft... says

Hiawatha is a sacrifice (oak-thirst to slake).

3.1.19

all across Minneapolis

RABBI-PATH

All across Minneapolis

the poet’s left evidence

like tracks under a fence

– long fellow’s footprints –

Nana Bozo the Clown, or

Hiawatha in slippers

(snowshoes, Alberta

clippers).  Fella came before,

might hop here again (ghost

dance, dream song).

Sunday stretched so long.

He was with us in the Lammas-host

like lambchild in the field,

a white cloud drifting

bluegrass... otskèn:rha, sifting

right from wrong (at Lammas-tide).

Bozo Lambrogio breaks up

the woolly categories

of our feral cats – Caesar’s

imbroglios, lions of Judah, Egyptian

pups... will skip the rabbi-path

out of the lake of wrath

back into Nazareth

by August 1st (we’ll do the math

later).  Yolk-black Fabergé cracks

in the snow... imperial

theocracies unreel; almond

Vierge Ouvrante gives berth.  Relax.

2.19.19

Morning to Evening Star

CIRCLE LAKE

Blindly, Hobo inches toward

the Keys.  In Florida.

Toward the delta,

in Louisiana.  His handy old

eye-in-hand in hand (light

portable fire-drill).

Ply all your skill,

Hobo.  Hi huraru ra’a,

Hi awari ra’a.  A muddy ray

from cold Atlantic

like some frantic

foundering Santa Maria

threads yarns toward that western

Garden of Evening Star.

Across his eyelid, sure –

like Sire Henry, in his baby coffin

(six weeks encrypted with Guillain-Barré).

Hi huraru ra’a,

Hi awari ra’a.

Autumn leaves of disenchanted

authors, sighing in their libraries...

(the Roger Williams version,

for piano).  Dispersion

through each mental prison (Henry’s,

yours).  Dread of ocean void

spirals up from deep

Le-Hev-Hev keep –

Coatlicue (the cut-up) is annoyed

                    *

& threatens Everyman – her sheep

is black & bloody red!

– Nana, you might be dead

before you know it.  Go to sleep.

The dream song reconfigures all

within its top-spin

in your heart-garden.

Your father was a gentleman narwhal;

your son was dancing on the shore

of Circle Lake, in Midway

Mirror-Land (in Galilee).

The crucifixion of the Evening Star

will not unveil her night-reality.

Observe this family

photograph, Henry.

Miss Padgett’s ancient book quarry –

the massive double-panes of glass,

a mandorla for owlish

Actaeons (Horus,

searching for Columbia?  Atlas,

looking for the moon?)  Nana,

dancing Sophie calls me.

Grandpa.  Hiawatha

had a friend, Hart Ibis Artemis – yah...

yawning from the deep, Jonah.

You must become the dove

still dancing, love –

spun from the heart of things.  Selah.

11.30.18

down to St. Lou

SLATE PANOPLY

Henry’s Chair is in the woods,

beside the Rio del Espiritu

Santo.  Hobo to you,

mayhap – lost in his darker moods;

drawing a diagram in river-sand

of Ursiana’s barer pillars,

moss-bound Giuliana’s

pines (forlorn Ravenna swampland).

Emblems of spiritual epilepsy,

moon friar.  Lame lone wolf

Dante, crying for a proof

of integral radiance (nay, nay

sobs hunchback Leopardi).

Hiawatha whistles there –

follow the tripping Hare

Whirlaway to Itasca – see?

The spring.  Mammoth drone of stream.

Down to St. Lou,

where airs axle true –

bloodveined grey sponge, clay dream...

tuning-fork in the river road.

Wheel, innocent rabbi,

through your Galilee

of primary colors – lift the load

from Henry’s sloping shoulders.  Bend

a prism to Columbia,

slate panoply of Jonah-sky –

who lights the harbor at grave’s end.

9.15.16

Henry's Chair

On the shores of Gitche Gumee

Am reading a remarkable new biography of Dante Alighieri, by Marco Santagata, translated by Richard Dixon (Harvard UP, 2016).  Alongside Longfellow's remarkably reader-friendly translation of the Divina Commedia.

Where I live now is Longfellow territory : Minnesota.  In fact I live in a duplex adjacent to the Longfellow section of Minneapolis.  This is the land of Minnehaha Falls, Lake Nokomis, the Hiawatha rail line...  Henry L's Song of Hiawatha was inspired & underwritten by the Ojibwa legends recorded by his scholar-explorer friend Henry Schoolcraft (discoverer of the source of the Mississippi).  I can hear my late father even now - Minnesota Scout-camper-canoeist that he was - reciting (slightly tongue-in-cheek) tidbits of Hiawatha and Evangeline...

Santagata's Dante is a preternaturally-gifted young poeta (Einstein-like), trapped in a political combination of Inferno and South Boston.  His yearning for the authority of Empire makes (partial, recherche) sense in a parochial spacetime imprisoned by warlords, feuds, vengeance, murder, and every other circle of Hell.  These circles were closed.  Dante was like a drowning man struggling to the surface.  His appeal to Beatrice and Mary was a cry for a spiritual lifesaver - and a rescue from personal/political catastrophe.

But don't let me suggest that what we have here is a version of the mind-body problem.  Dante was more than an alienated intellectual.  He was a lot like Whitman, too.  He asserted Love at the center of reality, at the matrix of the cosmos - and found a way to synthesize all the different departments of Philosophia within the very human desire to love and be loved.  This was the gift of his mentors (Brunetti, Cavalcanti, Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle... Virgil) - but a gift he transfigured into blazing bardic fireworks (Whitman's descants on Emerson provide a parallel).

I find it interesting that during his agitated exilic (& hungry) wanderings around Tuscany & environs, Dante gravitated toward anywhere with a good library.  That early Renaissance hunger for knowledge chimes with what Mandelstam calls the Italians' (Dante, Ariosto) enormous appetite & gusto for speech, rhyme, poetry...  Mandelstam, out there in Voronezh & Vladivostok, carrying his frangled, tattered copy of the Divine Comedy around, always, wherever Stalin decided to send him...

The library was my refuge too.  I spent 30 years in the bowels of the Rock (Rockefeller Library, Brown University) - after Ronald Reagan brought an end to my 5-yr VISTA volunteer career (circa 1980).  I didn't want to be an organizer anymore; I needed to write.  But I didn't want to go back to school (I graduated from Brown - finally - in 1977).  For a brief ridiculous desperate time I worked as a "professional resume writer"...

I thought of poetry as something simple & direct - beyond academia, beneath academia; beyond politics, beneath politics; beyond po-biz, beneath po-biz.  I started a group called the Poetry Mission for that reason (stealing poetry off campus).  We sponsored events in an art gallery, organized some talks, published an anthology for Edwin Honig's birthday... but this was long ago (early 1990s).  Others have been down this path.

The library.  On the campus.  Yes.  I went back there, into my shell - and stayed for 30 years.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the dome of the Rhode Island State House, under which I spent much of my 5 years as a VISTA volunteer :


"The Rhode Island State House is composed of 327,000 cubic feet (9,300 m³) of white Georgia marble, 15 million bricks, and 1,309 short tons (1,188 t) of iron floor beams.^[2]

The dome of the State House is the fourth-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world, after St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, and the Minnesota State Capitol.^[2][3] On top of the dome is a gold-covered bronze statue of the Independent Man, originally named "Hope". The statue, weighing more than 500 pounds (230 kg), is 11 feet (3.4 m) tall and stands 278 feet (85 m) above the ground. The Independent Man represents freedom and independence and alludes to the independent spirit which led Roger Williams to settle and establish Providence and later Rhode Island."

"Hope."

This post is a throwback to the HG Poetics of old - that Minnehaha of endless gab-gab... how did I manage it?  As TS Eliot says somewhere, "Humility is endless."  I worked, managed.  Now, strangely, I'm home again.  Florence was my paternal grandmother's name - the Goulds lived about 2 blocks from where I'm writing this, in another shady apt by the river.  Florence was born on the the 4th of July, 1900... granddaughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain...

Minnehaha's moccasin

SPIRIT-WOOD

                             i.m. Edward Lewis Peckham

Step lightly in my mother’s house,

whispered a tiny elf

named ELP – himself

a watercolorist (a yellow lady’s

slipper’s footprint left the forest

on this day).  Cypripedia

reginae – Minnehaha’s

moccasin – graced this wilderness

as well, making a pair for Joy

& Beauty (graces

almost three).  Time paces

seasoned out of winter, so employ

your dancing shoes, fiery Hiawatha –

roll like Polar Bear

around that pinpoint star,

sing like a loon, like your happy

father (Thalia-glad).  Nature

& Manitou join hands;

a Turtledove blends

sea-sounds, all about green Eire;

urn burials, gardens of Sirius

swim synchronizing

rhombs on monarch wings

(a rugged Paradise for ladybugs)...

one dance-call through spirit-wood

or jadestone flute

sows dreams of Camelot

(like waves of wheat around a vineyard).

6.9.16

*Note : Edward Lewis Peckham, Rhode Island artist and naturalist, painted a watercolor of Cypripedium parviflorum - Yellow Lady's Slipper - on this day in 1866, 150 years ago.  See illustration here from the Rhode Island Historical Society.

all aboard the Midnight Sun

FROM MEMPHIS

O Lady walking by, in black

jacket & yellow skirt,

you lift me from inert

& vacant thought into a way-back

memory-milieu.  The Promised Land

of sunlight at midnight

is nest for monarch flight

& viceroys too (you’ll understand

when we get there).  The Milkweed King

is Hobo in disguise –

the motherland is prize

for steady Jim (gone huckleberrying

with Oblomov).  He walks gently

into rabid disputes,

young Nanabozo – toots

his horn – Rabbi-clown, my

Hiawathee Bigfootprints

of Peace; he’s taken down

in order to rebound

into renown, like Printemps

Spring-Rain Joan, or Franny Cricket

(she of jingling anklets

in the cedar dusk).

There’s earthy scent beneath the musket;

there’s a penny in the well.

A dinged wingèd profile

traipses from the Nile –

elopes from Memphis (into Israel).

6.1.16

Spooky distances (for 3.14159............).......)...

APPLE PIE

Hobo drowses in his Einstein field

of asphodel, spooky distances.

Life’s tender differences...

only mauve peonies on copper shield.

Irrational yearning for the earth

might be the shortest path

to Providence.  Wrath

of History’s a concave labyrinth –

your soul must wash a dusty planet

down Big Muddy, Hobo.

Rise from your bed of woe;

our Hero beckons from his granite

lintel toward the circling sun.

Path P (transcendental

for each chaste equal

guest of compassing compassion).

The one who went to live with Indians.

Blackstone, Yellow Sweeting

apple-man – his greeting

(like sweet Williams’ own) a Both-Hands

Welcome, Minnehaha flute –
ray of soul liberty,

loop of Easter Rabbi...

Hart, Malcolm, Giulietta’s route

bent (parallactic) toward the light.

A catenary smile

or Life-Saver will

thread sad grooves into a chariot.

3.14.16

Mississippi River, from Indian Mounds Park (St. Paul)

Walk through the mirror

MINOR TEAR

Bleak winter shades... crows in the trees

beak-gnashing, rasping (caw-

caw, hawk-hawk).  Low

Earth, rotund silentium (dregs, lees).

Stillness of still-life – Brown Decades

(hoist Peto).  The Just Man

imago is just a man –

barely there, through simple glades

of green.  Mirror Lakes liked him,

in Mendelssohn.  Only

an infinitely gently-shivery

Rabbi, Hiawatha Honeybear – bro Jim,

our lunky logos (penny-loafing).

Who bears it all, past

He- or She-Cat’s paste-

up Geryon-masque (a scary nothing).

This maze contains a minor tear.

& through a crevice there

one Ariadne hair

leads you to almond-gold rain-bear.

Earth seethes with ziggurats of fraud

& blind men lash themselves

to violence (selva

oscura mitts gorilla code);

but it shall not be so with thee.

Bunny hikes one eye

& looks for wheeling Eli

to come by (benevolent memory).

3.3.16

Big Rabbit & the Can-Canute

TOTEM-GHOST

Winter.  An imperturbable water-serpent

flows smoothly south, under

the presiding MN-arch

(Peace Bridge).  Cloud-blanket (quiet, lambent

silverthought).  Ice-glancing light

of North Star State –

each ray will penetrate

the sixpack hexagons of Snow Rabbit

– that giant Bigfoot totem-ghost

Sophie & Phoebe rolled

to quasi-life (backyard).

Some Hiawatha Teotihuacan (host-

figure, phantom King).  Messiah

is a butterfly.  Love,

Love, and be loved, beloved

Bumblebee – amen, selah.

This glossy lala glossolalia

is like a peacock’s choral

cry, or agate-spiral

Saverin-Canute, out of Iona

(green Columba’s jaybird hymn).

At the spare crossrood

of naked servitude –

Boethius, Maximus, beaten

senseless – there Polaris burns,

& melts into the heart

of summer Ocean.  Start

your laddie-dance, lass – Roy returns.

1.26.16

Family of Man

It's late at night on 5.28.  May 28.  We buried my father's ashes in St. Stephen's churchyard today (my mother was born on St. Stephen's Day - 12.26).  In a beautiful spot beside Minnehaha Creek.  My mother will be buried there too, someday.  She says she hopes the creek will flood sometime, & wash them all downstream.  My mother had her first drink (sherry) at the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (in Portland, Maine) at the age of about 12 or 13 (ca. 1940).  She was pals with the daughter of "Laughing Allegra".  "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee..." (- just a little further downstream stands the statue of Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha across the stream...)

5.28.  May 28.  I finished the long poem (about 600 pp.) Forth of July on 5.28.2000.  The poem circles around (among other things) the early New England Anglican minister & freethinker & librarian & orchardist & Seeker William Blackstone.  First exile from Boston.  Early settler (pre-Roger Williams) in Rhode Island.  He shows up in many of my poems (see the books Lanthanum, Dove Street...) - even a poem celebrating my father's birthday (4.12.27).  In fact a lot of my poems are numerically structured around the numbers 5, 28 (28 is a perfect number).

Forth of July.  My grandmother (John Gould's mother) was born on the 4th of July, 1900.  Florence Gould was the first Episcopalian (Anglican) in the family.

William Blackstone was buried on his property in Cumberland, RI on or around 5.28.1675.

It's kind of mysterious how life imitates art & art imitates life & the structures of the imagination are worked out in the dust to which thou shalt return.  All these strange shadows of many lives well lived (in the "Family of Man")!

 10


  
 I am coming like a Swede in the night
 to Henry's Diner   (or not coming)
 coming like Ava Gardner   with a spring
 in her step   (and double-cross in her heart)

  
 to the shores of great rivers   dancing
 with thieves   in gilded armor (and lead)
 I am coming like   Vietnam-bred
 hootchie-cootchie man   breathing

  
 the same air (brotherhood   cosmos)
 as a summer cicada   hidden in a crown
 of tupelo trees   drowning (almost)
 in their drone   beyond reason

  
 coming in the sweet child-food
 of Melchizedek   that bees make
 to temper the blood (just as a book
 tempers hot iron paws   along the road)

  
 to restore you   like the sun
 and prepare the way (here it gets
 omen-like)   for the drama   (the set-
 up)   in a garden   of stone   manes

  
 where children gather   to appease
 the dead ancestors   ranged
 under the prairie   waiting   red-
 eyed   all night long   for the wise

  
 footstep   the light wheeling
 pivot   the morning
 birth-rite   (swing
 as you may   to leeward   (heeling

  
 highway crust   (Hiawatha


     
                               6.6.99