driving around Kenwood

BLUE CLAY

Driving around Kenwood, the memories.

In the mist.  October

leaves me almost sober

(maples blushing maroon, umber).  The bees

have mostly flown to sleep (in the calyx

of a sunflower).  You’ll find

soft traces of the mind

in whorls of thumbprints – Red Wing phoenix

lifted out of blue clay & industrial (okay

now what?).  Zone of quiet

emotional measurement.  Whit-

mind, informing each & all.  Today

the Mississippi is a feathered serpent,

mirror of oak & maple,

cottonwood.  Oak-apple

galls the rotund roundhead tyrant –

harboring the charismatic prince

whose mother & bride is

Espiritu Santo, Sophia’s

father & son (green acorn salience).

The canoe downstream is almost invisible

like a pair of wooden lips

whispering across the gaps –

a miniature ark, whose rainbow burble

bubbles back her own Churnagogue wake;

she is the radiant candle

glowing through the cupped hand,

the clay grail mending each American mistake.

10.7.19

a line in the road

GREY BIRD

Sarah found a baby turtle

this morning, inching along

a line in the road.  My song-

salience, or green volcano-yurt

on slow horizontal too... toward

her thorny rose-matrix;

my scrambled pick-up-sticks,

snarled with gold poncho thread

in limpid greys of dawn twilight.

This mutter-dome of whisper-

leaves, of zephyr-vespers

veils an agate lamp (magnet

for Blue Morpho & monarch flight)

pendant amid cedars –

like black-yellow flickers

gathered into marigold (O milky knight).

My abstract worming through its raving

scribble-babble, cartoon

peacock incarnation...

a myriad glancing-whorl becoming

the figure for your beaming face.

O the clear air of this

metaphysical silence!

Whose pause released one Finnish race

to lift her soaring steel mandorla

into lofty grace

planted in pivot-place

of riverine & prairie space – ah,

Psyche!  Sister Persephone!

I feel your sunny smile

now – lifting lilacs mile

on mile into an octave-harmony

                *

of active commonality –

Joy’s hero-trial!

Path P – Indian file –

thread-thin tattoo to Liberty!

So the little tree of J

is ever-living.  So

Jonah bee surfacing

tuned to your buzzing play,

high Sophie – through the fallen timbers

west of gray Verdun,

the world’s war-passion

settled in destruction.  Embers

from a wraith of spring, the sack of Prince

Henry’s royal oak...

one ashen acorn spoke

welded to purple wheel of Providence.

The crayon trembles in my hand.

The palm curves green

circumference – Iona

ray, from Ocean State (to every land);

the grey bird murmurs through the surf;

the Camelot of JFK

& blessedness of MLK

merge in the spray, resolve to turf.

So Thunderbird ruffles the stream.

The turtle is a Phoenix

swelling at the matrix –

agate child skipping (on waves of dream).

5.18.17

west of St. Louis

MASON JAR

& the word came out west of St. Louis.

Kind of hokey, like

a dust-devil psych-

out on eccentric orbit.  She was US.

The weird windlass twirled due Nord

into a wilderness

of cedar & watercress –

deserted road, iced-over, hard.

Held up on a tiny pinhead pine-

needle of sunlight, she spun

like a gyroscopic moon,

beholden to none.  She was fine

to behold, like a mason jar, with her G-

fitz-G major Eyelash Curl –

a square-dance whirl

around an Irish jug (from C

to C minor & back again).

She spoked light so lightly

all the ire of unspritely

iron nations (dusty canyon

grandeur in a pride of lions)

molted into Phoenix

ash & rainbow peacock’s

eyes – & I can’t write these lines

without tears wide as Okeanos

coursing planetary curves,

as Stella Morris swerves

another starfish into star (yes, yes!)

                  *

2.8.17

ultra rich & strange

MILITARY CEMETERY

His leaden haze puts Hobo in mind

of his old pal Willie

(Wallace), in D.C. –

simple homeless vet, friend

of Feathered Eagle.  You could find 

him, of a morning

(borderline bored) leaning

against that sunny wall behind

the taco place.  Told me once

about the time he met

the President.  Let

me have a word, sir... since

you’re headed to church, will you pray for me?

& old Bush says – C’mon along

brother, we’ll sing a song

together.  Man-fest, I guess.  Destiny.

So they trooped on down to the Cathedral

hand in hand, them two

old hands.  You know

there’s lots of masonry in the capital.

Big maze of marble, curious flame-

&-turtleshell designs.

Defunctive tombstones,

mostly – but I was there when King came,

for the March, back in ’63.

Love that constancy

in his treble prophecy,

you know?  Beauty, truth & rarity

                     *

– rarin’ to go, that meek milkman.

Love has her reasons,

I reckon.  The season’s

colder now.  WW long flown –

but sometimes I see his ghost wing

past the tyrant’s house.

Or maybe that was Phoenix.

I do get confused.  Wish I could sing

with the Prez too – like Maid Marion

underneath Robby Lincoln’s eye,

so redbreast mild (sigh).

Pall-bearers’ props (sable, crimson)

& the trumpets & the drums... the boots

in the saddle, all backwards.

Buried bee buzzwords,

scribbled graphs, epitaphs.  Hoots

from the midnight owl – soft whisper

over dim cedars.

Her grey eye engenders

all this concrete into something... suffer

the little sea-change, children, croons

Columbia.  The statue

called La Paix (flew

out of Normandy, wounded) from dunes

of military cemetery, comes

to life... Hermione

her name, Queen for a Day.

Rich & strange now.  Sound the drums.

2.7.17

Sophie at the Raptor Center