evening of the year

TIRED HAND

November is the evening of the year.

Peasants in Bruegel scenes,

old Hobo has-beens

cluster by each barnyard bonfire.

Smells of farm & mill & stream,

the salt of drying fish.

Legends of Gilgamesh,

Leviathan.  Earth’s drowsy dream

wherein these van der Weyden faces

peer, like wildflowers

(like elemental creatures).

Matrix of sky & sea places,

of perishable limestone prints

from whence a soul emerges

smiling... Demiurge’s

horsehair, flickering (Francesca’s hints).

Medieval bread & wine of things.

Cascade of bridges over

other bridges – river

washing under massive rings.

The solidarity of timebound

beasts, breathing together

under whip, rein, tether.

Muddy, between Arch & Mound

looms... pregnant with Spiritu.

What Piero knew,

Bruegel & Jasper too –

shade-palm, surrounding you

                    *

& me – stretching toward Pacific blue.

I layer watercolors so,

over crepuscular canoe

hid in Italian garage (one almond clue).

The limestone waterfalls in Rimini

like tears across a scallop-

sign.  The curtains drop,

the veil gives way... a human unity

of suffering is all our play.

Da Vinci, with tired hand

limns one command –

love one another, every day.

For we are one.  A multitude,

personified.  Benevolent

Ancient of Days bent

each into the mirror’s flood,

together – riverflow of heart-

veins from the earth

welling to fiery hearth –

lenticular sunset, plangent cloud-art.

So spinning from primordial rose

the golden maize of Chartres

guides you to its Artist...

Daedalus, not Minotaur; Grace

Ravlin, not some puppet-master

in the Kremlin.  Shadow

of Mona Lisa grin... you

rise before the fall (Easter).

11.10.17

it hovers outside

FATAL SALIENCE

Hobo mumbles along the riverbank

as October air grows cool

& clear.  The leaves, old fool,

the leavings... swift canoes, that sank

like royal palms into an azure sky,

into a fiery wheel

of oven-clay.  A seal

baked into bright red wax... on our way

to London, Guildenstern.  Or to

Verona, Ferrara...

mirrors of Ravenna

(fatal salience, Ursiana’s woe).

Surrounded by wolf-raven, Juliet.

You dance the sacrifice

like unto death (Paris

1913) – knifed in the clammy sweat

of granite vault, the stony silence

of the lie – artillery

deployed (ply over ply).

& does she live or die?  Hence,

Hobo-Romeo – you’ll roam

like Orpheus in hell,

sleepwalk a frozen spell

(so buried man goes skipping home,

strange hierophant).  Ineffable

grey granary of wisdom,

Ursiana’s 8-pt. dome

gathered to a grain of sable

                  *

sand... one little grain of sand.

As in articulate horsehair-

dream of Leonardo, air

figures crystal acorn – understand,

it hovers outside everything, & so

transmits clear folds

of Salvator’s bold

Nazir-songe.  Swing low,

sweet chariot... ray forth your fire

out of an almond eye

blazing   you shall not die

with gallant measure to inspire

the rooster of the Earth to crow

like Voronezh raven, or

like Vitruvian Man

from center of the Earth grow

feathers   coppery feathers   Ferrarese

Veronese  hazy

morris-dancing   mazy

corn mandala   limping   A-Z

sweet librarian   Natasha

or Nadezhda   sister-doves

swelling   dawn alcoves

of spring   primordial   selah

in the mandorla   of the casket-

womb   you must be borne

aloft   grey   Valentine

your sepulchre   1132   (kismet)

10.23.17

my Bruegel panorama

AUTUMN AIR

The little gold galleys of the butternut

navigate through autumn air.

My Bruegel panorama

of proverbial bird-wit is fading out.

The motherland calls Hobo.  Every leaf

a chaste canoe... Rus, Rus.

The enemy be us,

pugnacious Pogo cries – war is grief

between brothers.  Apollinaire

drifts in gray whiffs

of wistfulness... his skiff’s

more tangled up with Minotaur

than was before, sighs Psyche-

Ariadne.  That graybeard

on Ravenna guard

surrounded by gray paint-debris –

he might be me.  Ocean is gray

as wing of turtledove today.

Way in the middle of the air

Ezekiel saw them wheels a’glory

Louis sang (on path LP

somewhere in Tuscany).

Leonardo da Vinci

drew Vitruvian Man like a Kali

on a microcosmic wheel of fire –

he was such a star!

& in the Last Supper

Judas & Jesus in sfumato-mirror

                  *

reach together across girlish Jean –

or do they reach for her?

Shocked faces of the men –

is it betrayal, or espousal sign?

Some knot of gravitational waves

whorls into matrix-vortex.

Beloved spindrift Rex

emergent from that sea of graves –

a eucharist or mystical body

encircled by a palm

inscrutable as that helm

of Jonah, breaching the cloudy

surf of Ocean River – O font

of soul-transfigurement!

So rooted in the fundament

we rise as citizens of Turtle-Tent –

when the Eternal comes, & we

are summoned to a wedding-

feast.  Melodious syrinx

of Orpheus-Nazir... blithe epi-

thalamium from sparkle-profundum.

Wrath of Kali-Coatlicue-

Moloch subsides away

& Leonardo frames his simulacrum

of one vernal smile... Mona Lisa

bubbly as Virgin

on the Rocks.  Come in,

she says; God’s blessing in persona.

10.19.17

stars of Jubilee

DARK PILLARS

The cottonwood leaves are golden,

beaten thin by frigid air.

Graphene hearts, everywhere

now (mid-October).  What is Man?

that Thou take heed of him?

Flesh tends to disappear.

To fade – but not before

these bright medallions of seraphim

sail swiftly from the autumn tree.

Invisible beehives

of honey-gold enclaves

cluster like galaxies, ring you & me –

it is that via media,

that midway midéwé

colloquy – humbly

clustering from 6-way

crystalline antipodes – path P

of Providence, the clear

circumference (here

now & everywhere) of high Sophie.

Nerve-center of the flesh-toned bridge

uniting matière, esprit;

Venn diagram, complete

ellipse of air, water & light – edge-

mingled man-&-woman bloom,

transmuting rage & fright

with wisdom’s calm delight

to reconcilement’s sun-filled room

                  *

from midnight Minneapolis

(by way of Providence)

into your honey-dense

dawn star-forest – Cosmopolis.

Stars in the deep blue flag echo

that secret Jubilee,

when all the nations will be

reconfigured from the roots of woe

into one level plain of soul

equality & liberty.

So Salvator Mundi

implies, through Leonardo’s ball

of crystal – meek & sheepish mule

of a Franciscan king

correcting everything

with one orthogonal gesture, one smile.

Jesus is for sale at Christie’s, now;

the Earth is up for grabs

as well, it seems; crabs

gather in their gaudy, gilded scow

to celebrate the arrogance of rule;

our men of violence

fill up sad prisons,

cemeteries.  Is Man a Fool?

No... just blind.  Tall cottonwoods

stand, lean together –

dark pillars, that weather

storms of gold in planetary neighborhoods.

10.16.17

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : painting (label : subject/painting).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


There are many others...

There's something so important in Eliot's notion of "dissociation of sensibility". I'm not exactly sure what it is, yet. The way someone places a historical marker for where it supposedly begins, is basic cultural myth-making, like the Serbian concept of the Field of the Raven.

Eliot puts it after the "metaphysicals" - and links it to a loss of the medieval synthesis. But the medieval synthesis was mythological. He should read Cusanus : a renascent-metaphysic to beat the nostalgia of metaphysical poetry (Donne's elegy for that synthesis basically scripted Eliot's notion). Cusanus "enfolded" the dualities of what was to come (reality/imagination, faith/scepticism, superstition/science, philosophy/praxis) in a creative intellectual synthesis which bears comparison to Leonardo da Vinci's in the realm of art/science.

I would put the "dissociation" much later. Keats & Milton represent still (& marvelously) synthetic unities of reason/imagination. Their poetry combines feeling and argument, image & discourse.

With the progress of science, Enlightenment, humanism, journalism, telecommunications. . . poetry was forced into a corner marked by indirection. American poetry offers the same picture in colonial miniature : a progress of deflection (Keats to imagism = Whitman to imagism).

The history of poetry in English since 1800 (after the Romantic-Sentimental revolt against Augustan-Enlightenment uber-rationalism) is a progress of deflection - away from the union of logic & song (thus we have Black Dog Songs, as I described them the other day).

Part of my fascination with Language Poetry in the early 90s (when I became aware of it) was my sense that it represented a literary-historical terminus of this process.

Fluid dynamics. Courtesy of NY Times science section today, interesting article.

Leonardo da Vinci started it. he seems to be lurking everywhere these days, or is it just me. reading Leo Steinberg's wonderful book, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper. I think he missed one thing, though (while perceptively noting a million others). Leonardo not only caught duration & "sfumato" of multiple meanings in a gesture (in his "Last Supper") - but he also "preserved the unities", saved the appearances. It is an instant of time captured, rather than only a blurred spread of implications. It's both. That is, Christ's right hand, recoiling from the dish : it's not simply both or either recoiling from the dish and reaching for the eucharistic cup. It's rendered at the exact moment after his saying "one of you will betray me - he whose hand is in the dish with mine" - from which both Christ & Judas recoil - and also after he has just said "take, eat, this is my body, this is my blood of the new covenant", etc. His hand is still recoiling from the first statement; his left hand is moving toward the bread; his right hand will soon follow toward the wine. The disciples are responding, each in his own fashion, to both statements. The simultaneiity of this moment is memorialized, in a sense, as Steinberg notes, in 1 Cor. 11:23 : "the Lord Jesus the same night he was betrayed took bread and said, 'Take, eat : this is my body'" - which perhaps was Leonardo's pivotal reference.

But look at Peter, Judas & John. Some mysteries there that Steinberg doesn't deal with, & I'm not going to talk about now anyway. Much more to this painting than "meets the eye" of cursory attention.

Fluid dynamics. There's a lot of water in Minnesota : 10,000 lakes, Lake Superior, Mississippi. I'm doing 2nd chapter of my novel, tentatively titled On River Road (that will probably change).

Nada on subjective formalism vs. mathematical. She's right to counterbalance the model-making head trips with a more centered "mimesis" (the "canons" of Leonardo & predecessors - squaring the circle on the human microcosm - were centered on genitals or navel). But math is everywhere. Nada herself did some division (Nada divided by Ron = Ada with remain d'Or). Gaze into your navel you'll see a very physical umbilical cord back to nautilus spiral seashell.

I guess I'm on the wheel of carpitude this morning myself.

Reading Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column. about architecture.

He writes that mimesis to the Greeks didn't mean "imitation" as in reflection in a mirror. More like construction on the pattern or in the manner of nature. Aristotle said art (in the widest sense) & nature operate toward goals in the same manner. Poiesis meant "making" in general : architecture, ship-building, poetry.

Maybe the estrangement of poets has something to do with the fact that they are undertaking a constructive project, a fabulative building. It's not rhetorical in essence (designed to sway others, influence others) : it's model-building. In order to stand it has to have an integrity or autonomy or center of gravity, a wholeness. Makes me think of the old (medieval) term for the guilds or craft skills : the skills of the carpenter, etc. were a particular "mystery".

This is odd because language is so outward-oriented, so oriented toward rhetoric & active purpose, toward moving to action. Poetic speech is aimed more at a contemplative telos, like music : music contains all kinds of emotive triggers, but its end is to be a pleasing/moving whole - an end in itself.

Dangerous to the polis because language is so powerful - creating an alternate world-view or whole - the way Shakespeare's "Globe" (the sum of his plays) stood there in sort of ambiguous relation to the actual royals & Macchiavellis he was entertaining.

More from Rykwert : "canon" comes from rule, measure. Leonardo da Vinci provided a kind of quintessence of "canon" in his drawing of a man arms outstretched squaring the circle. It wasn't a new idea at all, but his drawing brought it to a new precision & finesse. The canon of design based on the proportions of the human body as microcosm.

What did Emily Dickinson say about "my purpose[?] is circumference"? wish I could remember the exact wording.

Physiognomy. The globe of "Shakespeare's Head" (building in Providence) making a circuit of cosmos. Epigraph to chapter 2 of Stubborn Grew (from Tempest): "I think he will take this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple"

My long poems an endless ball of insufficiency-twine. A recent section from Time Flowers, the sequel to the sequels that is supposed to tie together all the threads (ha ha):


12

La notte di Santa Andre trovai al fine della quadratura del cerchio e in fine del luce e della notte e della carta dove scrivero fui concluso, al fine dell'ora. - Leonardo da Vinci

At the end of the light, and of the night,
and of the paper on which I was writing...
his hand scribbling like a ball tumbling
left, and downhill, reiterating its broken

symmetry, surveying what unfinished
circumference on the diameter
of a vanishing point (spidery
spiral, infinite clue). Shshsh...

sound of raven-feather footwork (Genius
At Play). Outside, dogwood flowerets
disintegrate into rainy night. Tacit
geometry (J to BD) undeciphered

into dust-motes. His last gathering scattered
everywhere. Only the whorling chalice hesitates.

* *
*

Unbeknownst, Love fortifies and shields
against the complicated tyrannies,
their mazed evasions, mockeries.
And from a spiral fiddlehead builds

springs becoming mammoth summer, streams
vast Mississippis out of baby rivulets
toward delta-home of serpentine returns:
O lightning worm-word, regal David's dream

and cry! There be angelic balances
at work in this, acumen beyond our ken -
plainness grows beautiful (La Gioconda's
unsymmetric smile's intelligence).