National Poetry Month begins with April Fools

SPRINGLIGHT

                                       i.m. Jim Harrison

April by the ancient river.

The old bones of the king

remember everything

that he forgot – his yellowed quiver

like a scrollful of desire, old goat,

old Harry son of Harry,

with his dogs, with his ’44,

a massif in a cave, disconsolate –

world like a bungled maze, a hive

of killer bees, in a hole

in the ground.  Old King Cole

with his pipe & his bowl, still alive

somehow.  A dust-mote labyrinth

horned by his own shade.

I met a straw-blonde maid

of Provençal, spruce terebinth

from Marseille, or Toulouse – name’s

Quitterie – who kissed

me sweetly, once

outside St. Martin-in-the-Fields...

                     *

Turn again, O Man, from thy insect

wickedness... a dust-storm

swarms the bristlecone

pine, high in her cold dry cleft,

still evergreen.  Through yon spiderweb

of desperate cities

one clear flute-breeze

intones a major melody (B-

flat) – frail threads transmogrified

like griffin-chords into

transparent unison – blue

octave through twin pillars (pied,

squared).  It was an iteration

out of alienation, empty

heart of vanity –

whose nothingness nested creation.

                     *

Long ago el Rio del Espiritu Santo

rolled, a mighty glacier-

torrent, out of here –

before your dream-songe Manitou

brought you to tent among these timbers,

People.  April was Earth

before a human birth

lent gentleness & poison (hers,

yours, mine).  I found a moss-green coin

locked in a cedar fork,

swept past the flooded park

into this punted limb.  Begin the Beguine,

spun the vapid strings... the War to End

All Wars is ended.  An old

king crawls from the blistered

bole (emptied orphanman, around

the bend) – shines in the springlight

like a babe newborn.

Roland honks his horn;

Guillaume unwraps his gauze (a Calumet).

4.1.16

Still trying to figure out what I'm doing. Sincerely sorry for all the comings & goings of this blog. I love this medium but I'm in a creative miasma-turmoil-block. Will continue to try to be quiet...

Annoyed with both Jim Harrison & William Logan pieces in NYTBR last weekend. Logan tries to knock Crane off his always-shaky pedestal. Harrison the successful bon-vivant novelist makes fun of academic poets. They are fair game (I've done it myself occasionally), but when he writes "Vallejo... a grander poet than any now living on this bruised earth"... fooey. Excuse me, Jim, but how would you know?? Stick with hunting quail, buddy. Poetry's out of your league.

Reading H.L. Humes, The Underground City. He's better than Pynchon, John (speaking as one who hasn't read Pynchon).

Here's a new chapter from untitled fresco-in-progress.

1

 
Like the famous rose out of the dried-up swimming pool
the thought of you comes to me with the approach
of your birthday.  The planet spins just out of reach
of the sun (path of a dizzy potter's wheel)

 
still warming with evening light the flaking fresco
(framed by gilded oak) in the old Town Hall
where the phantom image of a pax municipal
is captured in a ring of dancing girls... come & go,

 
come & go with me they sing, in their clear soprano
silence of pastel.  And so I would indeed...
out of my fated rounds (Providence, decreed
in faded characters - Dante Street, Hope, Gano...)

 
and across the squared improbable city
harbored in every heart - toward you
(my dancing absence, skipping beat, blue
J).  From shallow deeps and minor bays to blazing C.