love & reason

GREY PEBBLE

Chris the carpenter, who came

to work on the kitchen today

grew up in Kentucky

(Louisville).  Stabled in the same

horse-town as cousin Julie, Uncle

Jim.  Heard the JFK

Inaugural, just yesterday.

Born in ’63.  Like a carbuncle

burst on history, his red hair

oscillated in

the wind (a Bruegel vine

for allegorical enmity).  Who there?

The difference between love & reason.

Conversion of the Jews

(persecution blues).

Crusaders, conjuring their notion

of Coulombe.  It’s about love

of the idea of love.

Been there, dove

that (through bronze dry ice dove).

Stone stumble on itself.

Luminous millwheel

like a cloudy meal...

ornery small emerald elf

in limelight (grey pebble,

desolate Black Sea).

No one care, see.

Is only poetry (silly rebel).

1.20.17

Primary colors

LIFE-SAVERS

A warm December, Pearl Harbor Day.

Pale & luminous radiance

suffuses the primary colors

of the workmen’s big machinery

in the river (below Franklin Bridge).

Dazzling maternal uncle

Jim’s birthday – a Ravlin

clé to the mystery.  Mrs. Elledge

added those little busts of Bach,

Mozart, & Beethoven

to my piano-lesson

collection (when I finished each book);

I loved her.  Jim waltzed Agnes,

the Viennese musician’s

daughter, around Lincoln

Center – while his own jeune fille was

in the shrouds of late-adolescent

angst, despair.  O

Juliet... swallowed at last

by Frisco Bay (agenbite

of inwit, James).  The pearl in the harbor

was a vivid soul, before

that fall; maybe somewhere

the wind still ruffles her black hair.

The soul, like a robin redbreast, wavers

high on its dogwood branch

over each day’s routine

avalanche.  Hunts for life-savers.

12.7.15

Franklin Ave. Bridge

Don't ask me

Not much to say about this, except that it's part of a series, and that Stephano and Nunzio are father & son from Sicily (my regular haircut here in Providence).  "Agnes" is Agnes Eizenberger, from Vienna, my Uncle Jim's onetime companion.  (Also thinking of another icon-maker & diagram artist, Agnes Martin.)

VIENNA VEINS

Klimt was a kind of crooked wicket

out on a creaky limb

in Cricket City (rim

of Rimini, Parisian rivulet).

Gold.  Vienna veins of Ravlin

violins (we were there,

Agnes).  Do not compare.

It’s only an American Robin

Redbreast, hooded, yodeling...

he’s calling out your name.

Not Stephano (fair game

for Fame) nor Nunzio (clipping

the locks that flood across your face)

– though they are near.  The Boot

strides on.  The man is moot.

Your Crown is Everwhirr – mesh-lace

of spy-veil, ambling the source...

a poverty of materials

in a land of burials

& sunshine (Italy, of course).

Klimt limns the anguish in your eyes.

Through vales of Solomon

or Sheba, all the broken

kingdoms, poppy-fields (Grandpappy’s

ripe Epiphany).  Pain circulates

through straitened means

somehow – corny Earth-scenes

beyond our ken (Thanksgiving plates).

8.17.15

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907)

Long & winding Rhode

Serendipity... I have a postcard from James Merrill, who was a friend of my Uncle Jim (Ravlin). Jim was my mother's older brother (by 15 yrs). My mother (Mary Ravlin Gould) was a childhood friend of the granddaughter of Longfellow (the daughter of "laughing Allegra"). (My mother had her first drink - sherry - in the Longfellow home in Portland ME, when she was 13.) In the late 1990s I wrote a book-length poem called "Stubborn Grew", the plot of which turned on the fate of Jim Ravlin's daughter, Juliet Ravlin (my cousin). It was published in 2000, at Tod Thilleman's invitation, by Spuyten Duyvil Press. Tod wrote to me that my long poem reminded him more than anything of James Merrill (a poet I have in large part avoided reading).

I seem to remember reading once that many archaic peoples recognized some kind of special occult relationship between a person & their maternal uncle. That's certainly true as regards the development of Forth of July. My uncle James Ravlin was an unusual character. Born in Saskatchewan in the winter of 1912, where his father (my grandfather) was on a building project. Jim Ravlin was very handsome, a Navy officer in WW 2. Became a lawyer, went east, worked for the tobacco companies, married into high society, shed his midwestern accent for a kind of high WASP drawl. Wrote Finneganesque letters to everyone (my grandfather's grandfather had come to the US from Dublin). Moved family to SF; left his wife; daughter Juliet jumped off Golden Gate Bridge, on his birthday; lived with his mistress, an important music agent in NYC; spent his last years with her in apartment overlooking Lincoln Center. Was a friend of poet James Merrill. The poem posted previously today was a kind of (lesser) echo of this one, which really got Stubborn rolling (toward my cousin Juliet!). It's an elegy for my uncle. (I know I've posted it before - sorry!)

6
                    i.m. James Ravlin, 1912-1997

 
Light quick mosquitoes speed flitter
and slide at latter-day angle easily
mounting every corniced ingle and
fuming, spuming, better, better and better.

 
Mosquitoes there were in Saskatchewan,
where you were born, between
Granddad's grain
elevators, Grandma's steel-eyed span.

 
Those clever, clever lips hovered
in camel smoke
like a Cheshire hookah, smiled.
And tumbled out an accent stranger

 
and stranger.  What flute
troubled earth to bear him?
The bare tongue-footed ague of him?
The sweet-eyed flourish, the high note

 
of his Viennese liner?  Where now,
sailor man, handsome PT-boat boy-o?
He sleeps in his long canoe.  He is
scattered... a late Minnesota snow.

 
Unmoored from the height of land,
drifting from Lawrentian divide,
blueberry, pine, air-filled
cliff, the taste of iron.

 
The cherry trees and the dogwood
bloom now in this sinner-town.
Pale green sprays tender
over the graveyard.

 
Soon come the clever mosquitoes,
the new swarms.  I inch along.
A snail, with prairie on my tongue.
Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose.

5.29 intersects with another pattern of dates, around Epiphany (Jan 6th). Several sequences from the opening of Stubborn Grew initiate this complex. The "narrative" element of Stubborn Grew actually opens with an elegy for James Ravlin, "Henry's" maternal uncle, father of Juliet Ravlin:

6

                 
                  i.m. James Ravlin, 1912-1997

 
Light quick mosquitos speed flitter
and slide at latter-day angle easily
mounting every corniced ingle and
fuming, spuming, better, better and better.

 
Mosquitoes there were in Saskatchewan,
where you were born, between
Granddad's grain
elevators, Grandma's steel-eyed span.

 
Those clever, clever lips hovered
in camel smoke
like a Cheshire hookah, smiled.
And tumbled out an accent stranger

 
and stranger. What flute
troubled earth to bear him?
The bare tongue-footed ague of him?
The sweet-eyed flourish, the high note

 
of his Viennese liner?  Where now,
sailor-man, handsome PT-boat boy-o?
He sleeps in his long canoe.  He is
scattered... a late Minnesota snow.

 
Unmoored from the height of land,
drifting from Lawrentian divide,
blueberry, pine, air-filled
cliff, the taste of iron.

 
The cherry trees and the dogwood
bloom now in this sinner-town.
Pale green sprays tender
over the graveyard.

 
Soon come the clever mosquitoes,
the new swarms.  I inch along.
A snail, with prairie on my tongue.
Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose.

Proceeding directly after this poem comes the first invocation of Juliet Ravlin, "Henry's" cousin, daughter of James Ravlin, & the presiding spirit of the orphic "ghost dance" at the center of Forth of July. Juliet committed suicide off the Golden Gate bridge at the age of 19, on her father's birthday.

James Ravlin's father, John Ravlin, engineer builder of bridges & grain elevators, was born on Jan. 7th (1889, I believe). On Jan. 7th, John Berryman leaped from a bridge into the Mississippi River, down the block from & within sight of John Ravlin's home on River Road. "Henry" has been recounting these strange birthday stories ever since. From the 2nd chapter of Stubborn Grew, titled "Ancient Light":

Bruegel.  Adoration of the Kings.  1564.
In the National Gallery in the heart of London
in the hands of black Balthasar in a green
conch on a gold nef.  Is that a monkey there?

 
And the scrawny peasants and the bourgeois tubs
staring at all that gold and frankincense, miraculous!
O clever, clever, clever calculation - and finesse, too!
The has-been, burnt-out Wise Men ignore the rubes

 
meanwhile - have eyes only for the grinning pug
hidden in swaths of shrinking violet or
marigold blue (I can't remember)... for He
shall Rule the Nations - snug as a bug in a rug.

                     
                          *

 
And Henry... what about Henry?  Is he ever
coming around again?  I wonder.
Around Epiphany, his mind began to wander,
they said.  Still have a Q in his quiver?

 
On Twelfth Night he remembered his grandfather's
birthday.  Granddad, Builder of Grain Elevator,
pere apparent of his mother - of the
grainstock of generations, ruler.

 
Hardy pioneer, flower grower.
Opera lover.
Mother's middle name - Elvira.
Clay vine of Ravlin violin - e vero.

 
The higher you go the more grain implodes.
Spontaneous combustion fertilizer
mounts to flood tide and none the wiser,
the straight line of inheritance erodes

 
and out of stumped Henry begins to drift
an example of poor penmanship.  Bark
of a splintered retriever out of work
and out of time in London's night shift.

 
So many neighborhoods of rotisserie syllables!
Nobody needs your babytalk victories, your
bosky driftwood, boy.  Work another hour -
or metro enthused back homeless to Minneapolis!