on your dark retina

SEA-FROTH

The soft touch of watercolor

like a moist afterthought

on your dark retina.

The comeliness of ballet dancer

uprightness of innocent angel

her glance prematurely sad

– unfolding her fan of mustard

gold (butterfly wings on purple balsa)

beneath rough branches of jack pine

& beside the air conditioner,

a sunless window (in its lunar

TV efflorescence).  With her fine

naiad brow, brimming with thought

& the dignity of her wings

like a daughter of Memphis king

or mother… Isis or Hathor (Thoth

merging with dappled river pattern

yet again).  & in upper

right-hand corner a minor

violet cloud, a miniature icon –

Notre Dame (unburnt as yet?) – or

Statue of Liberty?  Unclear,

inchoate… like right now, here

in this charcoal-smoky, somewhere-

possible America – suffering glare

of phosphor-bomb campaigns

& camouflage engines –

blind canvas (some cimetière

                  *

marin) of noon.  & as the sun descends

west of the granite capital

& you sense (as the ineffable

arc of those feathers, wafting, bends

to rose Pacific horizon) the limpid

gloom of freedom’s evening

then she will be gathering

fragment-limbs of her beloved…

Isis, young dark dancer by the Nile.

Shades of live oaks,

holm oaks, holly oaks…

green Acorn Kings of Hollywood… will

stay awhile.  The restoration of the earth

will be a Morris dance –

as (in his happy trance)

the young king will relight the hearth

under the aegis of that Providence

kind Williams’ hand held forth

over the sea-froth

chasm of an Ocean State (whence

every liberty proceeds).  I mean

the heart’s imagination

of dove-divination,

when prancing St. Jeanne rose again

from dusty repetition of revenge

into a coracle of Union –

her canoe of sun-flotation,

Hobo’s freeway cloverleaf (Stonehenge).

2.21.20

snowflakes on Presidents' Day

SPLINTER-WORD

George III was buried yesterday

200 years ago.

The mad King Bluster-Tyro

pressed New England into granite liberty.

Ceremonies of the royal tomb

reverberate across a nation

scarred by assassination.

Abraham, Jack… William, Jim…

framed by wide wings of Martin

(& Bobby too).  They stand

elongate, with palm frond –

archangels in a nave-cavern

of fluted oaks.  Stone tears well

from republican cenotaphs

when that Ant-Leader laughs

who foments red-black wars (from home

to hell).  So long waves coalesce

magnificent Pharaoh & Osiris

in theopolitical impasse

with alien slave throngs – witness

the fissure of Red Sea by their God!

Tyrant & people, king

& kin… a knotty kenning;

Agnes Martin might trace a grid

to simplify ratios of power & myth.

A single snowflake amid crows

of winter, in the beginning was

the splinter-word.  Her spark was in the pith.

2.17.20

a cornucopia of acorn habitats

UNDOING CAESAR

In this misty February pre-dawn dark

a Snow Moon, over silent

cedars, glows phosphorescent

silver.  Sacred thumbprint-mark

of first king (saturnine, defunct).

& I’m whorling his identity

for the FBI (maybe

some type of Memphis pharaoh-punk?)

in case we need to trace him back

to the source (Itasca

tourniquet? some kinda

hieroglyph?).  Small floaty Hobo-shack

in the heart of mudpie heartland.

Little coracle of clay

shaped for Lincoln’s birthday

maybe (Valentine’s Day).  Unmanned?

nay, manned – like a catamaran

by every air across the sun;

part of carnival season,

a gloss on Pentecost.  Mighty One

coming-forth, like hurricane or tornado

from a whisper, cave-

mouth… out of the south-

bound, multitudinous, incarnito

nexus of brownian river-motion…

out of the roaring flood

of driv-down dust, blood –

wind-sown, windblown clay… spun

                      *

into handmade UNION, like an eye-in-hand;

sliced from the Nile-bed,

bled from Osiris-head,

bricked in a pyramid of mason-sand…

our salt earth… squared beneath an almond

lamp like hovercraft

or hydrofoil (fore-&-aft

in quatrefoil) – little fylfot countermand

(counter-clockwise emerald) out of Iona;

like a coracle of Columba

or Camelot for JFK

her Isis-essence emanates from Iowa –

West Branch of western harmony

amassing trusty Athens

& Jerusalem-to-be (Hen’s

covenant of clear spring… see?

– translucent integral of truth).

& that tall rose window

tossed (like buckets of stone

water) to the skies, is massive, Ruth –

a cornucopia of acorn habitats,

a capital of washing

towns – a Kurbsky sting

against dim Ivan coups-d’état;

or Osip vs. Iosif – MLK

withstanding FBI –

Vindman in vindication (sigh) –

humanity undoing Caesar… Hallelujay

2.10.20

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

your barbecue of fibs

WORDY COVENANT

& how could that heart-shaken man

(Jay Berryman-Osiris) dive

from a bridge, the eve

after Epiphany?  Say, Jack Ravlin –

Granddad – 3 blocks from your house?

& on your birthday?

How?  Evil holds sway

as dream molts into parody (inverse

remorse, or nightmare fallacy).

Estrangement reigns

when Minotaur maintains

the lie that makes untruth reality.

Demonic hatred be the coin of death.

The grass stuffed in the mouth

was greed gone south –

coffered Osiris longing for mere breath.

That auctioned ship, Old Ironsides –

the Constitution of a rifled

dream – must she be stifled

by unruly piracy?  The manger hides

her refugees in the hull of your ribs,

old mothership.  Your heart

where 13 adders start

is like Coatlicue – your barbecue of fibs

is just begun.  Your John Paul Jonah

swings his wordy covenant

over his head (adamant

evening, stony crossroad... hallelujah).

12.20.19

one mustard spark

RAINBOW MOUTH

The splendor of dangling catenary arcs

of orange steel & azure

sparkling with slim sure

stride, sprinting beyond the bayside parks.

I saw you, iridescent Golden Gate

on a sunny day in 1974.

Where Juliet had gone before,

plunged into her absence... my jeune Fate.

These tears in the inescapable network

of mutuality, these tears

of things.  What heart bears

at eye of hurricane (one mustard spark).

In the still, small world, along the keel

of a trim equilibrium skims

love’s unconditional hum

of humble surrender.  Like a simple meal.

Like a mother or father who is always there

ahead of time, before

you are aware.  Will soar

with eagles & doves, your Aviator-

Mediator – volant-violet Adonis, lifted up

(beyond the rivalry of red

& blue) into the thunderhead

of Thunderbird (Jonah grail-cup).

Hum now, Evening Star, Columbia...

your rainbow mouth, Osiris-

child.  Over the crisis-

cradle, full of infant cries – la realtà.

10.22.19

season of myths

AUDACIOUS FRIGATE

Yearnful melancholy Hobo ambles

through the cool autumn air

beside his ancient river.

The stately ship is in shambles –

audacious frigate, Ironsides;

the man of lawlessness

fills sails with loopholes,

fraud & force cloaked in bromides.

The mellow colors by the Mississippi

figure a buoyant hearth

where a woman might give birth

amid flame-tongues of domesticity –

like these nests of bold maple leaves

mingled with cadaverous hearts

of cottonwoods (Hart’s

premonition, Berryman’s Osiris sheaves).

& Henry, patiently delving like a wasp

through its oak-apple shell

or a worm through the skull

of a defunct Lear, will suddenly gasp

like an infant breathing her first air –

where oak-leaves chitter

beneath Roundhead October;

a restoration from crypt-keeper’s lair.

Hobo, following the copper shoreline

bends toward St. Louis

& his bark of Jessie, O.

Light churnagogue (twin trees becoming one).

10.16.19

fireball parody

META-BRIDGE

October Indian summer weather;

delicate red hands

of sumac & maple pause

suspended, swing through clear air.

A white paddlewheeler like a ghost

glides upstream out of

Lethe – like a church dove

burbling an emerald paternost,

a moody coracle out of Iona.

Who is the master here,

O mini Man o’Tar?

Whose maze is this, Grandma?

Nile Voodoo Queen seeks her Osiris

at the snaky rainbow mouth; &

Henry Churnagogue steams south

to find his figurehead (Columbia’s

Joanna-genesis, out of impoverished

Franciscan waters).  These two

reflect each other – so

your spring-coiled safety net’s accomplished.

So when that fireball parody of Icarus

– no guidance system – lands

a direct hit on Ireland’s

intricate dear vessel (Ick-R-Us?

Ich bin ein Russki, then?) our meta-bridge

of bridges, our Iris beyond 

all arks, will respond –

braiding a human chain of love & courage.

10.8.19

glare attracts birds

MIGRANT ZONE

      “But,” she added, “a tribute that kills thousands of birds?  Is that really 

                what we want?” – NY Times, 9.11.19

Little Alex was in love with them.

Would run out to the “woody

area” (floored with heavy

twisted vines) & note their thrum

of peregrine wing-calls; run back, report.

He was 20 when the Towers

fell.  Now he’s in the painters’

guild – swings from scaffolds out

in Portland (surfaced a new public school

this summer).  Everyone

knows someone so, dangling on

the perimeter of gravity (lead’s rule).

Edgar Brightman says, each body

is an etching of God’s mind –

that Personage who’s fond

of persons that we are (might be).

It is some Berryman-Osiris dream

of emerald Ireland, or

Mannahatta... out of mire-

bleared violets, one twin-beam

(ineffable, 4 miles up into night).

The glare attracts birds

(like glamorous words

of bright adhesive poem).  Raven, kite...

– bad omens, harnessed by our own

self-heightening memorials.

Yet... all my trials,

Lord.  DOVE LIBERATES LOVE’S MIGRANT ZONE.

9.11.19

New York Times, 9.11.19

slow boat to Atlantis

archaic Mississippian ware (Minneapolis Institute of Art)

ADAMANT ACORN

The steady quiet of the river leads me,

& these monarchs afloat

toward Mexico.  Mote

of black-orange sail, tacking across a sea

of green... like a jasper flag of Jonah

(flickering calm coral

pinned over equatorial

squall).  Sextant from Alexandria,

sunken Heracleion – lamp from Atlantis

beaming through night sea;

matrix of Milky Way,

your Isis-canoe... assembling Osiris

from slow-roiling flatlands (Mississippian).

So Wolfram’s grail-witness

(ineffable justice

planted in lovingkindness) branches on

through Osip’s, Nikolai’s chaste vision –

adamant acorn of creation

(shining emerald of redemption

framed by buoyant casket-stone).

The red muscle pulses into veins.

A wheel turns versus gravity

rowing time to eternity;

the melancholy of Ravenna cranes,

the mortified forsaken innocence

of flighty Juliet

my filmy safety net

hugs tight – lifts up to cedar salience.

8.29.19

throned upon dignity

MY GROUND

The muse of my Ravenna poem

is secret & silent, hidden

in quiet like that Belgian

Isis – adamant black Mom

throned upon dignity in West Branch

shaded by old oaks

& the whisper of spokes

on a windmill (over limitless green avalanche

of cornfields).  She is my implicit

First Mower – my ground

of whispering midwestern sound;

Hobo, curled by his sprung rivulet,

her loving servant & factotum

& my bosom pal;

we three walk out of Hell

by the glow of one sole lux humanum –

an eye-in-hand, like that manifest

benign donation of a palm

opening from the cosmic realm

above Transfiguration of St. Apollinaris

in Classe.  & as we are three-in-one

in the mode of deification

we mirror that diamond Everyone

dwelling in the well of supernal Union

before, within, beyond Creation –

in the heart of the dream-songe

& the rêve-vision, we plunge

toward Restoration like a green acorn

                       *

& rise like ancient Osiris or Lone Ranger

through the climbing limbs

of an emerald Okean Stream

glowing more human (richer, stranger)

& more alive, as we lift toward that

light cross-tree of stars

where gentle Dante stares

& time & space availeth not

& where the marriage of true minds

is blessedness of spiritual grace

as we become one Falcon-

Ace, or Jeanne-eaglet – who finds

her microscopic lamb-lamp in the grass

just as Maggie spied Jesus

composting the flowers

there, in Resurrection Cemetery... Rise,

Sister-Dove!  Walk, Jonah-Lazarus!

& thus the reunion of the universe

is now our interstellar fire-house –

Maggie a tower of almonds (brown eyes

shaken up to smiling Milky Way

between Jerusalem & Athens)

& my dry diagram begins

to melt into a double Tiger-Lily –

like this one (Hobo showed me)

peeking from the shade-weeds

by the Mississippi – beads

of green, black, orange... a flag (you see?).

8.7.19

call him Halfway Hank

FICTIONAL GARAGE

Hobo staggers along the riverbank

halfway between Henry

& Osiris (bury-

man).  Call him Halfway Hank.

Like Bluejay all out of mummer’s tricks

memories of a Myth America

detach from his hat (ha-ha,

caw-caw).  Tall Tale of Two-Sticks

maybe – or The Time We Had a Picnic.

Nostalgia for infinity

invokes our Plenty-

Big-Prairie; mysterieux Henri Pick

was anonymous, along with Alexander P.

These meadowlands are Russian.

Thunder’s Oblomovian this

afternoon (American iz you & me).

So memory would like to dab a fresco

containing a continent.

As when a canoe is bent

around a bough of yew, or spent willow...

in some fictional garage in Ferrara

where recent immigrants

gather for sustenance

like Jonah huddled in a whale’s cantina

& the eye in your hand opens like a tear

& the river streams into the Gulf

where Wolfram & Beowulf

celebrate Thanksgiving (more Grail? – here).

7.16.19

all the unspoken waltzing things

SEA-GRAVE

Henry has his scribbly hobbies.

Hobo is obsessed.

Osiris in his nest

buried (maybe touches the Keys).

A Viking ship in Minnesota

sleeps near Lake Itasca

like a Moses-mandorla

or canoe (garaged in Ferrara);

a pregnant Virgo by Francesca

curves in an oval

like a miniature whale.

These fish are scaled to hallelujah

& back – one swallow swallowing

a smaller, swifter swallow –

& water seems shallow

until you measure it (by hollowing

a sea-grave in the Milky Way).

& so Jonah yodels,

while Akhmatova spells

lowly on an ocarina (hey ey

yo).  A warbling robin sings

out of Mississippi clay

her infinite wedding day –

all the unspoken waltzing things

logrolling like a planet made of grace

in a dream-songe dream, Henri.

Near that Melusina-sea

glistens in memory (her San Fran face).

7.10.19

toward the 4th of Juliette

DOUBLE WHEELS

Lone robin yodeling his evening threnody

plaintive, solitary

on June’s last day

what would he intimate to me?

That summer was immense & infinite

beyond the figuring

of our (almost) unerring

memory of planetary things.  That what

our dreaming signified was plain

(glory beyond our ken).

Tomorrow’s now & then

only a ghost might fold again

into the origami of a labyrinth

of Chartres granite, Mary

blue – like this contrary

stubborn root, trapped in cement

blooming, bleu Ming, nevertheless

along an Ariadne thread

signed (calligraphy by Ted

the Mason) in a matrix of finesse

by its ineffable Makar (aye

laddie, on a tear

shed from everywhere –

like Ocean River, or the Milky Way)

& the stone drones below human hearing

it rhythmous b-flat bass

someplace in Memphis

where Osiris met his fate, shearing

                     *

Love from its neverending source

(like Jackie K’s wing

saddled to her hat thing

flying off convertible, in Dallas).

Was it a Lincoln?  Was it a star

mobile, from galaxy?

Something moving in the clay

rotates like Ezekiel wheels – where

Louis Armstrong melted to el P

& X marked the spot

(Montale’s really not

at home – it’s Giorgio who has the key

to the garage, muttered the lovely

Michal of Ferrara dunes).

We don’t recall these tunes!

Ecclesia et Synagoga cousins be –

double-wheels within wheels, sez

Zeke, in Minneapolis.

Where Juliet was, once

before she lost face... fell from grace...

– how tender floats the human form,

ephemeral!  Until

we knot yon safety spiel –

until that lightning robin find his worm

& like a Caliban, or Jordan weed

begin to mold the clay

into slow-moving roundelay

(American)... Cahokia high meed.

7.2.19

dialect of high & low

CLAY NAVEL

Literature might be political.

The dialect of high & low,

the pyramidical Pharaoh

& Erich Auerbach in Istanbul...

slaves muttering (familial)

athwart the exaltations

of regal Lion-Suns

& River-Moons (extra-terrestrial)

their jocular contra-dance lingo.

Dantean, obsolete

vernacular (obsidian);

mosaic featherweight, grave Galileo.

Everything formed from nothing... out

of a pinhole in the universe.

Clay navel – Osiris hearse

called up by current, cattail flute.

Whorls of tree-rings mantle each mortal eye.

Isis in Iowa,

Blackstone of raven-sigh –

Cautantowwit, under the Milky Way.

The tacit origin.  Your motherland,

O King.  Incipient

restoration, air apparent...

transparent equilibrium (beatitude).

Near the steel vault of St. Louis.

In the seine of the fishermen,

over the Mississippi.  Sign

from tree-logs, Jessie Ophelia... always.

6.23.19

the American dreamwork

NAVE RESTORATION

The American dreamwork seems to grow

of itself, like a vagrant

acorn’s buried descendant

branches roots into veins of air, so –

leaving yourself behind, then

as in a park playground

at dusk, all around

echoing shouts of kids having fun

within the green lamps of those trees

& the circle of daydreaming

grownups, their evening

rest emerging at last – the iron wheeze

of the swing-set beginning to mesmerize

with its creaky metronome –

& you have a premonition of home,

like a matryoshka doll of paradise

or a houseboat nested in a boathouse.

American as they don’t get?

Anonymous as a planet

without name, yet – Isis, Osiris...

A figure stands at the dream door.

They put the body there?

Now it’s not anywhere.

He gone, she gone (to tell them more).

Hobo Ulysses glides toward New Orleans,

St.-Jeanne of the Delta,

Jonah.  Coracle fella,

acorn Cap.  Nave restoration’s what it means.

5.17.19

Mussolini shoals

MARBLE FACT

Long way from stones of Notre Dame.

We haven’t that feudal allegiance

to a field beyond France.

Bright poppies blister over Belgium

where conundrum of Isis in Iowa

came from.  She is, and was

mysterium of Osiris

on the Mississip – Ezra’s mirror-delta;

hard marble fact planted at West Branch

in Herbert Hoover’s memory

(who would not have taken kindly

to any meat-locker Muss avalanche).

Ezra yodeling the alpine Swiss serene

of his muse Circe Clementine

Vichy (& all the swine

she mesmerized, so spotless clean)

erasing all that history of filthy usury

& black boys handing Bibles

through the bars... Abel’s

your bro, Ez – cain’t you see?

Ah... the shudder of absurdity.

Knife-stab in Marlowe’s eye

– over the Jew of Malta,

of all things!  It cannot be.

It is.  Villon grins in your face,

King Flibberty-Gibbet.

Grimace may be safety net

for every reprobate.  O prodigal race...

5.4.19

 

golden lanterns of Osiris

BREAD-BOAT

May Day.  The ancient wheel of the earth

lifted on a pole of flowers

by a ring of skipping circlers

wearing flower-circlets.  Distant mirth-

song, childhood in Mendelssohn.

Light primordial.

From before the murky Nile-

punts, beneath waves of Heracleion;

older than those golden lanterns

of Osiris, Ezra

beaming from the deep your

imperial star-bar patterns.

Yet the axial pivot is not a dazzling pillar

but an imperturbable muddy

river, rolled into clay

by palms of your servant, Hathor;

into a ring or a bowl of Providence,

a lowly bread-boat

for carrying each soul-mote

out of its nightmare toward deliverance.

The soul is humbled by redemption

undeserved.  Not light

of brazen copper, but of heart

that passeth understanding, O my son.

Light from before all things, who smiles

into blue depths of rosmarine;

who leaps to Galilean

shore, sings out, & hoists the sails.

5.1.19