SHADY IMAGO
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of a raven overhead
with the sun in his beak – dead
noon in Jerusalem – I will fear no
evil. The rabid orangutan
with his orange comb
trumpets drastic doom
for milky stars – the Black Son
of Memphis & his Romany
Hobos (a gospel band)
– he doesn’t understand
the music. Where‘s the harmony?
Under a ruin of reconstruction,
the rusty copper scaffold
of jealousy (green mold)
they glimpsed a revelation
of plain limestone floor – the sepulchre
where Jesus lies in state,
briefly (before the great
grey wings translate to their obscure
futurity). Along a Mississippi
sedimentary ridge, I spied
the quick white-gold
Ionian flicker of a flicker (underbelly
lambsdown curvature aloft)...
Io? from Iowa?
Some swift sky-cow
out of Abyssinian abyss? Soft...
*
I hear her owl’s wing whisper
through the silence. Nut-
brown acorn chariot,
a whorl of grey cloud-matière...
Gödel’s self-interference, weft
of Maximus bard-
beard (sun tangled
with midnight, O infinitely deft
monarch)... Apollinaire in blue
kepi (the unknown soldier
waiting out the end of war)...
twin silver doves that mirror you
upon a double door from Mexico.
O Guadalupe – heart-
encrypted grail-casket –
cedar & cypress womb-Argo
whose planet is moss-green tomorrow –
bend down to sister Psyche
now, unknot my
Tauromachia; Raven’s shady Imago
unfolds a lantern crown of light.
Out of the cthonic hills
of frightened, haunted wills
a laughing stream called Make-It-Right
(the Minnehaha of the minnow tar)
floats Moses-coracle
to Dawn (original
lodestone – morning North Star).
11.4.16
