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
