spring crucible

ASPHALT PATH

Yesterday your birthday, Papa.

92, mild ghost.  Sun-wheel

set at Swan Point... seal

of a woman’s self-extinction.  Ah,

woeful calendar (Coatlicue).

Strife of father & son.

Friday black sun,

aboriginal sin (hey ey

yo).  Here in Minneapolis

snow, interring April

in one wide hexagonal,

preserves a buried man in ice

(Resurrection Cemetery).

Henry ascends the asphalt

path from heart’s tumult

to frozen Father of his Country.

Washington Ave. Bridge.  Yet

(wobbling, wavering

within your shadowy

ring of flame) – dawn’s pale promise!

Man’s faithless diffidence his own

life sentence, we

depend upon your mercy

to raft us into Libertas again –

mysterious Jonah in the “33”

(Mars’ den) whose hum

breaches delirium,

wind-bred to share (Nazarene glee).

4.13.18

part of a panorama

FLAT RIVER

You want to understand the metaphysical basis

of these innumerable poems-

après-poems.  Sherlock Holmes

might just as well (go home).  Faces

crowd the apparitions – bow

wet black petals

into wreath-portals;

Nile barge (or Venice funeral-scow).

Sometimes the dishwasher breaks down (just now).

Anton Gàg died young.

Paint fumes (bad lung) –

Bohemian lifestyle in New Ulm (& how

his seven kids survived, I dunno).

Painted Dakota braves

advance through dry sheaves

hungry for ground (1862)...

We’re part of a panorama, Melody;

some Mendelssohn concerto

swelling to tomorrow...

Nature renewed by grace (slow psalmody).

The flat river was calm today.

The bridge craned upward

in a mirror, downward.

Man & God in Maggie’s puffer, aye.

Aunt May (out of Glasgow) beset

my father (John Douglas)

with needless trials, alas;

the ship of faith already left the port.

12.2.17

just beyond my window

John Gould (U.S. Navy) with root beer, Minneapolis, ca. 1946

DEEP BREATH

September crickets in the darkness

just beyond my window

harping seasonal sorrow

elegize their summer quickness.

Cassini in her pure remoteness

plunges through the rings

of Saturn.  Airy things

(that fiery opera house in Venice,

flammatory lance of Beatrice)

coalesce toward autumn,

build a nest of flame

for rangy Thunderbird (eagle-Bice).

& is it only Ouroboros?

Boreas, recycling?

The ancient iron swing

Granddad assembled (90 years

ago) still creaks its aching 2-

note plaint (see-saw,

curse-us)... as though

the Iron Age were never through.

Someone must bear it all (above

rusty Titanic murk).

My father squared his cirque

on his last day.  His eye on Love,

one grip in mine, his other hand

traced a clear circle

over that whirl-debacle

with one thin finger... with one bound

                  *

beating the bounds of that vast realm

where Jesus & Black Elk

go roamin’ (with Melchizedek).

& if a 6 turn out to be 9... at the helm

6-wingèd seraphim feather the font

of Holy Wisdom.  Little well

of do-well... purling from hell

of trompe-desire, of chaine-ressentiment;

Alighieri’s checkmated yearning

tree-hum-yuled to heart’s

lightness... O sullen art’s

deep-harrowed aim – O desperate learning!

When men fall into Minotaur’s embrace

& Ariadne’s thread

snaps at the nail-head

one slight Rabbi-hair, O Falcon-Ace

might lift you from the corral waste

into fellowship

of Primavera soul-skip;

where lovely Manto-lips taste

intelligible everlasting bliss –

a porpoise laughs at death

& with one deep breath

huffs cobwebs off God’s gold telos :

that gardener of souls at dawn

lifting a toiling Job-

of-all-work by his nob...

Rachel out-sailing Ahab... Queequeg’s fin.

9.14.17

poem for Father's Day

John Gould rowing in Oxford, ca. 1995

COPPER SEAL

Father’s Day.  Here’s a quiet hallway.

Grandpa’s twilit apartment

on Delaware Street.

Cozy, gemutlichkeit, OK.

Grandma’s old Revolutionary print

over the dining table.

George Washington & nimble

Lafayette – their filial détente

confirmed in pizzicato minuet.

Grandpa’s brass cannon

shell shines dans le coin –

Et nous voilà, sieur Lafayette.

So the crimson seal in melting wax

like Hamlet’s father’s ring

purls out, expanding

into undiscovered final acts –

Pacific reconciliations, palm-

print circumferences...

the moss-green salience

of Liberty’s majestic calm.

The Son of Man looks to his father

as to an anchorage –

firm stay against dry rage,

banal amnesia, unruly weather;

history would lose its thread

& be estranged, without

a commonality of thought,

that human constancy – dead

                *

center of the curly sprout

who springs up (fed

by seedy Shakespeare’s Head)

to brazen River of the Holy Spirit

(Father of Waters).  Before all times

the soul looks out in joy

upon a wide Creation Day

like mossy meadowlands – rhymes

with Honest Abraham in his

absinthe mandorla – bright

JFK & MLK – light-foot

Truth come marching in (this

copper seal of Peaceable Kingdom).

Light of fathers everywhere,

the milky dawn-lair

of the race, breathing soul freedom –

like whisper of Lipsanothek

(cross-braced in elephant

ivory from distant

Brescia) – a life made perfect

sustenance.  So a little acorn

from William’s Catholic Oak

(in windy Providence) spoke

to me once, as father to son;

as a green man in emerald coat

smiles from a heart of sunny

gold, so dauntless – funny!

Lifting my heart to his coracle-boat.

6.18.17

John Gould, U.S. Navy, 1945

meet & join

personal compass of Roger Williams

FAMILIAR ALMOND

My snarling yarn snowballs thistle-

clumps of confusion into

the midmost of the Slough.

Incomprehensible green missile,

towing kisses from that acrid swamp

in Mendelssohn (whence

we dragged a canoe by bare

feat, Heidi, home – only to dump

it in the permafrost garage).

There are many jinxed

men buried in there, minx.

Path P was a chi-rho camouflage –

X murks the spit (twin cousins

rustling for windy blessings).

Oaky, salty Invernessings

hone your eye into a baker’s dozen –

thirstings between gold floor-leavened

loafers & a 14

April funeral (foreseen

but not seen-for).  The scene’s unheavened.

Then for heaven’s sakes, let’s have it,

Lucky.  Twelve’s the number

of twin seraphim (Mary

& John) & Jenny’s lost mint (Juliet)

– the mother rising in the leery

graviton – the hamlet

feeling mighty chary yet

(Blackstone on hold, with Roger steering

                     *

spins his compass toward the iron clearing).

West, Virginia, west

to Vermilion... yon felix

nest.  Gone dragnet spearing.

& yet the guyline mumbling

of poetry retrieves

a sense of limpid leaves;

the universal shuttling

of loom with lambent seraphim

conceives an agate diamond-

crystalloid familiar almond –

6 paths of Dakota Slim

remind the mind of Eagle-Heart

(who reigns by thundercloud

of humble Jonah-bird

O sages in the Super Mart)

that everything says meet & join

in lattices of give

& take   Seek ye   & Live,

that honey-dome   of stubborn pain

intones   my cousin Juliet

great-grandmother Jessie

Ophelia   madre de Jenny

listen   a gentleness, O jet

of Mississippi water   sip & see

the ghosts come back to me

in Paradise   a little tree

of Jesse   blue   (a juniper, maybe)

4.12.17

Yeats' Tower Hill (almost)

GHOST-SHIP

The long year closes on snowfall,

finally.  Over the ridge

to the Witch’s Hat, a ledge

over Arthur Ave. (#33 - les

jeux sont faits, John Berryman).

My father’s flinty ashes

by the creek, that washes

through my mother’s thoughts.  A man,

c’est tout.  Her lacquered plate

of autumn gold (Yeats’

Tower Hill, almost)

shines for the poet now, like fate.

A circle, fiery wheel of light...

Apollo’s chariot,

or Noah’s boat... a plot

of Plotinus, from cloudy height

of thunderherd – heart-mirth

of chuckling Apollinaire

(his swaddled head a pear

donated to interstellar 4th

or 14th (Q) Juillet).  The pattern

gold, shot through by fencing

needles, under the glancing

plectrum of wind-beaten mast.  Stern

heights & forthright gunnel-curves

of one gaunt ghost-ship

surging through the deep –

one orange alba-ange flares (swerves).

12.30.15

Thanksgiving at 509

Tomorrow some of the local Gould gang will be gathering at "509", my mother's apt in St. Paul (with the same street number as their old house back in Mendelssohn - 509 Arthur).  It will be the first Thanksgiving in 65 years that she'll be on her own, without my father.  Mary Ravlin Gould, the very talented not-famous painter, potter & general craft master, will be 88 next month.

About 25 yrs ago I wrote a long poem called "Grain Elevator", sort of a take-off on the "dream-vision" (this one featuring Ronald Reagan, Walt Whitman, my grandfather Ravlin - the grain elevator builder - & various infernal images including trains, pyramids and golden nuggets of dust).  Anyway, the poem ends with this rather stylized Norman-Rockwell Americana coda, an old-fashioned Thanksgiving thanksgiving poem dedicated to MRG.

III

Your two clay whistle-birds
Are on the windowsill,
Ready for children's lips to share
Their flute-sounds with the real birds
At the feeder, on the other side of the glass;

You've always been the better maker,
Turning the years and years around
With muscular feet and fingers,
Clay speech rising from the wheel
To last this generation, and to serve
The next Thanksgiving – plates, bowls,
Pitchers waiting to ornament
Some simpler, lasting celebration,
Open house for the upright heirs
Of tender hills and anxious clay.

And where's that modest watercolor,
Lit with the cold and clear Minnesota light,
Of Granddad's granary downtown? Standing
Behind the rusted parallel of the tracks
And a row of poplars, crowded out
By warehouses and condominiums,
Its curving columns burgeoning now
Only with air and memory – and hidden
Wafers of petrified wheat, noon
Sunlight answering a lifetime's work
Just over the treeline and the crooked streets.

On a sultry day in late July
In 1961 – when I was nine – we stopped
In a little pasture beside the road,
Under the shade of clustered oaks,
With a herd of cows nearby,
For a picnic and a rest on our way
To visit Grandma's farm, and cousins
In Iowa City. And after the sandwiches
And sleepy talk, while the grown-ups
Snoozed among rocks and baskets,
I wandered off a little way
And found a squared-off family graveyard,
The gray slate leaning in the uncut grass,
Deep summer whispering from unfamiliar soil.

Maybe it was your voice I heard,
So long ago there in the aching depths;
Your voice, challenging me to find
That earthy crossroads – whistling word –
And lay Grandfather's brooding ghost to rest.

Along the Minnehaha

Poetry enlists the descriptive, inscriptive, epitaphic, encryptionologous powers of writing - which are obviously formidable - in its campaign of resistance to time.  The poet stubbornly proposes a spiritual orthogonal (an upright L) in opposition to the horizontal flow of history, events, distractions, decay, necessity, time, death, chores, etc, etc.

Perhaps I'm delusional, yet by the same token I do have a sense of being one of the most indomitably resistant poets in America.  Everything I do in this realm seems to oppose the practical, the social, the amenable, the common-sensical, the professional approach.  It's been like this for so long I've lost all perspective on it, anyway.  I do what I do, it is what it is, it's become second nature.  People may object to the obsessive-repetitive characteristics.  Perhaps they're right.  I have no way of knowing.  Let the chips crunch where they may.

STEELY PRONG

Heidi, it’s been many a year

since we went a-Maying together

down Arthur St., in Hopkins

(Glastonbury? Mendelssohn) –

but next door, in the autumn rain

a misty hawthorn silvers

bright chartreuse berries

for the birds (windhover, crane,

starling) who may alight someday.

Just down the ancient lane

my father’s granite urn

abides, along the Minnehaha;

ravens stitch the cooling air

above the stream – a shade

those oak-leaf hands once made

over our heads (good chevalier-

Samaritan).  Yon turtledove

coos from a russet square –

fieldstone embrasure, where

vaults rise on sable ribs (alcove

beyond alcove, into the light).

Bring me your thorny ring-

around-the-rose, Heidi;

I’m ready now to dance & sing

athwart the maypole-chariot.

One drop of scarlet raven-

ink, one graven letter’s

steely prong... (one grail-griot).

9.30.15

Hawthorn in the rain

Life's unwritten history

BRUEGEL SCENE

Summer loses weight, becomes

translucent at the end.

Sunlight slants graveward

with a farewell glance, & autumn’s

trumpet-call is barely audible

amid hilarious

alarums in the circuits

of the starlings (swarming, risible).

& so you wonder where you are

on earth.  John Berryman’s

in jasper, John’s in grey;

Man’s in a graveyard green (so far

from here).  Splat in a corner

one cloud-turtle (from

Iona) lifts her drum-

shell from the sea – almost another

comber, very salt & watery.

I’ll join the starling circus,

friends – I’ll whistle us

to Minneapolis, SE of Rimini.

That raven’s in the Bruegel scene.

His glance is like one

wintry oeuil upon

her apron – by the deep tureen,

at dawn, in the spare refectory;

feathered in soft silence

on a wall of remembrance.

What’s up, Dad?  Unwritten history.

9.21.15

September 21

The poem that took the shape of a state

One last memo from Elkhart.... a very old (& now a little revised) "shape poem"

 ARROWHEAD
    
        A
 Maze of lakes in northern Minnesota,
 Crisp air adrift on owl's wings
 Between the wide gray skies
 And fanfare of muted pines;
 Waves lapping, lapping
 Against the riding prow
 Of the motorboat, my dad
 At the tiller, looking
 Out toward shore, quiet,
 His beard grown rough now
 After a weekend in the woods –

 I'm afraid to dive too deep
 Into the scales of the past,
 My callow bones, the large
 Boy head full of springing
 Illusions, upstart to replace
 A sense of imperfection
 With voracious all-devouring
 Enveloping thought – fishline,
 This daily bait of blind birdsong.
 Before you, Iron Range long gone, I
 Will always be that unbound, reedy son.

Hieroglyph for a father

Reporting once again from Elkhart, Indiana, en route to Providence.  Elkhart is green & in the middle of the country, south of some Great Lakes.  Today the sun shone, the trucks plowed, the bugs spattered 'gainst the windshield of the golden Buick.

I wrote this poem about 25 yrs ago, thinking of my dad, and also of the "word of the father", the Biblical Word filtering down the Nile between sand dunes & pyramids.  The Twin Cities are a sort of Egypt in reverse : the Mississippi is the Nile, the great seed companies (Pillsbury, General Mills) & the many grain elevators are like the Pharaoh's storehouses, watched over by prudent Joseph.  My Dad was a very wise & prudent Joseph himself, a sort of self-contained perfectionist & workaholic.  Coming of age in America in the late 60s, I think I (along with my brothers to some extent) found it hard to reconcile our highly motivated, organized, dedicated & driven father, with the sharp & sour odor of violence, chaos & confusion of that time.  The "social malaise" (Nixon, Agnew, the War, the riots, the Weathermen...).  I was part of that prodigal confusion myself.

He worked in a profession (intellectual property litigator) saturated in conflict, rivalry & stress.  But he didn't bring it home or channel it against us.

Anyway, this poem is about my father but it's also an allegory about the Word.  "Out of Egypt have I called my son..." - the son Joseph of the 12 tribes, & also the son of Joseph, the carpenter...

HIEROGLYPH

Papa was always working on the house,
his long shadow bent across the sill
like a letter in an unknown alphabet,
his hoe or hammer making their steady
marks across the vagabond afternoons,
the deep summer water we lived through
holding our breath, our lungs tight
with promises, danger, laughing gas.

And when we grew older, more serious
and dangerous, Papa was always working
late at the office. For all we knew
he was a drone of the dread Pharaoh,
one of the caretakers of the Sphinx,
late into the night composing riddles,
subtle passwords and husky undertones
which opened the secret granary doors.

And it was only later, as we watched
his dry wooden boat slip underground,
that we understood the clean framing
of intention, the straight crossbeams
of its execution, that house of his
a kind of sounding board for praise.
Working across the tightrope of the
roofline was his way of walking on air.

& here's another, even older poem, which gets a little at that difference of the generations, and the feeling we had of our Dad, moving on ahead of us into the pine forest.

MORRIS DANCE

Every morning my father followed
the dusty freeway rings - a welter
of iron circles, a maze of wheels
dodging beneath the vertical
shelter of the concrete law.

And he jousted with the cold
steel cables of the elevators;
he stood before the judges,
spearing a wet dollar each day
in the rockbound pool of possession.

Somewhere between the inventive silence
of the shop, and the hollow hunger
of the labyrinth, he traveled out
with a ball of legal twine, ready
for turbid blades in the gripping dream -

and at the end of December,
the two of us, the rusty brothers,
trailing those roads again
in your rattling clunker,
remembering the dance steps

of the breakdowns, the power,
the glory, for ever and ever.
A mystery man goes on ahead of us,
on through the green light,
into the lake-blue sky -

(and there's a charitable shadow
in the norway spruce tonight, a star
already hidden in the thunderhead;
there's all the peaceful sleep
we never knew, winging over the highway).

The other Henry

Driving home to Providence tomorrow.  The route (Providence-CT-NY-NJ-Mercer, PA-Elkhart, IN-Chicago-Wisconsin-Minneapolis, and flip/reverse) takes about two and a half days.  U.S. 80 etch-a-sketched on my brain, as by a no.2 lead pencil.  I've seen the heartland, from winter to summer - busy old world of pasture, trucks, silos.  Roadsigns.  Burning machines, fleeting memory, archaic billboards.  Sunny green slopes & wide, sly streams.  Beef jerky.  Construction fellas from Tennessee & Missouri, families back home, playing beanbag in the motel parking lot night after night (beer & barbecue).

The little witches' hat of the water tank on Tower Hill (only high point in the metro area).  Conical green cap peeking up in the exiled distance from my mother's balcony (steadfast old Southeast lady, shipped to the old folks' home over in St. Paul).

These past 9-12 months, very rattling for me.  Change in the air.  I retire from ye olde library at Brown, I go back home to help my Dad in the throes of dying, & deviously the life he's made is snarled, inwoven again with the so-called life I made.  This is going home, I guess.  I'm reading The Education of Henry Adams in my off-time.  Watching the early swallows from my mother's strange new balcony, I think : Henry could have been a poet, if he'd listened more carefully.

The Big River, with its screech of pileated woodpecker, & ghost of Berryman, is listening.

I mean Henry Adams, the other Henry.  A sort of translucent mind & heart, plangent & sad.  He never did get it.  It wasn't up to him.  (I mean that other Henry.)

I, me, this Henry, will get back to poetry, though.  I've made a vow on my father's strong handshake (as I quote Ecclesiastes in the obit : "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your strength.")  My father was a mighty man, a righteous man.  My mother has a fine hand too (artist, through & through).

I have this sense that America doesn't quite understand itself or its own poetry yet.  Poetry is a spiritual discipline, a trial by fire.  That lead pencil pressed down by the 2-yr-old - that US 80 with the green-gray "Venus Wins All" down the margins - is an ash-trail of a blue-bright flame (world-shaping metamorph).

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")!