the distinct end of poetry

V-WAKE

The distinct end of poetry is beauty.

& beauty is wholeness, radiance

& harmony, per Stephen Dedalus

– out of Aquinas (Aristotle too, maybe).

Beauty, rounding on itself… dimensional

& resonant.  Unlike the trodden

thoroughfare of explanation,

abstraction (utilitarian, impersonal)

& then Truth stands there, facing you –

smiling, breathing! – the mimesis

resolves at its moral crisis – the

peripeteia of heroine & hero flow through

& it’s all too real, this thunderstorm

in your heart – when Lear

& Cordelia meet again (in fear

& trembling) at the obliteration of all form

all kindly grace, all courtesy & charity

beneath tromping beast-breath

& mincing m’carnal serpent-teeth

– until you hear the tingle of the mercy-

bell (so slight, so bright, so still).  So

I would defend the poets’ cause;

manifest those subtle laws

(human & divine) by which they fulfill

their milky icons, walking through stone

as in an Easter season

at the Great Sabbath Even

when Mary goes to the tomb (afraid, alone)

                         *

& meets the shy gardener (Ever-Living One).

So I would elicit my own

testimony (prodigal son) – &

body forth a pregnant Henry maze, spun

from that seedy Emperor in mid-July

who loved Our American Cousin –

swan-diving into Frisco basin,

branding his heart with fiery Never-Die.

& under the aegis of that orthodox St. Maximus

I would retrace the delicate brushwork

Marsden Hartley (in his Moby Dick

memorial) marked 33 – sea-terminus

or Ocean-birth, Jonah or sepulcher…

black hole or vanishing point,

centering thin, small (paint-

brush) horsehair… your Jerusalem Chamber.

Everything resolving now, in the master play

when Prince Hal meets his father

– O recreant & fickle feather!

Arrogant betrayer!  This your day, boy –

clasp your virulent & blood-soaked crown!

For the rêve-songe in the river-

valley of our May-King quivers

in a V-wake – groans with a birth – your own!

When the Eagle of mute Joachim molts into Dove

& Mammon-prone America restores

Columbia – & when the sun soars

in the oak-bole, & Cordelia mimes… LOVE.

4.17.20

the legend of Guillem d'Orange

CALM EQUILIBRIUM

The frail forsythia across the drive

is leafing now, sweet

milky gold.  Is life complete,

somewhere – some honeysuckle beehive?

The legend of Guillem d’Orange

seeped into the chansons.

Found its way to Stalin’s

cantons – Osip took an interest (étrange

poète – tel joie de vivre!).  Guillem’s

a distant relative, by way

of Negus ancestry –

West Branch an Ethiopia of idioms

& Quaker scattergood.  Small world

of planetary matrices…

– a world Guillem renounces

(adieu, Charlemagne) for cloistered

Provençal sea-cave.  Knight becomes

monk.  & shall Earth rest,

also? – quaint Jubilee bequest

someone foresaw, 3000 years ago?  Sums

multiply… an exponential calculus

bending toward vertigo.  Yet

Osip & Oscar Cullmann know

an elegant solution to the cul-de-sac (us

vs. Rus… general apocalypse).

The restoration in his Name

returns the Other to the Same –

after a darkened Holy Week’s eclipse

                     *

the Wolf shall lie down with the Lamb

& whom Jerusalem encrypts

shall meet Sophie – who skips

from sepulcher to Ghent (near Amsterdam)

to gaze from candid sheepish eyes

into the crippled stadium

(where waves of human tedium

crash against hate-riddled walls)… & rise!

I see that other monk, Franciscan-

Neapolitan Joachim – his spare

horsehair, daubing seraphim

& golden Thunderbird (tall plummet-plan).

Third Aeon of the Holy Ghost,

gyring… with restoration

in her wings.  A gravitation

from the grave – gift become host;

33 years of absolute devotion

(1099-1132)

framed by crane-bone flute

& Marsden’s Melville-crucifixion.

You wonder at my curious forgotten lore.

It isn’t hard to find.

Her golden fleece, refined

by fire, still shines from everywhere;

sheep in witch hazel, murmur-dove,

pearl beyond price… she is

forsythia of everlastingness –

calm equilibrium of Pax (justice & love).

4.8.20

my circus is circumference

AGATE PATH

A camouflaged Eye of Providence

hovers over the pyramid

like an acorn emerald

planted in oak-leaf munificence.

The Geneva Drive is in Ravenna.

Its clock ticks in a circle...

twin circles... minuscule

mosaic tesserae resolve into Divina

Paradiso.  So Jesus-Orpheus the shepherd

pipes Eurydice

free of that ceremony –

Flee, Morning Star, into thy molten Word!

So Raven-Cautantowwit mounts up

like chunk of cave-shade

out of Narragansett glade.

History will halt here (full-stop).

The wheels... the wheels... from Sepulcher

to Joachim’s Eagle...

a 33, at harpoon angle

spins gravitation for a falling star

into reverse, Hartley.  Your 9th-month

manger – energy

transformer – tyranny

to liberty – Caesar to pigweed (amaranth)...

in our eye, blind soothsayer.

Dreamer.  Beware the Ides

of March, jewel!  The tides

wind up your record player

                 *

wrapping American wolf-hides

against endless winter,

before pale blue Easter

cracks the shell’s snowline... abides.

Two boats in Gloucester rock against the pier.

Twin meditations on a feast –

Thanksgiving yeast

to lift this clay into a Gaiasphere.

Light leaning down from high Polaris

filters into Catholic Oak;

Blackstone’s wheel-spoke,

planted in Pawtucket – ferrous

axle, trimmed by Roger Williams –

fortified by Edward Coke

to be King Charlie’s nook

when he eludes Roundheads (skipping exams

for exile’s exile – double-cross).

I’m whorling a rusty-russet

agate path, Juliet –

for you (muttered George Henry Loess).

Out of circuiting clay, no less...

out of the mid-month

warbling of Bluejay (29th

of May, no doubt).  Camelot is

something else.  The Lady in the Lake

of the Isles raises

Excalibur aloft... says

Hiawatha is a sacrifice (oak-thirst to slake).

3.1.19

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

O splendiferous butternut

SALT-CUBE

September butternuts bombard the ground,

soft lime-green globes a-burst

with rich black compost-

muck.  By genealogy of sound

they must descend from Milky Way

on high; from some black hole

of fiery Moloch-El

shifting the gravitational display

plummeting like an otfe-stone

out of St. Peter’s burg

to vertiginous epilogue

(Akhmatova-agate, or Pushkin-

bone).  Sealed with a raven-knife

tattoo, absinthe still-life –

l’Affaire Dove-Sister-Wife,

mired in a faro-game of civil strife.

Her smile’s invisible as air.

Now Phoenix is on fire

& flooded Lone Star Empire

waits for Milly the Kid to appear;

up here in Minneapolis, Frank Gehry’s

fishtail art museum

harbors Hartley’s muse.  Glum

Crane surfacing as white shark – hairy

situation! & out the window, there’s

Berryman’s burnt span –

marooned sad son of Man

abridged to riveted soul-tears.

                   *

Some autumn in King Lear, mayhap

(John’s doggèd copy?)

may Heav’n shed mild mercy-

milk through these blind spokes, old Pap.

It’s waiting for you, Cain, McCain –

open your magnanimity

to gratitude!  See

to the superflux...  She comes again

light-feathered through your heart –

Cordelia, Columbia;

unscrolls the epigraphia

footnote on warped LP (dappled 8-part

harmony) – spectrum of a weedy

Jonah-flag.  Within gray

scales, smoke-signals (hey

ey yo) her hand waves complimentary

colors – black earth, jungle green

& orange flaring yellow-

gold (passage to indigo);

red, white & cinder (ultramarine)

complete the ashen diamond

salt-cube of Manitou

(that Hiawatha 1-3-2) –

whose handspin sets a table ronde

for Pilgrim as for Wampanoag

& etches mene mene tekel

onto Minotaur’s tough Jekyll-

hide (only a promise, Nadia-Mag).

9.7.17

a flower for Bloomsday

CIRQUE MATRIX

Gray Hobo-bird faces a problem :

how to save his own long

featherweight fern song?

How to rewind a strung-out poem?

Effigies & icons flashing by

like ripples in his eye –

Burchfield, El Anatsui...

Hartley, Martin, Klimt... Johnny

Jasper... fond winter raven-

oeuil of Master Bruegel...

Pompey, in the empty well

of Yahweh, was befuddled – No One

There.  The clear plein air of Quaker

meeting house, of Shaker

chair.  The carpenter’s

simplicity of Philadelphian law-

oracles.  We hold these truths...

But Hobo’s murmuring his

Nil Reed Candace house;

his prairie wind blows wild (Ruth’s

trail through mazy corn, tracking

Boaz from Goshen-land).

With poem-in-a-can

in hand (his pemmican) & Red Wing

Thunderbird-Woodpecker perched

atop his hat, he moseys,

slouching, sea to sea;

aboard his polar bear canoe (birch-

                 *

light) he circulates a mystery –

where be this Henry Church

round whom leaf-sundials march?

Planted in Resurrection Cemetery?

Or hidden in a holm oak tree?

The painted whisper gallery

enshades invisibility.

Will he sleepwalk forever, Poetry?

The milkweed monarch fans meekness.

This moth is camouflaged

brown dust.  The sagebrush

rolls through red deserts, the cedars

pine for Juniper (slate-blue).

Time’s broom sweeps clean

but tiny seeds remain.

A microcosmic mustard-yellow

gyroscope (spun in Ravenna

backwater) balances

Galilee on Providence;

the bicycle with one duo-antenna

twirls its silver spokes into

a rose-wheel window.

Where did Harry go,

Hobo?  He’s hidden in Otranto

glass.  He’s riding Pegasus

into a cirque matrix –

cartwheeling carny tricks

as Henry Flower Wilderness.

6.16.17

Rose Island Light

HIGH C

Hobo takes his descending path

sloping to the great river.

What can he give her,

steady Delta Queen, to stanch the wrath?

Past frigid walls of enmity

feathered with graffiti –

a rust-red major C

like an iron magnet... Rimini

or Cleveland?  Venice, maybe –

where the blind king lies,

his crazed hawk’s eyes

closed (petrified) beneath the sea.

The crane dance of the manic poets

circles the salted harbors

of the Gulf.  The Earth bears,

pining, their smoldering caskets

toward one windy maelstrom-vortex –

matrix of Rose Island Light.

Human massif, beaming bright

rotating manna-sun, whose Artifex

is spoked with rays like peacock’s eyes;

radiant Ancient of Days

out of the heart of praise

within a ring of living creatures

breathing fire against the cold

accidia, the starved

& shriveled souls carved

with the scar of Queequeg’s mappemunde

                   *

the raven-star, the midnight sun.

& the Nazir of poets chants

one Galilean entrance –

lacustrine circle, Aquarian –

out of the sea as rapt Columbia,

planetary bird of clay;

cloud-shade of Day

for restoration of Terra Incognita.

Hobo beheld this mighty mandala

like a rose wheel of limestone

light, through human bone

& muscle, limbs & ligament, figura –

tattooed by Piero della Francesca

as a mirror for your glance –

as Miriam in moody trance

harbors the light ray’s umiltà.

Like the Hart of Marsden Hartley

in a rose from the sea,

in a sea-knell’s 33,

out of the sunken chest floats free

the vision of immortality –

Love’s salty clarity

spouts from the clay

enchanted unison, octave’s high C.

So Hobo lay in his muddy riverbed

south of St. Louis.

His clay revolved; his

turtledove hummed overhead.

2.28.17

casket from Samarkand

GREAT RECKONING

Crusaders racing to the Tomb,

an historical pinpoint

in 1099.  Where He went

at 33 (a little room

for some great reckoning).  Daggers

in the eye turn every way –

shark swordfish play

for nightmare realms, & beggars

follow San Francisco up a narrow

fuse (to blessedness).

Stigmata (foolish meekness,

humble mulishness).  A wheelbarrow

carries mild infant Majesty

into his palmy kingdom,

spiky Jerusalem

(sea-rose of sandy history,

Rome’s  crabapple).  The viney mind

demands firm scaffold,

grid to climb, hold

fast – casket from Samarkand,

mercurial chasm, golden

kaleidoscope... meanwhile

one half-moon wafer-smile

of blinding white sail’s sudden

eminence rides on gray wave –

the plummet of an eagle

etches his grave seal,

marking 1132 (full fathom five).

7.15.16

Dartmoor pixie cross

This week's NYorker has a brief review of Marsden Hartley show in Hartford. "the master of Dogtown is having his day". Did Charles Olson notice? Hartley did a lot of painting in Dogtown.

"the middle voice". not elliptical. where on the Virgilian wheel is the impulse? see, simplify, speak. meter-making argument. sound & sense & pressure of experience. he paints a blue mountain.

My kids' mother Francesca born & raised in Lewiston, Hartley's home town.

"By the fragrant Androscoggin,
clogged with noise & smoke. . .
Lewiston High School. . ."

Numerological symbolism in his painting for Hart Crane ("Eight bells"). Eight bells means noon, time he jumped off the ship. 2, 9, 33.

Crane the other side of the coin from Eliot's alloy of traditional/modernist. the flip side.

Hartley & Max Beckmann. Painting in Minneapolis Art Institute ("The Departure").