only an echo of Jerusalem

SPEECH IMPEDIMENT

Uncanny quiet over the face of the earth

when a plague wind blows

like a Sabbath no one chose.

All the crumpled greed, the burnt-up wrath.

The painter paints, the poet bodies forth

rehearsals of embottled ships.

Righteous Ironsides in death-grips,

waves of evil crashing each wake-froth.

We recall the speech impediment of Moses,

his lame stuttering.

The stubborn mule, his bawling;

how the moth anticipates his metamorphoses.

The beard of flame, the copper serpent…

apotropes for lamb

muzzled to kingdom come –

the mute goodness, whose light is spent

in painful denouements of selfless love.

We know these weary nurses

of the commonweal.  Sursum corda

you sweet Cordelias, sent from above.

Amid stark silence of a vacant Mass

my murmurs of a restoration

seem almost abomination.

You must judge what ought to come to pass.

These incoherent old man’s mutterings.

Only an echo of Jerusalem

to come.  Your Jubilee, I AM –

brilliant integrity of all good things.

We hold these truths to be self-evident –

Williams' Carta (so fair,

kind, true).  Coke’s tender care

breathing to Providence (love’s fundament).

4.21.20

on Holy Saturday

RIVER-TOY

On Holy Saturday, the Great Sabbath

when Jesus murmured, It is finished

& in his grave (like Jonah’s fish)

rested… as in an Ocean River bath…

When 12-yr-old Henry grandly admired

his glue-stiff model (Old Ironsides)

alight with joy, & tired pride…

– as just now Sophie dashed across the yard

to him, 50 years later – to display

the paper flower boat (sky-

blue, & Clizia-giallo) she

runs off to let fly, down the Mississippi…

her tender river-toy… her revery, her rest.

& while Henry gyred – wacky

as Coney Island in Waconia –

like Hermann Gödel, in his final nest

of parenthetical limit (righteous exactitude

of unknowing) – across the path

from Sarah’s parents (math

of relativity – some spousal quark beatitude)…

Where the world ends, & begins again;

at Swan Point, where her mother lies

who died the day his father’s eyes

first opened.  Amid the Great Congregation

of synagogue & church (pain-bearing world)

one pearl-eye opens at the prow

of raven-beak Argo.  Mark thou

how contrapuntal matrices of love enfold.

4.11.20

February, face-to-face

VERTIGO-CURL

It was a night of misty melting;

Hobo, the boho, sawed

through his dark glass so

in old St. Paul.  Janus was hinging

everything on sister Sue’s nag,

at the racecourse (Mordish

Hippodrome) – his wish-

ful thinking left him holding the bag.

The sky mottled gray, like a blurred

chessboard of dirty snow.

An alleged RI rainbow

filtered through Amina’s pocket (mirrored

Pocahontas), while a Balkanized

cannibalism consumed

the demos, knocking Sue

Mixam to the maximum (paralyzed).

Irma admired the Emir’s muscle

from her stolen distance.

In that mossy manse

with her ear to the hearth, the hustle

all over the earth seemed a triangle

built by Souperior Deo

for a bonfire canoe

– his own, by Odin’s kayak!  & to bungle

it was Man’s bad gamble.  Sal

Miniato & Silo

Paennim could tell you

as much – ‘twas comet Groundhog’s tail

                        *

after all.  So they went eel-gathering

all over Galilee for that

matter of Bretagne, mate –

the official King, along with his blathering

& corny Maid Minniver, his lovey-

dovey yaw-way L-vessel.

She would sail through hell

for old Ossifer Osiris – hand-in-glovey

with him, all the way!  Ecstatic Itasca

purled in the tiny whorl

of her Vertigo-curl,

like a Topsfield spanner in Alaska!

She was very moving, that sheepish yak

shellacked in the clay.  Like

an emerald in the smallest tyke

of a state, of all states – the Union, Jack!

She dwelt in the heart-hearth of Odd Eddy,

looming through mystic slips

like Evangeline E. Nilegnave (skips

across rocks down Jeannie’s Mississippi);

like a raven over Neva, like Anna

acting the dove in our eye

– is you serious, Rus?  Why

risk ice for Osissyshipiris?  In Louisiana?

Hobo says, I see our sis Lady Liberty

surge like Old Ironsides

through the fog, on this Ides

of July.  Let’s go find her, Henry.

02.02.2020

relativity behavior at the end of May

NEF-TUNE

& what if all the Seekers, Roger’s progeny

– that prophet-salt of the earth –

assembled in an ark (Bertha

the birth-canoe)?  Like an almond eye?

Like tall Sophia-Top, spiraling from sky?

The quintessential star

of relativity behavior

in the Great Congregation, at the end of May

(5.29.1919, to be exact).  When Albert

raised a toast to the memory

of time & space, & we

felt that fire... like Baked Alaska in the desert.

Birthday for Ocean, constellate;

malingering little reprobate

always castigated by Bay State,

always flaming in a pentagram – complete

salt sea-bird tugboat-gal

who lofts Old Ironsides

to cosmic shipyard one Ides

of July (my Galilean madrigal).

It is the nef-tune, from the underside

of the sea, of the mind;

Love’s ecliptic incline,

like one grain of sand.  Wave, light... abide;

to launch us from our shadowy shells

& melancholy corners

into this brilliancy of yours...

all-human cradle where the hearth-fire dwells.

1.29.20

in the entrails of the nation

RIVER-SCOW

So Henry hearkens to the sea-wash

over his meandered house.

From District C to Minneapolis

his terramara whorls, to Washington

& south to Frisco, lap after lap

of wave on wave, sea-green,

serpentine.  A Berryman

for Julian’s Bower (Juliberry nightcap,

mayhap)?  Osiris, in the entrails

of the nation?  Sleep, now

microcosmic river-scow –

everything grows smaller in the whale’s

rib-cavern, everything a miniature,

dioramic Minnesota (at the

end of the last knot, minute-

man).  Cold as a Viking vulture-

sepulture.  These bricks might save

the planet, Henry mumbles

to the museum baubles

in his sleep.  & then her hand will wave

to him, from waves of his dream;

Columbia the sister-dove,

his Tyche-tyke from above...

over the Father-of-Waters with a beam

of smiling light.  & suddenly the vermilion

shades atop Sunset Mountain

& the orange orangutan

threatening our rusty tub of human

communion (Old Ironsides to you)

are dissipated shadows

in a rosy dawn... & Henry’s

crown rests in her ark (shalom, J-rue).

1.6.20

what child is this

HOLIDAY MUSIC

The empty duplex is quiet tonight

though not completely silent.

Drumming in the basement –

Khaled rehearsing our old duet.

From different corners of the same planet

immigrants & refugees

hasten to the Twin Cities

as to gemütlich haven or warm magnet.

& history is like a palimpsest of pelts

trapped in somebody’s woods

before there were neighborhoods

or streetlights – only raw scalps, rotting guilts.

When we were that City on a Hill

of our imagination –

special paragon of Creation,

establishing law-&-order by God’s will

on earth.  But it wasn’t so beautiful.

The Magi rode by camel

across a parochial hell

subject to Herod & his trumpets (terrible);

the angels remained invisible, mostly;

& both the Ark of the Covenant

& ironclad Ship of State

came to resemble that drafty, mangy

manger itself.  Where Mary lay

& her shivering baby sighed

& Joseph almost died

of inhumanity.  Hush little baby, don’t you cry.

12.24.19

Hamlet in the death-canoe

SCARLET WAX

The dreamer, mapping a circling cosmos

of milk & honey, starlight

& sweet fire... like Brightman’s

integral Person – with tables of Moses

in their cedary bark of mutual promise

lending salty substance

to halting hesitance

of reason (while the heart says yes).

The dreamer assembles the disparate realms

into crescendo-tango.

Hamlet in the death-canoe,

precipitous peripeteia – helm’s

Charon-pilot, planting the scarlet wax

of his father’s dread seal

for a doom they must feel

anon (political axe prickling their necks).

The tables of the covenant

written on our hearts –

sine-waves where channel parts,

Osiris-Jonah reassembled (US to haunt).

Old Ironsides, your canny constitution

oxidizes under termite siege.

The man of lawlessness will wage

perverse destruction like a weathervane

cut loose... yet that rust-bound ship

still bends toward Providence –

native Thanksgiving-sense,

red-corn grasshop (at clipper clip).

10.23.19