Rock Candy Neva-Neva trail

LIMESTONE PROFILE

The little white cabbage moth

& the dragonfly, following

Hobo down his bumbling

Rock Candy Neva-Neva path

beside the river.  Past the bridge

nearly finished, almost

restored... some ghost

dance out of Petersburg (knowledge

from chaste vision – redemption

blooming like a morning

glory – everything trembling

at the dawn of time – the Galilean

tacking in the wind across the lake

zigzagging like a monarch

slanting orange-black

over sumac, milkweed – to be forsaken

& his cup to take)...  So the dream of a girl

is the grail of a dream, when

startled Magdalen

beholds him (where fern-worlds unfurl).

Like a fiddlehead figurehead, a nettle

Beatrice, the dream ramifies;

what was there always

unveils, the whole sweet kernel-coracle –

as Hobo finds his bearings in the smile

of a limestone Ursus profile,

in the lofty Milky Whale

of a firefly Jonah (rainbow trail).

9.6.16

across languages & worlds

CEDAR HANDS

O calm August river, weaving

under your ceiling of gray

fluff!  I’d like to say

you are a figure for Edith, rocking,

singing Sophie to sleep, somewhere

above Ethiopian night.

I’d like to formulate

a lamp in a window, out there

on a foggy lump in Narragansett Bay –

Rose Island Light, maybe –

what stands for certainty

in the midst of rocky sea, the sway

of tide.  They’re almost finished now

with the bridge repair.

Her double eyebrows bear

their concrete filigree, & show

twin circles in the river’s glass.

Their delicate embrace

a fractal carapace

for curving lips of one round lass –

a sea-green pebble, calipered

by radiant massive Einstein

armature.  So shine,

my lighthouse pine – like shy brown bird

or Great Blue Heron – one sharp eye

across the moving waters!

Agape holds stars

in loving stillness – rhyming sky

                      *

with earth.  It is an ur-rhyme, personal –

a Neva-petroglyph,

an anchored spider-skiff,

chaste common akme (Eeyore-humble);

like moony pleb with sunny Phoebus,

roaming Apollinaire

with domed Apollinaris,

Love is that hearth-melding force

that fuses Unity & Liberty –

soul freedom is the spark

of arcs.  I found a monarch,

lonely, in the donkey straw you see

down by the iron river (pausing,

perhaps, between White

House & Soldier’s Rest).

We bowed to one another, browsing

sheared grass, cordially.

The song began like this –

a dream made manifest,

Railsplitter... prodigal Boy...

held in grey threads of dog days’

dawnlight.  Soft rainbow

pigeon croon – low

throaty turtledove song-maze –

dream-songe across the meadowlands

of languages & worlds

farfalla-far – she whirls

& jags... floats into cedar hands.

8.12.16

Franklin Ave. Bridge

Geoffrey Hill, Yves Bonnefoy, Elie Wiesel

SMALL EMERALD ELEGY

                      Geoffrey Hill, Yves Bonnefoy, Elie Wiesel

Light at dusk across the grass

salted with white crosses,

poppies... graph of losses

rounding up the Somme.  Mass

for the mass of young men gone.

On Cemetery Ridge

the plowmen made a bridge

of bone, unbreakable – and won

the day.  Coraggio, amigos.

Somnolent River

Time will shiver silver

when the last full measure flows

from infant veins, against the grain

of human servitude –

that dominant X (rude

chi-rho, nailed up in the brain).

In the barranca (by the monarchs’

den) the battered Consul

penetrated to the well

of Golgotha.  His mind sparks

like the last firefly of evening meadows...

a small emerald octagon,

or 4-leaf clover – moon

over Eire, over the raging shadows

of the nations.  Clue vero, Ariadne-

yarn.  A catenary

arc, or smile – an airy

rack of clouds, threading the Neva R.

7.2.16

George Bellows, Rain on the River (RI School of Design Museum of Art)

Gemstone of Paradise

NEVA-LAND

The poem is for lonely you

amidships (I-&-Thou

nailed coign to prow) –

& for that grubby neighbor too

next door (George or Georgina

with the garden hoe).

A solitary lamp-glow

lingers in the old cantina –

in William Blackstone’s study (man

who went to live with...)

– uphill, on the forest path

to Middy Wewe’s blithe fountain.

George Washington spins in his grave

to see how we behave

without a mind to save

us from ourselves.  Thee must be brave,

& true, & kind, & dedicated

to the perfect good –

that global neighborhood

that shines, wid’ green & delicate

kiwi-glow, beneath the rind

of blind & brutal night.

A callow grail-knight

stumbled on it once, near Samarkand –

spry Wolfram rings the tale – &

like an unknown soldier

leapt – O soulman Prospero! –

from here to Skye (in Neva-land).

5.20.16

Once upon a time

Once upon a time there lived a Mississippi riverboat captain, named Mr. Lawrence, who had two daughters, Jessie Ophelia and Cleopatra Desdemona (not kidding)... Jessie Lawrence married my great-grandfather, George P. Gould.

DELTA QUEEN

The hobo-poem stumbles out of Itasca,

a somno-ambulant mutter

just west of Superior

like a Nile-canoe in Minnehaha

or Thesée-en-Argo, lost at sea

in a maze older than time.

A stone-barrow, or lime-

burnt spacetime spruce-vortex (little tree

Apollinaire chased down in Paris

listening to Stravinsky

on the 29th of May).

Distant thunder... blessed senseless

mote.  What acorn happiness

coils beneath necrolithic

Moscow?  What lithe

Pocahontas limns Potomac offices?

Lightning rives gnarled raven limbs.

One glint from gold iris

shakes the paralysis

from icebound Neva aisles – low hymns

drone from limestone fish-caverns;

there is no place on earth

where Psyche’s sighing hearth

cannot ray lamplight (ask Jules Verne,

or Edgar Allan – ask St. Joan).

My Delta Queen glides on

toward perihelion

engulfing sorrow in her zephyr-zone.

4.18.16

On a ceiling in Verona

SPIDER-THREAD

Late winter gloom.  I’m stepping down

an ice-path to the river

like an Incan on his sliver

of Andean terrace (steep, frozen).

Downstream, the dark-eyed Jessie O.

(steamboat captain’s daughter,

great-grandmother)

was just a child, coming up from below

St. Louis... O Jessie Ophelia...

Cleopatra Desdemona...

Solominka, Marina...

frescoed on a ceiling in Verona-

by-Neva, maybe (in a dream).

& I, only mere boy,

half-yearn... imaginary

Longfellow, flaking off the stream...

Your dark water-crossroads, Pawnee-

Hecate.  Whirlpool

of Eurydice.  School

of Dante’s cinder-journey.  Three

ways, all phosphoric (thundering

falls).  Only to find

that light Diana-mind

Justinian burrowed, for his high welding –

only the lightest spider-thread

from Colchis dawn will do.

For Juliet.  You too,

my child, may skip the tightrope-tread.

2.19.16

Drowsy motion of the river R

FRESH CRUST

The immense raincloud stretched like serpent

or shadow of raven-

wing, on an evening horizon

over the Pacific, just past the unspent

abyss of Golden Gate.  Only here

ice scales an ever-brooding

Mississippi – black Earth blood-

stream (like Nile in winter mirror).

My Neva-Neva land folds history

into an origami crane –

an ever-moving terrapin

lapping on a chain (of clay).

A flower clambers from those rings –

a million-pillowed peacock

Rose, whose eyes flock

van der Weyden faces (channelings

of worm-warp smiles).  Lyre-kings

hung like Christmas bulbs

from every thorn; their clubs

thronged in night circles, chorusing;

the Word was crumbling, in a whirlpool

(Ocean River, circulating

echoing Hector ring)...

‘til Joey the Calabrian (my cool

collaborator) sketched an eagle

plummeting – flipped

up a fresh crust, dipped

in wine & snow – lifted his bugle...

1.7.16