aqueducts for bumblebees

JESTER THREADS

In the anonymous late grass,

among the stray brown

stalks like overgrown

aqueducts for bumblebees

Hobo looks off toward the flesh-

tone Mississippi bridge.

He yearns for the courage

to be like Woodpecker, in his mesh

of stealthy wasps & stolen honey –

I mean that Thunderbird,

drilling his fiery word

dovetailing out of Galilee;

the lightning rod atop the dome

whose inner lining is mosaic;

a kingfisher, whose beak

flings Geryon from his kingdom.

Late August air grows clear, autumnal.

He’ll shed his jester threads

like Hal doffs Falstaff duds

& lie down by the Rio del

Espiritu Santo.  Watch how that firebird

melts hearts into unison –

lifts into comprehension

both Jerusalem & Athens, toward

a chastened & revived Cosmopolis

where neighbor-love is measure

of the planetary future... &

then he’ll mosey back to Minneapolis.

8.24.18

haunted scent

ANCIENT SPRING

My soul, like a woodchuck hidden

in Old Charley’s Oak,

must be lit by a stroke

of lightning even to begin –

like that gold spearman on the dome

in Providence, icon

of limpid Everywomban –

Williams’ independent spirit, come

to revolve like Gabriel Crozier-Torch

around his merry Morning

Rose (see Alighieri’s singing

sky).  An Ocean Island (search

Queequeg’s tattoos).  A green Tahiti

lapped by peaceful Ocean

River – Night Sea span,

gold-threaded geometric Ratio,

squared rail-split Israel rondure

(Galilee of Lincoln-

logos, all for one

& one for all).  O armature

of lovely Law!  Fleet safety net

bracing each breathing sheep

with her own fleece... keep

dangling in catenary grace!  Yet

lift the lilies of your haunted scent

until the spirit in us

brims past avarice,

hot pride – guide to your tent

                *

under Polaris & the prancing

Bears, where free children

ripple the utmost common

well.  Like Addams, balancing

book-learning with hand-work,

art with science, freedom

with obligation... some

justice for the beaten fork –

the disenfranchised, cheated poor,

collateral damage

beneath our idol-image

(smoking low sulfuric Boor

of plump kin-pride & greed).

So Hobo Henry muttered

by the mud-brown flood

of Mississippi river.  Honey-mead,

sweet sea-salt air of tamaracks...

the vaulting spire of Dante-

tracks filter the ray

that flies orthogonal – strikes

Roman iron with Hebrew vine.

Gold thread (Apollinaire’s

trompette marine) bears

light into the grain combine –

sun through the moss-green shade

above the ancient spring

(a Restoration thing).

So in a Maker’s aye all things are made.

4.28.17

J. Fisher King

WHAT CHEER

April rain soaks the riverlands.

The cottonwoods are green

with a mossy sheen

(a milky spray).  Giuliana understands

her little boy’s harmonic joy,

winding up his yellow

gyroscope (so

imperturbable, this balance-toy).

Ravenna sifts backwater Time.

The hollow tock of wood-

pecker, carving a shed

for screech owl (minima sublime,

incognito).  Little gray on gray

tree-rings of Okeanos –

oscillating Knossos,

Minerva-maze.  Flute-bird (in clay).

A copper Jonah, lifted from the well.

Dusk-rose, Venusian.

Seal of the Son of Man

like Hamlet’s ring, in wax (fell

Icarus, from labyrinth

– the ship sailed on).

Trials of the paragon,

the paradigm.  Blue hyacinth

of Shaker spirit, trembling

Will   I am

Alpha Omega   home

in my petroglyph   assembling

              *

light stars   on the horizon

Thunderbird ghost-

dance   round pivot-post

of early souls   lifted from prison

At dawn in Providence, the light

gathers gold   atop

the dome   What cheer,

Netop   the independent soul   bright

spear   at petrel summit of

this Camelot   simplicity  

a brave’s priority

to choose the good   be led by Love

J. Fisher King   Ancient of Days

as it was   upon a time

at the beginning (lame

limb   violence bears away   always)

& the smile of quiet eyes & lips

the canoe in the shadowy

garage   Ferrara iron

burgeoning almond   Natasha limps

toward her vault   in Magdala

Gesthemane   April

umbrella   of good will

the given Earth   the rose mandala

a fingerprint spiral   of gratitude

Thanksgiving feast   soul

liberty   constancy   whole

serene   uplifted   Rhody-rood

4.19.17

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...

Center of the earth

COCOON-SHADE

We were scrambling through an endless cave,

Mark Trail & I, in the

cartoon – wait – uh...

that was a dream!  Mind, now – behave!

There was an independent chap with spear

all gold, atop a globe-

sized turtleshell, adobe –

yodeling (with shimmering lyre)

Good Will I am Good Will...

There was a lowly, sketchy

mule, named Eeyore, following

his master, Donkey Haute, until

they reached the center of the earth

– a vernal O, encompassing

an M, a W (whelmelding

vertiblur upon a sunlit hearth

all rosorangled in Pacific dawn).

& then I felt wings purring

in my sleep... a chirring

flutter-by of monarch (milky-spun

cocoon-shade of the teeming soil);

a turtledove was crooning

too, for old George – leaning

on his scythe, worn with grave toil. 

The axle of the earth, the axle...

muttered he – of rusty

us the icon, see.

Light waves from Chartres pinnacle.

4.22.16

Remembrances of 1865 (so beginneth Ravenna Diagram Bk 6)

SEA WASH

To turn your glance back, eastward, from

the height of a great orange

pier (Home on the Range

in your ear) – immense Pacific foaming

behind you... like a lookout in a crow’s-

nest – a single burning glass,

a golden eagle-eyepiece

taking in a continent.  Up to Rose

Island Lighthouse (Narragansett Bay) –

to the byzantine capitol dome

in Providence, whose gnomon

is a gold harpooner – looking away

back west, toward you.  Photoshot (still).

As when the sun stops briefly

over Jericho, before they

blow the trumpets, & the walls fall;

as if you stood before a Peto

still-life (intricate

& accurate memento

of complete stigmata-scrimshaw hero).

I hear another sea wash, sighing

round salt emerald shores.

Columba’s Iona (wars

far off, now) laved with dying kings’

repentance-prayers (touch of blessing

for the wounded flutes

of clay).  So lift your lute,

sad Frisco boy.  She’s leeward (glistening).

2.12.16

& so concludes Ravenna Diagram, bk 5

BRIGHT PENNY

J was for Juniper (Maia genus,

Jenna) – an ordinary

quiet little tree –

you find them everywhere in Rus,

U.S.  One of the cedar family –

of which great masts are made

in Massa Maritima, she said;

& note the canoe, so beautifully

wrought, that graces this garage

full of rusted implements,

old iron junk (ribs,

tubes, gunnels, disjecta, garbage)...

– no, don’t kiss me now, it’s almost

Valentine’s.  Here’s a letter

in the litter, from your brother

in Minneapolis (him & his boats!) –

expatiating on that Inland Ocean

stretching from Superior’s

index, through Mississippi

dells & vales (his new obsession)

leaving these microscopic spirals

...in the pervasive buttery

limestone underbelly

of the land... seashells, fan-whorls;

epitomized in one moist flesh-toned

stony nave & spire

(near 34th & 34).

Meek modern well-proportioned

masterpiece, harmonic matrix

of father & son (elegant

Eero, eerie Eliel) – bent

Saarinen ark, soaring to Beatrix

rondure... O navigators!  Inching

over gravity waves,

black holes, ripe graves

of wombified Vikings... cinching

one planet with your splintery

kaleidoscopes (wind-

buffeted facets of land

& sea) under Dancing Bear, Polaris!

I would scratch my cartoon of your fellowship

with the circumference

                *

of an almond salience –

one bright Penny’s (legal, tender) skip.

A dove circles the Bay there, Columbia –

where the beats gather

spliced to twine pillar,

shrouds & safety nets of a still Finlandia –

wheeling wings, massed between sea

& cedar palisades,

Pacific rock parades

& sigh of spray... enveloping, visionary

finish at the prow of fiery

sunsets!  & I recall

the rudder of it all –

kind capitan of Little Rhody,

prophet of soul liberty –

gold Independent Man

atop the mobile span

of Providence – abeam with charity!

Wrapped in cloud, the binding peaks

wink now with S.O.S.

Laurentian Divide is

where the waters separate – soul seeks

her Earth, commensurate with hope

– justice of Manitou

sluicing like rain (for you

& me) across wide prairie slope

to live-oak bottomland.  My faint

hen-scratch... mere filament

to trace the lineament

of Kalevala-coracle – St.

Mary’s fishing-boat, or Paul’s

(vain little man, whose plan

would hook Leviathan) –

one rosy ark, riding the squalls

where refugees huddle for warmth & light.

O womb abrim with life,

grail-casket, Raven-knife –

matrix of River’s coppery might –

lift up your little pine apex!

Crown my origami fleet

with fir-green fin – beat

time with silver oar (moon reflex).

2.11.16