beneath Corona Borealis

BLUE CANOE

While boy-o Henry skipped down Arthur St.

in birdsong Mendelssohn

a few miles up the trolley line

J. Buried-Man lingered on Arthur Ave (complete

Dream Song lament, at 57).  In Paris now

they’ll have to reconstruct the nave,

restore each curving architrave.

This knave goes drifting to St. Lou – his blue

canoe, beached crosswise (by Cahokia)

a kind of compass needle

aimed straight up.  Will weedy

Hobo ever stand erect himself?  Selah,

Ezekiel, Isaiah.  At San Vitale in Ravenna

or at Notre Dame, pilgrims

still stamp across the lurking limbs

of Lucifer – ravel a penitential way

by grace of Mary’s Ariadne-avatar.

It was her love for Theseus

(like Maggie Miriam’s for Jesus)

reeled him out, dis-mazèd – free & clear.

Lone Henry looks straight up, to Pole Star.

Ariadne’s Crown.  The toxic night

a donnybrook for his distraught

Columbia – his ark battered by Minotaur,

his Constitution of chaste liberty

suborned (sat on by Putin’s man).

Look, pilgrim, to the heights again –

whence cometh Thunderbird.  Dove… see?

3.29.20

serpent in the clay

SLOW WHEEL

Henry leans on Hobo, stumbling along

the river path.

Sullen serpent of wrath,

her mud-green bronze glistening

mutely as she goes, her banks

tight-lipped, angry with Man,

older than Man.  The sun

barely registers on shady flanks

slipping by, tongue flickering.

The plot thickens.  Clouds

darken where crowds

hearken – listen! – princes, bickering...

& who shall have the succession?

A cast of characters –

kings, clerics, warriors –

mime St. Vitus in scared possession –

sleepwalk their sacrificial totem

for a perennial repetition

of the same (again, again).

& armies marshal around Bethlehem

to protect the kingdom from its violence;

a convenient woman shall

be found, to dance the ritual

in their place (a chosen princess)

& her cacophonous Parisian Rite of Spring

will set the keynote for a war

to end all wars (for

a while).  Meanwhile the black spring

                     *

of Rio Mississippi coils in anger

on the Iron Range, under

the North Star.  Thunder,

Hobo, Henry says.  It’s Woodpecker

come back – alight near Red Wing,

so they say.  What

does it mean, old mutt?

He muttered back : it don’t mean anything

to many, Hen.  She walks beside you

like an iron canoe,

the spiral J of Synagoga –

like that Micòl in Ferrara, like a shadow

of Our Lady.  Spiritu – loving you,

who don’t deserve her –

sacrificed for Minotaur

on every altar, from Cahokia to now.

Then Henry saw a little emerald

almond leaf, shaped

like a boat... wrapped

in a river-whorl, spun, twirled

downstream.  The Delta beckoned,

where dark Mère Lousine

grinned from the deep.  Lean

over some more, Henry, Hobo intoned.

There’s Benjamin Latrobe & Son,

sunk like a foundation

in the Gulf.  An American

sun blinked, dark.  A slow wheel spun.

7.21.19

upon St. Swithin's Day

MONARCH MILK

‘Tis hot & muggy in the octagon

upon St. Swithin’s Day.

& will it rain?  Say.

St. Emperor Henry’s (Holy Roman)

also, once upon a time.  It’s stifling.

An unreal toad usurps

the garden throne, & burps.

His orange tongue is mean, & trifling;

his fire-red refuge-chair is for a child

who hasn’t come home

in 33 years.  Christendom

conquered the Holy Sepulchre... wild

slaughter & rejoicing on this day,
1099.  But will his Ghost

lift from that gloomy host?

Joachim daubs a fingerpaint contrary

blindly, with bare feet (a cave-fresco

for San Francisco).  & Henry

plots his own obscure & minatory

figure : double wheels.  Of milky glow

& river-clay – Cahokia, North Star.

To turn the Great Year

5 29s... & spin from here

some monarch milk (a little almond to restore).

7.15.19

mark how red dust leaps

GATEWAY RING

The trickster-shaman & the prickly prophet

frame a stumbling-block

you can’t dislodge... mock

as you may, puffy lectern-puppet.

It is a fundamental moral world

they dramatize, a place

of breathing flames – their science

is conscience, this life a dream unfurled

on stage (his banner over me was love).

On board a fellowship

from birth, we skip, we slip

& slide toward the deep (sky-alcove,

ocean-sepulchre... Osiris-canoe

full of Isis-candles... grave

of MLK, our architrave).

As if returning to our own soul (true).

In West Branch, Iowa (my grandmother’s

home town) there is a dark

moss-green catafalque

of Isis, adamant earth-mother (who remembers).

& the North Star of the martyrs shines

like a seminal spark

over the Iron Range.  Mark

how red dust leaps into lifelines –

how a merry-go-round of American clay

swings toward the gateway ring

upstream, down.  Shaping

newborn, translated children – maize, hay hey.

7.11.19

only a sketch : Jozef Czapski

JOZEF CZAPSKI

Only a sketch, a drawing, a cartoon.

Scrawny shivering prisoner

reading a book (Siberia).

This upright Pole, from a dead platoon

survived, somehow (so tall, so

innocent).  Budding artist

from Paris, now of Tashkent –

following Proust into gulag, ghetto.

Somehow.  Like mast on frigate.

Colors mime sky...

Poland, we must die.

Yet he shows up (seraph, implicate).

Survives.  Grows old in Paris,

having kept his conscience

into Moscow (blessed

nonsense... bunks his paradise).

Grace is the sign of something human,

intelligence the trace

of civilization, Falcon-Ace

(O hoary Horus of the hunted men).

Isis (in West Branch) is your mother,

Belgium’s deep divide

the humdrum Hoover prelude

to a splenetic Grant Wood war –

Virgo, we know not who we are.

Speak of the grain of wheat,

Persephone.  Complete

your D.C. scan (Henry’s North Star).

3.3.19

from Jozef Czapski, Inhuman Land : Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 (NYRB, 2018)

by the teeth of St. Anthony Falls

SAY HELLO

End of summer sounds.  A surf

of crickets & cicadas

swells into the branches.

Phantom cottonwoods (leaf-

hearts pale yellow, dried-out husks).

Anemic light, grown timid

spooked by swollen shade –

August forecast (autumn dusk).

Henry attends to his North Star,

his Union under onion

dome... tending toward ruin

now.  Anger drives the darkness car.

Sleek starlings yoked in harnesses.

Electronic neon

beckoning Power’s iron

catalogs (bright pigeonhole affinities).

He stands by the teeth of St. Anthony

Falls – a Berryman

apparition, a ghastly John

lingering by fish-scale cutlery

(zombie ice-fishing is reviving

local watering holes,

say Twin Cities

polls).  Barely surviving

in professional cinch, Polaris

remains fixed in place –

kingfisher Falcon-Ace

tweaked by that wench in Paris

                  *

out of all shape, except a heart-

scarred origami –

Guillaume or Alexei

dovetailing it to Jordan-sprite.

So helpless Noah watches his waters

subside.  He turn to Hobo –

Hobo turn to her.  So

child become grain – grain gathers

to child.  On the scandalous retina

of Mary Magdalen,

the Earth rewinds again

as Man – wrath spun to mattina.

I have no rage.  The otherness

of your... your mother-smile.

He lay for a while

on sands of Jordan wilderness,

at peace.  Your American motherland

is an adamant green

Everywhere.  A limestone

welcome-mat (with waves of eye-in-hand).

It was here before we all arrived;

it was not to be won quite yet

by war, but by legitimate

befriending – loving everything that lived. 

& only a bum in San Francisco

or homeless reprobate

treated like jail-bait

knows Charity enough to say hello

& happy lovey-dovey Thanksgiving to you

8.22.18

speech after long silence

DARK MATTER

On Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise”

(bronze doors of Alighieri’s

Baptistery) mute eyes

read open palms as messages –

clouds’ condensation (mist & spray)

solidifies in glints

of angels’ footprints.

Cerements & shrouds (all hands... away).

Sauntering winter by the river

leaves only this ladder

of snow – bronze adder,

subterranean shiver (moon-silver).

Anonymous Zaccheus of Topsfield

fined for making friends

with Indians &

Quakers (150 years ground

on, before the Revolution

bent the tune).  We are

the salt within the Rio

del Espiritu Santo (many thousand

gone).  We are the Lenten corn

in a maze of amnesia

to the horizon (hallelujah).

Old Hole-in-the-Sky – buffalo-shorn

tepee – pyramid cathedral, aye.

Dark matter between Bear

& Lyre; grey mother,

Jonah’s poncho (oaken sigh).

3.12.18

the family woodpecker

STEEP RAVINE

Quiet today along the river.

In the steep ravine, only

the Morse drum-talky

of the family Woodpecker

interrogates the oaks with hollow

query.  Where are you,

worm?  Job’s blue.

Ice-packed for the long, Nile-slow

Egyptian winter, thick with Pharaoh-

dolour, pyramidical –

ridiculous cyclical

suffering, encased in snow.

It’s not his fault, & he will tell you so.

O, if these canyons were

only in a book!  We’re

leaving – desiccated, delicate.  Don’t go.

The poet has her humors – she’s

devoted to them, wholly.

Lear’s wise Fool, she’ll

follow Boaz carrying the heaves

out loud, in sheaves.  The polis, too,

be uncobbled knowledge.  What

vaguely familial knot

of rivals, bickering horseshoe

favors for grubs, is this?

Not Man-Eat-Too-Much

or Minotaur – no, such

rapacity’s reserved for the abyss

                *

of Pole Star Netherworld (Étoile

du Nord).  Little Crow

stood there, y’know –

with the Red Wing clan, in a potted bowl

of leers.  Stood with the scapegoat

as a prophet should – charisma

whirling in the twister-eye

(magenta bronze, the serpent-calumet).

Who sees him sky-hole in this mess?

Light imperturbable

as Mississippi burble

through a transparent lamb-lattice –

the holeness of that holy garment

parti-colored Joseph wore,

shellacquered semaphore

way under limestone sediment

of painful jealousies & wounded hate.

Her singular vocation,

musing on desolation

til scarred earth-pangs abate –

bored by a dream of early days.

Canoe of Camelot,

Lake-Lady’s thunder-knot...

the old bare dance, woodpecker maze

of placid Oak-Gal Day – a writ of spring

(St. Vitus 1913

Paris Corn Maiden)

that joins Creation to Thanksgiving.

3.9.17

he was no Big Fish

SWEET CORDELIA

Like a Showy Ladyslipper in the woods

unseen by all except

chipmunks (scrabbling adept

through silent clerestories of dead

cedars) Hobo strayed, from Ursus

Major to St. Apollinaire;

he was no Big Fish, barely

a minnow Star du Nord (Jesus

his seine-maître, toiling away

upstream).  America

steamed on, formica-

sleek, pregnant with Labor Day

& White-Tailed Rabbit & Polar Bear

looked on, from cell blocks

melting in the superflux.

The Man of Concrete was no longer there

(he’d cried himself to sleep).  Henry

by a berried Berryman

stood by, his Resurrection

Plot cartooned in St. Paul snow (flaky);

apathetic Oblomov, at the gazebo

spied Olga in the distance –

wading through native plants

like sweet Cordelia coming to rescue

jet-bagged Lear.  Earth dangled

from one silver hair,

suspended over the bear-

cave (striped with blood, star-bangled).

9.7.16

"Pinecone", by Marcia McEachron

Minnehaha's moccasin

SPIRIT-WOOD

                             i.m. Edward Lewis Peckham

Step lightly in my mother’s house,

whispered a tiny elf

named ELP – himself

a watercolorist (a yellow lady’s

slipper’s footprint left the forest

on this day).  Cypripedia

reginae – Minnehaha’s

moccasin – graced this wilderness

as well, making a pair for Joy

& Beauty (graces

almost three).  Time paces

seasoned out of winter, so employ

your dancing shoes, fiery Hiawatha –

roll like Polar Bear

around that pinpoint star,

sing like a loon, like your happy

father (Thalia-glad).  Nature

& Manitou join hands;

a Turtledove blends

sea-sounds, all about green Eire;

urn burials, gardens of Sirius

swim synchronizing

rhombs on monarch wings

(a rugged Paradise for ladybugs)...

one dance-call through spirit-wood

or jadestone flute

sows dreams of Camelot

(like waves of wheat around a vineyard).

6.9.16

*Note : Edward Lewis Peckham, Rhode Island artist and naturalist, painted a watercolor of Cypripedium parviflorum - Yellow Lady's Slipper - on this day in 1866, 150 years ago.  See illustration here from the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Vladimir's Mnemosyne

FLINTY SEAL

The little height of land, pasture

behind the slough, Heidi,

in Mendelssohn – where we

hunted fireflies together

as on a giant turtle’s back

in the dark – like sparks

or bees on a gloomride

puppy stars under the black

sky – sidling, sidereal

in sympathy, friendly

affinity, & simply

love (centripetal

North Star).  Vladimir’s Mnemosyne

within the hazel wood

only pure good –

Time the shady tall ash tree

that leaves its paw-print on your brow

today.  Miniature

meteor, or sepulchre

in microcosm, negative snow-

flake, flinty seal of Solomon;

emblematic passion-

flower, heart’s icon,

salt for a matrix-flame... O Queen

of the South, nightingale’s

bridegroom, at peak of

deep star-well – Love’s

rose-nest (crowning pregnant sails).

2.10.16

Big Rabbit & the Can-Canute

TOTEM-GHOST

Winter.  An imperturbable water-serpent

flows smoothly south, under

the presiding MN-arch

(Peace Bridge).  Cloud-blanket (quiet, lambent

silverthought).  Ice-glancing light

of North Star State –

each ray will penetrate

the sixpack hexagons of Snow Rabbit

– that giant Bigfoot totem-ghost

Sophie & Phoebe rolled

to quasi-life (backyard).

Some Hiawatha Teotihuacan (host-

figure, phantom King).  Messiah

is a butterfly.  Love,

Love, and be loved, beloved

Bumblebee – amen, selah.

This glossy lala glossolalia

is like a peacock’s choral

cry, or agate-spiral

Saverin-Canute, out of Iona

(green Columba’s jaybird hymn).

At the spare crossrood

of naked servitude –

Boethius, Maximus, beaten

senseless – there Polaris burns,

& melts into the heart

of summer Ocean.  Start

your laddie-dance, lass – Roy returns.

1.26.16