chaired in the adamant of Time

WISDOM-BENCH

He was muttering in his sleep the whole time.

Of things seen & unseen,

emblems of earth & heaven – like

a man in his grave, waiting for his bones to rhyme

again.  His friend Hobo came from Ohio

whistling Carl Sandburg tunes,

Vachel Lindsay refrains;

his duds were dusty, raggedy, his health so-so;

he only loved the calm of the constant River

& the wide distant plains

& the ache in his heart.  Pains

of hard living made him smile (it goes on forever).

He himself was an old Yankee man.

Some Quaker dream tilted his mind

to the redemption of a world unkind,

& mad with rage – a providential plan.

The dream came out of West Branch

one fine day – the black marble

of Isis (planted at the Memorial)

a kind of emblem for her Wisdom-Bench

chaired in the adamant of Time, as Walt

declared.  & we are Hagia Sophia

with a million eyes, maybe… a sigh

instilled by otherworldly grace.  A bolt

of lightning from the Thunderbird.  Thus

Wisdom is justified in all her children –

settled on her lap of twinkling obsidian

beneath the steady circling of milky stars.

4.20.20

Oh say can you see / by the Topsfield town line

& so the grand explication rolls on...

R.D. READING GUIDE #7

TOPSFIELD  (p.9)

This poem clearly a rejoinder to the conflicted cul-de-sac of previous poem (“Black Peak”).  The aim seems to be clarification, but the murk only grows darker.

“Topsfield” : suburb of Boston, next door to Salem, Massachusetts

“Shaker plate / of light” : simplicity, clarity.  Memory of lakeside Shaker settlement near Lewiston, Maine

“one steady statute / of a dauntless ghost” : refers to “our W”, one of the poem’s heroes, Roger Williams (R.W.)

“O say // can you see / By the Topsfield / town line / Where Endicott / ripped / the King’s cross out / barehanded...” : national anthem transposed onto colonial Bay Colony.  The future Governor Endicott of Massachusetts was (at that time, anyway) an enthusiastic disciple of Roger Williams.  One day (in the 1630s) the excitable Endicott, inspired by Williams’ objections to King Charles I’s reinforcement of the Tudor “establishment” of a state-sponsored church, tore the cross out of his own militia’s Union Jack.  This was an early (and emotional)  expression of Roger Williams’ influential theory of the separation of church and state.  Very remotely echoed by Dante in his De Monarchia – the medieval version of a doctrine stipulating the separation of Pope and Emperor.  (Endicott, a resident of Topsfield, was next-door neighbor to Zaccheus Gould, the poet’s great++grandfather).

“Friend” : Quaker, Shaker

Twain’ll meet / Nought, around the bend” : some kind of prophetic cancelling of violent rivalries and conflicts (with a prefiguration of Mark Twain and the river)

“Wauontam.  Let’s eat.” : a Narragansett welcome, to feasting (experienced by exiled Roger Williams)

“Tempestuous word... stirs up... chartered Concorde” : a lot packed into this stanza.  Let’s say the tempestuous and threatening prophetic word of someone like Roger Williams, in the 17th century, eventually grew and flourished into the “self-evident endowments” of the 18th century – the U.S. Bill of Rights – in some kind of constitutional alliance with France (“chartered Concorde”).

“Hip-hop’s // Charlie horse” : ambiguous image of a limping monarch (Charlie horse”)

“rocking, racking... icing on a cake of Peking / take-out orders” : the political concept of human liberty, originating in America with Williams, results in a challenge to the autocratic, lawless brutality of “Putin’s generic icing” and “Peking’s take-out orders”

“Aerial checkmate thing” : poetry’s inherent opposition to soul-tyranny.  Echoes of  Biblical Ariel (the Psalmist’s hope); and Nabokov, Montale (“checkmate thing”)

gash of a calm current

CALM CURRENT

The daggers of the sumac (plum-

red, maroon) accent

the gash of a calm current

between these knotted forks of autumn

cottonwood.  The knot itself

an ellipse, like bole

of oak (hollow hole...

screech owl?) – for an emerald elf.

The Green Man in the green glade.

Prehistoric American?

Or an Irish cousin.

Gardener in the garden (maid

Magdalen’s Gesthemane).

The river is a strong

brown Gould.  Unstrung

out of New Hampshire (Alleghany?

Ohio?).  Or maybe Negus, Ravlin...

leading the flock mesmerized

to Iowa (West Branch, 

shepherd).  Buzzing a Quaker violin.

We have dawdled long enough

in Babylon, children.

The labyrinth (Parisian)

folds Theseus into a trough

much like a Mississippi mirror

dreamscape, umbilical

(& smoothly paradoxical).

We mumble into the interior.

10.29.18

How to be God's friend?

JUST BEYOND

The lifesaver : a fruity ring

invented by Hart Crane’s

father.  Across the plains

yawing wind-wagons roll.  Something

akin to Grant Wood corn, maybe –

an icon.  All’s figures,

counsels holy Zero

Summer.... Burchfield parody

(complete with feverish Light-

in-Gale).  Deep swampland

heartland, over sand-

fly latitudes.  God’s outa sight;

Dad’s a kind of Kingfish, generous

in all the wrong ways.

Those were the dog days.

Rain... unlikely hymn (so mysterious) –

another author, just beyond the pale.

Moses climbs from his dinghy

ready to shake that thingy –

waterspew from Rock (a Word, set sail).

How to be God’s friend? ask

the Friends.  Williams hectored,

but he left on record

how to walk humbly (high shellfish task)...

Friends gathered in a Rhody cave.

Silence is best response

to Charlie’s dalliance.

Our Author is a friendship trope – to save,

not to condemn.

5.8.18

each poem starts fresh

TROMPETTE MARINE

Soft breeze moves the cucumber leaves

climbing the fine mesh.

Each poem starts fresh

upon a labyrinth the wind conceives

the way Dante struggled like a goat

to rise above the black-

white chessboard (epileptic

knight, squirming from Hell’s dank moat

toward one firefly-mote of light).

O civil wars of cousin

wolves!  Striving in frozen

latitudes of predatory fright-

might, ice-blue treason – all

spite-pirates of the broken

sheep of state – forsaken-

&-forsaking sacrifice!  Ravel

me then, Ariadne, in your primordial

& woolen salience

of J... into the silence

of a pregnant Jubilee, where Piero’s wall

glows in the morning light (& swells

a womb within a cave).

Search the high nave

of the Milky Way – Francesca dwells

up there (with Jenny Littletree) – among

the Shaker Indians, Quakers –

meek paisans, peacemakers –

fused by trompette marine of song.

8.1.16

Womb in the cave-shade

ALMOND ARK

They were farmers & shepherds in West Branch,

cartwrights & blacksmiths, laboring

through pain... the rusty ring

of iron clamps, the thick stench

of horse manure, the pigs & cows...

yet took their time for quiet

in the Meeting House – let

runaways abide, lambs browse.

Their silence lodged in protest against

violence itself –

the insolence of Guelf

& Ghibelline, the gangs, the hunts...

the iron dream of domination

locking the brain-cave

in its frozen grave

(creak-echo of damnation).

There was a spring in Tuscan hills,

coiled like a rusty serpent –

green with moss, bent

into turtleshell... old Williams’

spiral (out of Coke, Blackstone).

Mules’ rustic rights

& supernatural delights

limp into leaves of a live-oak woman –

her heavy womb in the cave-shade

like a Negus by the Nile

hidden for a while...

almond ark of spring (oak-apple maid).

5.11.16

Quaker Meeting House, Scattergood School, West Branch, Iowa

Lilacs in West Branch

WOOLLY FLOCK

Soon the lilacs will be blooming

in West Branch, Iowa.

Old John Brown’s hideaway

among earth Quakers (humming

his grave tune, without the guns).

There Harriet’s railroad

tugged through Negus-made

tornado shelters – Grandma’s cousins

too.  I trace an equilibrium

through reams of loveletters

in turquoise blue (scatters

from Scattergood to end of time).

The clay looms closer on those farms.

Isis herself unveils

just past our Hoovervilles –

beckons with Everlasting Arms.

A refuge from the storm, where corn

& flowers grow.  Mild Shaidlock

led a mighty woolly flock

from Ohio to Muscatine, in 1849

(they write); his great-granddaughter Mary

married Jack Ravlin, & thus

they came to Minneapolis...

they rest, remain.  Spring memory.

The silence of unvarnished truth

glances from shepherd eyes.

Proud histories of lies

axed by one pine (standing on earth).

4.20.16

Henry Negus farm (Springdale Township, Iowa, ca. 1900)