in the gold realm

ASCENSION DAY

My friend Chris in New Zealand

emailed (on Ascension Day)

about that homely display

of bare feet, trampolining to cloud

in the Lorenzetti fresco (or

was it Philip Guston?)

under the superscription

of a proscenium arch.  Flower

of early Renaissance mind

echoing (if necessary)

your mirror-quality

of reality.  Who will so bend

the boarhound from the boar,

Raven from Nevermore?

Is this your last cigar?

Plein air puffs from a planet’s core.

Limestone shreds of the labyrinth

at Chartres were sort of a letdown.

Rough work.  All the gold gone.

The mower set out to mow... absinthe

green, moss green clasping the scent.

The emerald pentagram

shadowed in the sheep’s I AM

quickens the dead husks in a fundament

of everlasting life; & when the Eternal comes

it will be as we remembered

in the gold realm of childhood –

when time swells (the drone lingers, hums).

6.14.19

Poetry is a resurrection game, an art of giving life to dead letters & blank pages. And of bringing the "mana" of past poetry and a past time back to life in the present. I was impressed by Philip Guston's assertion, at the height of abstract expressionism, that painting is an "impure art", that we live in images and are "ridden" by them. & also by the ways he continually re-worked & re-encountered both his Old Masters (Uccello, Piero della Francesca), and his own early imagery, & that of his contemporaries (Max Beckmann, Krazy Kat...).

The question of an innate American "disruptiveness" (opposition, resistance), which Gary & Josh have been discussing, should maybe be looked at in the context of a more fundamental dialogic principle, rooted in this encounter with the creative emblems of another, earlier time & place. When a poet brings artistic "resolution" to his or her own time - within their poetry - this achievement sets up a dynamic of echo/response in the present, for poets now.

Happy New Year, everyone. Happy Birthday, HGpoetics.

Went into NY last Friday to see the Philip Guston retrospective. Happy me.