in the gold realm

ASCENSION DAY

My friend Chris in New Zealand

emailed (on Ascension Day)

about that homely display

of bare feet, trampolining to cloud

in the Lorenzetti fresco (or

was it Philip Guston?)

under the superscription

of a proscenium arch.  Flower

of early Renaissance mind

echoing (if necessary)

your mirror-quality

of reality.  Who will so bend

the boarhound from the boar,

Raven from Nevermore?

Is this your last cigar?

Plein air puffs from a planet’s core.

Limestone shreds of the labyrinth

at Chartres were sort of a letdown.

Rough work.  All the gold gone.

The mower set out to mow... absinthe

green, moss green clasping the scent.

The emerald pentagram

shadowed in the sheep’s I AM

quickens the dead husks in a fundament

of everlasting life; & when the Eternal comes

it will be as we remembered

in the gold realm of childhood –

when time swells (the drone lingers, hums).

6.14.19

continuing Fontegaia chapter 3...

2

 
Over the panorama of Good Government
a brooding glow of midnight blue - so dark
against that airy chamber's Tuscan glare
(nocturnal cadence under Judgement seat).

 
In a corner of the couch, her head sloped
on her hand, in diaphanous soft silver smock,
sweet Pax, detached from civic rolling stock,
moons into the distance (a painted antelope

 
toward real mountains).  Shielded
by gentle heart, wise temperament
and nothing more.  Feminine bent
posture, leaning there; unfolded

 
field of meadow flowers, arcadian ark;
figure of the will, transfigured in a well
of all things well.  Not sundered from the skirl
of shrill desire, no - lightened by the footwork

 
of a deeper bass.  That ring of nubile girls
dancing in the street, demure, careless...
that Appalachian moonshine, effortless 
play (ukelele-dobro-mandolin)... whirls

 
you (collage of giggling collisions, jig
of visions) shaken to the roots
of every angling pine.  Somehow in cahoots
with an aerial arc-welder in T formation (Zig?

 
Little Brown Jug).  His banner under me
was sealed (toward Paradise); the plow
left off, her feathered steed sails Now (her
Soo Line siren - high horn silvery - Away).

18

 
Out of gray Bruegel-skies, a little snow,
then sunlight.  Old Providence streets
could be 14th century too - meeting 
the mind's eye in a dumb-show

 
dream-vision.  The mind's mirror
and the mirror in the horsehair fresco
mirror each other (squeaky merry-go-
round's warped arrow, errant caballero).

 
An old fumbling sinners' waltz, broken
accordion (my life, my life...).  And
somehow, out of this, expectations
of expiation, civic destiny (Hoboken

 
in Hagia Sophia - pinpoint in a dome
of mordant gilt).  But the dream-key
is the dreamer (Glenn Gould, shy
hobo huddled in igloo-kingdom

 
tinder of snowflakes touching the keys
to Goldberg variants - shimmering
so... so is each tree a rustle
of many trees... tiny hands tickling

 
air, wind).  Lorenzetti
held civic fortitude in his mind's eye
until the commune coalesced - Justitia
a naked femme aloft over complexity

 
of multitudes - a last motif
beyond the turmoil of desire;
the common good entire
our final interest, massive

 
and first.  (Only a tiny hanged man
weighted against the great commune.
Shadow of oneiric dissonance; one
flaw in painful, panoramic span...) 

16

 
Ambrogio ("Honey") Lorenzetti painted
the missing Mappamondo, across the room
from a canopied Maesta (red, white, bloom).
A wheeling disk on the wall, centered

 
on Siena or Jerusalem (we don't know)
surmounted by a bold and burly majordomo
(Guidoriccio) - his horse checkered red-gold,
black (goldfinch caparison).  1352

 
(after the funeral).  City by the Sea,
Castle by a Lake... mute panel-trophies
of the subjugated suburbs; Sienese
big game, hung up in framed humility

 
around a proud procession of possession.
On the far wall, in a niche, kitty-
corner to the Virgin Majesty -
a later friar, Bernardino (franciscan

 
hobo - voluble, acute - Byzantine-
thin-sharp - smirking, barely)
stands barefoot on a mini-Mercator
of his own... modest Napoleon,

 
the self-crowned ruler of himself.
Through a door, the panorama of Good
Government (girlish neighborhood,
primavera ring-dance); then riff-raff

 
of the Palio (thundering hoofsparks
on the Campo bricks) out in the streets
a smoldering explosion of communitas
joyous throngs surging through the parks

 
mincing   jostling   pirhouetting   prancing
Mappamondo, Mappamondo... horsemen
circle round a single steed (your golden-
black caparison)... I'm getting dizzy, going

 
blind.  Still center of yon middle-earth
(Jerusalem) Saena Julia (a sign of J).
A workeman that hath copies by...
might fix my ferris wheel into a wreath.

8

 
Think of it - in the heart of town
in the well of the piazza's madeleine
in the inner chambers of Siena's
nerve center : a fresco-sun.

 
Shines through the Black Death night
(vale, Brunetto).  He was a bookish
city journalist, his panoramas flush
with tags, encomiae, Italo-Latinate

 
cartoon balloons... memos for precepts
to be kept in mind, aides-memoire
for puffy counselors (collected there
within the glow).  Dream-ships -

 
papyrus-barges of the word (parchment
and ink the lifeblood of the civitas);
packets of ben commun, epitomized
in pithy brush-light (air apparent).

               
               *

 
Shines through the Black Death night
an image of measurement (wisdom's reproof).
The mind (unclear, uncertain... pregnant, aloof).
And it is not enough.  The anchorite

 
in solitude, the nurse in the Baghdad ward
reach understanding in extremity
deeper than any rational city
can celebrate (cerebrally).  Hard

 
is the path, and narrow is the way
- or Ramirez, the immigrant
in the mental hospital (with his crayon).
In the Beginning was the Word, Jose.

(... that's "Pax", reclining there, from Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Good Government" fresco in Siena.)

Texts that have made life difficult for me over the years :

The Bible
"Cowboy Bob" series from Hopkins Public Library (that dates me)
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Catch-22
60s NY School anthology (red cover)
Vlad Nabokov books
Most of the paperback novels of the 60s

Days of hectic. Yet must I drone, drone I must.

Reading about Sienese painting, history. Sounds abstruse? Not really. Democracy, civic values, religion, art, Black Death.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescos of Good/Bad Government in Palazzo Pubblico. Probably influence on Bruegel. Exploratory, panoramic improvisation.

Providence I am reading your local papers. Same issues - gov't overburdened with inertia, selfish interests, bureaucracy. Various levels & types of apartheid longstanding ("suburban golf protection racket" as Stubborn puts it). But hopeful civic efforts underway everywhere - creative projects of betterments.

Lorenzetti read Divina Commedia and was one of first - maybe the first pictor of Dante.

*

Walking about today with fleeting quarter-thoughts in between work. Mild, muggy.

Stevens' Adagia - the ones where he holds "poetry" and "poetry of life" in each hand. Maybe no other way to apprehend it??

Poetry is a sense. Not words, really. We have to feel our way into it again, blindly - into the sense of it we had in our youth, man' decades ago.

I mean poetry in its psychological/experiential context. . . what am I saying? When you ponder the vast variety of human capabilities, personality bents, individual experiences - such ground the vast differences in taste, apprehension, appreciation, valuation. & often I think we literary leeches are the most blind - through jaded appetite. We no longer respond as we did, to a new world speaking to us from the page.

But my own argument here excludes the word "we" to some extent (talkin about myself, I guess). Nothing is determined or set in stone in this regard. We may again find ourselves caught up in a new literary charm, a new discovery, a new love.

Poetry is a sense. A sense of reality-as-poetry. A premonition.

I have a literary reputation as odd, eccentric. Also boring, conventional, traditionalist. Actually I am Super-Normal Standard Poet. My literary memory is an echo chamber. I keep alive certain normal ways of speakin'.