I've decided to bring HG Poetics to a close today. 4/7 is a good number for me.

Thanks to one & all, for visiting, reading, writing.

Adios & bon voyage.

9

 
The quartzite ridge you are now standing on
is about 23 miles long, 800 feet wide, and rises
some 100 to 300 feet above the nearby
agricultural fields.
             The hard, red-to-pink Sioux
quartzite exposed here is one of the oldest
bedrock formations in Minnesota and was deposited
originally as red sand
   all the glyphs at the Jeffers
site were produced by pecking with a pointed rock
held in the fist and used as a punch
struck with a hammerstone
    carvings that resemble
bird tracks can be found
     turtles, geometric designs,
bison figures, stylized thunderbirds,
and birds in flight
             a long-legged animal glyph
which could represent a horse
   Dragonfly and linked circles.
The dragonfly is a common Dakota motif,
and the linked circles were often
used... to depict the passage of time.

This quote from Mark Rothko has stuck with me...

I paint very large pictures.
 I realize that historically the function of painting
  large pictures is painting something
        grandiose and pompous.
 The reason I paint them, however - I think it applies
      to other painters I know – is precisely
because I want to be very intimate and human.
 To paint a small picture
  is to place yourself outside your experience,
to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or
        with a reducing glass...
  However you paint the larger picture,
    you are in it.
    It isn't something you command.

- thinking of previous post, remembered this from the last poem in Way Stations, "My Byzantium" (1996):

7

Not the flower, but the whistling stem,
the stump still sprouting
desire from pain, pain from desire –
a homeless voice, roadside day-
lily in rearview mirrors,
unstemmed longing, infinite,
to the barren node of the
horizon.
Not for itself,
but in response, a choral thorn-
crown for harvest of black-
eyed Susans tempered
by drought – the keening
proud repentance
of Appalachian eyes.

From the fissure, a breath
of warm air – the frozen flower (touched
by a human hum) blooms.

In cliffside cave or hermitage,
a prehistorian, unfrozen now, draws
out Nativity from spring charcoal:
under the modal drone of mountain
banjo, streambed clay (glance
of a goldfinch) rose infant lips
are moving (do, re, mi. . .)

another little bit from "My Byzantium", written late 90s.

3

 
The crowd was moving beyond the guardrail
and surging up and down in gleaming escalators
between the two unmatched exhibits

 
I was in the crowd and with the crowd
memories between the tracks of the trekking pilgrimage
statuesque in lived postures of waiting and looking.

 
At the eastern pole of the great museum lay
Mondrian.  There was a tree in a Dutch backyard;
branchlets billowed a crisscross scandal until

 
with the lantern of his lifelong devotion
a surprise habit was to kiss Mrs. Ernst unlike
a monk, erring, earnest, in the back of a NY cab;

 
while at the western pole was to be beheld
the family album of Alfred Stieglitz –
not Venus not Diana emerging black and white

 
beside the dock in skinwet bathing suit,
or the two dignified old dames a-walk
down a country lane away from the horizon.

 
Choose:  your home movie extracted lovingly
undamaged from the real?  Or the concrete circumflex
of a node of apposite contraries?

 
What are we looking for in glasses?
"there is always something deeper, a little deeper,
in the waste places, along the roadsides"

 
It was a crystallization
of hope longed for, one
something

 
one, what was the number
of the archway
upheld

 
crumbling
unspoken
yet

 
flit, still
as, as
if re

 
me
mbe
red

which mayhap brings me back to Byzantium & "walking through the pictures". This is from "My Byzantium" (you may have seen it before. . .):

 
7

 
On Valentine's Day on my lunch break
I walked down the hill to the School of Design
to see the Crucifixion with Two Thieves
by the Master of the Providence Crucifixion (Dutch, circa
       1450).

 
After 500 years the colors still bright as a dream.
Jerusalem in the background, strange towers of mauve, beige,
violet, the high walls flecked with scrawny trees
(no goldfinch near), the line of horsemen
in blue Martian armor (or Flemish 1400's) appearing
out of a crevice in the pale
green, springlike fields
    
                          and surrounding the crosses,
crowding the stage, the gray horses, their necks
like tensile steel with unknowing beast grins,
the fop soldiers and gawking onlookers, the boy
(or dwarf?) reining in the horses for the lords
staring in gratified excitement
at the three hung men, a swordsman
(realistic touch) ready to hack at the calves
of the thief on the left - the three men
of exactly the same build, only
Jesus more deathly pale, calm, as if asleep.

 
In the foreground Mary faints, weeping
(like the women outside the execution arena
in Afghanistan today, NY Times 2.14.96),
her arms hollowing, ready to become
a bronze Pietà; two of the soldiers
peer sidelong out of the picture frame,
but John and the Magdalen look you in the eye
out of hell, still, out of 1450.

 
Beside the Crucifixion a little gilded wooden niche -
relic, even older (Italian, 1250 or so, hand
of Lippo Memmi) – a blonde in a red cloak,
sky-blue undergarment, holds a little casket
(myrrh-box? urn?) and gazes with almond eyes
from under her hood at me,
the blush on her cheeks still faintly there,
her look still veiled and distant, yet looking, still
    
                            B
       M  I  N  E

 
(A little further down the hill below the museum
you in the yellow t-shirt under a black sweatshirt
circle the gargantuan monolithic pile of the Supreme
Courthouse in a banged-up Falcon only
to look through the corner window
behind the iron bars hoping
to catch a glimpse
of a certain Irish cop
– like a goldfinch
tethered to the law.)

 
Snow is falling today on Providence,
it comes down gradually from cloud to ground;
soon Mardi Gras, then Lent, a drop of ash
on seared forehead; and through the
mirror of a dusky glance I see
one green-eyed almond Magdalen –
a chalice in her hands, she holds
this dying light in pale green fields,
while snow falls slowly over Providence.
 
                         2.14.96

here's another section from My Byzantium (actually this was swiped from a brochure about a state park in southern MN). (poem appeared in Way Stations)

9

 
The quartzite ridge you are now standing on
is about 23 miles long, 800 feet wide, and rises
some 100 to 300 feet above the nearby
agricultural fields.
              
                          The hard, red-to-pink Sioux
quartzite exposed here is one of the oldest
bedrock formations in Minnesota and was deposited
originally as red sand
    
                         all the glyphs at the Jeffers
site were produced by pecking with a pointed rock
held in the fist and used as a punch
struck with a hammerstone
     
                            carvings that resemble
bird tracks can be found
      
                         turtles, geometric designs,
bison figures, stylized thunderbirds,
and birds in flight
              
                        a long-legged animal glyph
which could represent a horse
    
                        Dragonfly and linked circles.
The dragonfly is a common Dakota motif,
and the linked circles were often
used. . . to depict the passage of time.

from My Byzantium, a poem written around 1997.

4

 
Byzantium falls like a sour apple,
and light falls softly on the eyes
of the young girl in Vermeer's
most august gaze – in the blue
turban, turning to look, or
turning away.  One pearl
gleams in her ear.
   
                            On Veteran's Day
the yellow leaves fall from black trunks,
a hollow sound empties the capital,
the train moves slowly, Citizen Cain
is jealous of his rival's powers
of enunciation, he wants to sit up front
on Airforce One and talk to the
Stones, he vows to cast his seed
every which way, the way rich men everywhere
anchor their arks on air, namecalling,
mudslinging – bagmen, bag ladies,
their lot cast on the periphery
of the supermarket, are invisible
until they begin spitting crosshairs,
and the whole city turns,
slowly, pinned
on a gargantuan
oval
screen;
the intentions
of the rabid millenarians
remain unknown –
    
                      Headshot. Cut to flashback.
– targeting, on television,
the brain of a rabbi – Jack
Oswald Ruby, the look
of a trapped rabbit fading
in the hallways of the Hermitage –



 
5

 
Beneath the layers of detached leaves
there is always something older, deeper, more hidden:
under the piles of grounded macintosh turned
brown, a trace of Blackstone's yellow sweeting –
the first American apple, planted
by a shy Anglican hermit
on the slopes of Study Hill (in Cumberland,
near the graveyard of the first American
shopping center).
   
                        The day dies, the year
dies, a conjunction of evening star
with star; a dim light
through the lilac dusk fibrillates
on the sickbay window into
countless tiny paths, meandering
threads – how many
stranded together
to form the small island
of a painted smile?  The waiting
eyes, beckoning, withdrawing, innocent
beneath the blue turban?
    
                           On Veteran's Day
I recognized your insignia,
but underneath lies another
trinity, another constellation
gathers in the looming dark.
Apples mouldered in the shadows
of the traces of the Byes'
abandoned farm; that bird I
looked for, hidden in the shiny
fur of the Hermitage, warbled
a death-song, kind,
perfect; I wanted to curl up
and sleep under the falling snow,
sleep with all the peaceful shapes
in the stillness of Vermeer's studio, under
the frosted glint of a single pearl;
sleep with the whole world falling asleep
in the snowbanks, on the shortest day,
sleep in the grave where John Donne sleeps,
in the oldest graveyard, in the drift of wheat,
numb, senile, a drowsy despot, nestling,
eyes closed with snow-white lime,
with the scent of snow-topped
apples. . .
           
                       
                 Never again
to face those insignia
of the real, the unbooked
war – in the weariness
of imperial dusk, where veterans
share their dying with speechlessness,
between Crusader and Saracen,
crescent and cross mingling one
ruby drop of blood from the chest
of a hermit thrush.

 
But there is always something deeper, a little deeper,
in the waste places, along the roadsides
of abandoned barns and factories,
persisting, faintly; trying
to come back –
  among the bent
roadsigns left behind,
waiting, subsisting, imagining
eyes that penetrate
through the petrified
screens –

A poem from another Valentine's Day (from "My Byzantium", in Way Stations):


7

On Valentine's Day on my lunch break
I walked down the hill to the School of Design
to see the Crucifixion with Two Thieves
by the Master of the Providence Crucifixion (Dutch, circa 1450).

After 500 years the colors still bright as a dream.
Jerusalem in the background, strange towers of mauve, beige,
violet, the high walls flecked with scrawny trees
(no goldfinch near), the line of horsemen
in blue Martian armor (or Flemish 1400's) appearing
out of a crevice in the pale
green, springlike fields
and surrounding the crosses,
crowding the stage, the gray horses, their necks
like tensile steel with unknowing beast grins,
the fop soldiers and gawking onlookers, the boy
(or dwarf?) reining in the horses for the lords
staring in gratified excitement
at the three hung men, a swordsman
(realistic touch) ready to hack at the calves
of the thief on the left - the three men
of exactly the same build, only
Jesus more deathly pale, calm, as if asleep.

In the foreground Mary faints, weeping
(like the women outside the execution arena
in Afghanistan today, NY Times 2.14.96),
her arms hollowing, ready to become
a bronze Pietà; two of the soldiers
peer sidelong out of the picture frame,
but John and the Magdalen look you in the eye
out of hell, still, out of 1450.

Beside the Crucifixion a little gilded wooden niche-
relic, even older (Italian, 1250 or so, hand
of Lippo Memmi) - a blonde in a red cloak,
sky-blue undergarment, holds a little casket
(myrrh-box? urn?) and gazes with almond eyes
from under her hood at me,
the blush on her cheeks still faintly there,
her look still veiled and distant, yet looking, still

B
M I N E

(A little further down the hill below the museum
you in the yellow t-shirt under a black sweatshirt
circle the gargantuan monolithic pile of the Supreme
Courthouse in a banged-up Falcon only
to look through the corner window
behind the iron bars hoping
to catch a glimpse
of a certain Irish cop
- like a goldfinch
tethered to the law.)

Snow is falling today on Providence,
it comes down gradually from cloud to ground;
soon Mardi Gras, then Lent, a drop of ash
on seared forehead; and through the
mirror of a dusky glance I see
one green-eyed almond Magdalen -
a chalice in her hands, she holds
this dying light in pale green fields,
while snow falls slowly over Providence.

2.14.96