The latest version of Rest Note, which includes the new chapter of Fontegaia, is available here.



A*D*V*E*R*T*I*S*E*M*E*N*T

...& all my books are available here. You can look at the previews for each book, sample the poems, evaluate the print quality, etc. It's all my own work. The print is rather small, but on the other hand these are genuine "pocket books" - they will fit in your pocket. Or you can download an electronic version, for the price of a large cup of coffee.

I don't carry any imprimature but my own. There are no blurbs, recommendations, curriculum vitae, awards, medals, or insignia to be found on the covers. You'll just have to take your chances.

I have nothing against regular publishers. I've had a few, & I hope to have a few more someday. But in the meantime I've written too much to keep it all at home - my poems run to book-length sequences. I learned typesetting & editing through publishing other people. For now, this is the simplest way I can make my work available to my contemporaries.

This last section of Fontegaia chapt. 3 (#26, below) is a wee bit murky, even for me. May have to work on that...

Chapt. 3 is the (planned, anyway) middle part of a 5-part poem. Fontegaia is an attempt to explore certain historical, geographical, religious, political, & poetic phenomena through the lens of Siena (civic murals & artworks, the Palio horserace, local saints & other historical figures, & so on).

Elements of the city sort of shift around - like a lens focusing on different facets - in order to represent lots of other things (beyond Siena itself). If I write about the semi-mythical river "Diana" (which the medieval Sienese, always in need of a better water-supply, went searching for beneath their hilltops) - at the same time I may be writing about the moon (Diana was a moon-goddess), about other rivers (Mississippi, Jordan, Amazon, Nile), about searching for "the source" of things, about baptism (in the "font" or the spring), about masculine/feminine (& psychological) aspects of religious iconography ... - etc. etc.

Chapt. 3 (as you can see if you've been following along) focuses in particular on Diana/moon/river-sources. (As chapt. 2 focused on the Palio, and the 1st chapter on the Lorenzetti murals & other art.)

As I finish new chapters, they've been added to the Fontegaia work-in-progress, in the book titled Rest Note. Chapt. 3 will be added soon, I hope.

*

Also, I think, if you want to understand what I'm trying to do here, you'd want to see Fontegaia as the culmination of a longer "quatrain" train (as I've mentioned before). Stubborn Grew - the 1st book of Forth of July - opens with the poet-speaker looking down from Prospect Park at the "local Rhine" (the Providence River). The Providence, the Blackstone, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Nile, the Jordan, the little spring rainwater streams that run down Arthur St. in Mendelssohn (Hopkins, MN), & various Russian rivers, all play a very big symbolic role in Forth of July & some of the quatrain-sequences which followed it (like Rest Note).

I could be wrong, but I do feel I am drawing toward the close of this particular long streak of writing. So it's culminating around this little fountain (the Fontegaia) in the main town plaza of Siena (the Campo), over the supposed location of the underground tunnels & channels of the mythical Diana River.

& this is it. In a nutshell. Maybe.

...so in this vein, some Rest Note reminders...

"Nature is a prairie for outlaws." (Thoreau, via Latta-meander)

*

Hear, hear. Sends me back to Rest Note :

16

 
Far-off rehearsals of a whippoorwill
send Oblomov into the summer deep.
Yearning's sister is eternity.  The steppe
is brother to the sky.  So still

 
the planet's perihelion : so beaten round
the concave of the heart.  Its cup
so plenished with pleroma-envelope
(reverberant bell-boom of circum-sound).

 
I am but a poor herdsman, a dresser
of sycamore trees, bespeaks Hobo.  The priest
(amazed) beseeches him, leave off, desist!
His plumbline oscillates from nothingness.

 
Its long suspension seals the summer rain;
the swingset's rusty interrogative
repeals its requiem (equable ruth).
A whippoorwill replies.  They will remain.

 
Across the rolling distances, a prairie
butterfly makes delicate, indifferent way.
Zigzagging here and there.  A monarch, say,
or viceroy : his plangent rule a mockery

 
of rule, his slip of flight a sweet retort
to blind and dutiful raison d'état.
He's gentle evanescence, only that -
an evanescent elegance, the earth's éclat. 

 
The sound of the whippoorwill penetrates
the humid summer afternoon.  Late summer,
later afternoon.  Oblomov twists an ear
of wheat between his fingertips.  He waits.

Imaginary scholars (my imaginary friends) might be able to find some connections between Paul Fry's notion of the "ostensive" character of lyric poetry, and Rest Note.

A "rest note" in music is silent : a timed pause, the absence of a note. With regard to my poems, the title implies a sort of culmination - the conclusion of my seemingly endless stream of quatrains (!) since beginning with Stubborn Grew...

Stubborn opens beside a river in Providence... Forth of July moves on to the Mississippi... Rest Note goes from the Amazon to a mythical underground river in Siena (Diana), and the fountain in the Campo square (Fontegaia).

But aside from that, the "rest" implies a hoped-for future... the rest on the 7th day, the peace on earth, the Jubilee, Redemption, the Golden Age. The rest and equilibrium radiating from a finished beautiful thing. And the analogy between these two (art & history, or art & theology). Thus the Palio "4 horsemen" on the cover. The references to St. Francis, Joachim of Fiore, etc.

A revised, expanded Rest Note : includes new chapter of thingo-in-progress, Fontegaia.

OK, this is it for little paperbacks. A new run of Rest Note, pocket-sized. Includes 3 related sequences : Rest Note, Autumn Door, and Fontegaia (part 1).

Now I feel like hitting the road, giving some readings... (p.s. I'll be away for the next few days, in the Twin Cities, for an 80th-birthday party for a couple of twins.)

11

 
So much rain toppled on our juggled race
we were as on a distant, moister planet;
blindly we moped along, making a circuit
where we meant to draw a line.  The place

 
was unfit for a pilgrimage.  Bellicose
with bees and bugs, a broken Belgium
(crocus belli, abject, burnt in gloom).
We floundered on - blinkered, morose;

 
we sought a scapegoat for a game of fear
and found one (some fabled hermaphrodite
the sailors fetched - covered in frostbite!);
stumbled ahead... and struck Capella's anchor

 
with our feet.  Somehow we'd hit bottom.
Where was the ship?  Rotating overhead?
The iron itself was tightly filigreed -
cartwheeling polka-dots, a wired A-frame...

 
and lettered there in hieroglyph, we read:
the ship is nought; you must rebuild the ship;
otiose Atlantis, dozing Z (your smoked fillip
of corny Amsterdams) are zeroed, zed;

 
you float upon the Nile (an oozing iris
of desire).  Scattered hoots savored the jungle.
That grim report of some unruly Amazon
jangled our nerves - some angry Pocahontas

 
scrambled the rune for us!  And left a maze
meant to confound.  Umbilical, the strangled
vintage clapped obdurate palms... angled
at unseen light... umbering crazed castaways.

On we go. This is the ornamental midpoint of current "chapter". (Companion to #10 of previous chapter - posted over at Alephoebooks.)

10

 
What sort of voice is this, then (in blue light
of cave-mouth) whose semaphoric gravity
slowly seines the iron?  A river-ditty
cups an osier (Joseph's willow-basket) -

 
its homely suavity retrieves the gardener
from grave retreat, its pulse a counterweight
to fictive terror in the tales.  Reciprocate
harbinger of recognition, angelic warden

 
of the vengeant arm, sergeant of Abraham;
answerer, twin-sister, echo, dove.
Gold-withy florin, painstaking... Love's
grandmotherly and oaken logogram.

 
Concentric rings compile a universe
of anniversaries (reflective palimpsest
and testament) for Providence.  A nest-
collegium (eccentric, implicate, obverse).

 
Your king (yourself) conveyed upon a sled
into the boneyard of the replicas
has answered back (a fecund Amazon,
familiar Magdalen, resurgent riverhead

 
of recognitions).  The gardener's ground zero
of transgressions is transposed to chords
of a resplendent bower-bird's word-
hoard - both gambrelled listener and hero,

 
your still-tendrilled mirror of reunions.
Tentative, antiphonal, the whispers
built a stony circle of fifths - spires
above Nevaland, refulgent onion-

                  
                *

 
domes; it was a floating coronation,
water-lily incarnation, signal-design -
echo of the heart's unearthly pine
(sustent beyond the garland of the nine).

 
Time uncoils unseasonal suspense
across the quarrels of the tribes.  A stone
hand hovers over the edge of the canoe
at Prospect Park.  What tender balance

 
swings that audible city of audacity
toward pity?  Listen, listen - O Eternity,
he cried - weaving a crib, his muttering
reality - O concave octave framing unity.

 
Then springs of praise - pervasive tree -
scribbled from every margin to the sea;
transpolar (equable, inviolate) civil society
espoused the conscientious refugee.

 
And what of the map?  The map's a rude
and woody crossword (love's ninefold ormolu
of equatorial and jungled parallels).
Equations of experience; the blooded

 
pattern of rust in green extravagance.
Earth drones in the labyrinthine furnace;
the stirring of her mettled source
reverberates through every elegance,

 
silvers the ploughshare, stills the swing.
And then a suspended seventh sounds again.
It is an amnesty for labored denizen,
the planetary pinion (Saturn's wing).

9

 
An iron bell (muffled by humidity)
sounds, distant.  Sailor understands
he's touched haven; not vagrant winds,
but lubber's arms, wring such solidity

 
from air.  Sound hangs suspended there
from metal flower (pendulous too,
titanic water-lily - amid blue
depths, beneath infinity).  Somewhere

 
nearby, Sailor Town lies nestled (rocked
beneath green hills).  Metropolis to him,
where locals scramble up a worsted scrim
of news - packetfuls of letters, interlocked,

 
a pillowy osier cage of breathless deeds
uncounted - then counted, recounted; tested,
tasted, registered, restated... ballasted
to earth (as only iron words can be).

 
Landed, they may not mark the miracle
performed - unfurling suddenly, mountain
erupting from sea to sunlight - when
a young green fiddlehead (tentacle

 
sprung free) arises from rusted urn
fractured by wayside.  Wobbly
Peg-leg canters trippingly
in hoarse euphoria; old adamant

 
stern planet (curdled) strands him firm.
There is a proverb in it for the wedding
banns; the word is perpetrated, steeled
with fortitude.  Waltz on, brave earthworm!

8

 
The stillness of a quiet pond reflects
a round world in the round, he thought.  Captain
(not sad, now) had folded up his fogged-in
spectacles.  In an upright case.  Below decks

 
(in the red wheelhouse) compass and chart
were sealed up too.  He sank a weary temple
to the jungle floor (an awful bed, though ample).
The soul is feminine, some poet wrote,

 
he thought; a mirror is her port, and portal
too.  And as he fell into a drowsy doze
amid the studious saws of stewed cicadas...
suddenly he saw - aloft - a water-

                 
                  *

 
lily.  (Lotus.  Trim chrysanthemum.
Behind the ruffled well of Maggie Carr,
the swamping vamp of gaudy Riviera
Lil.)  Cicadas, crickets clept their random

 
hum.  And in the shadow of slow sound  
another figure crept across his sleep :
a woman like a butterfly (shrouded, adept,
all wayward, skyward... faithful to ground).

 
He dreamt, like Nebuchadnezzar.  In a delta
(ecumenical) the riddle of Rapunzel spread
(wrapped in an eggroll) on a rugged bed
of caesar salad... so his Z sighed Ah.

Read-Along with Rest Note

Poem #9 : Rest Note as a whole is built to some extent on patterns of 3 and 9, so as #9, this section brings the first full sequence to a close. And it's a winding-down, in a hesitant, doubtful mood. Can poetry ever escape its solipsistic, irrelevant, self-indulgent prison-house, in the midst of a social world of suffering, inequality, injustice?

Much of the opening of the poem concerns a "Lazarus" figure, and in this section he's tempted to go back to the sleep of the grave from which he has heretofore been stirring. The poem circles back, curves downward, and ends in a supplication.

9.1 : "Raindrops curve" etc. - the figure of micro/macrocosm (windowpane/retina), inside/outside (camera obscura) - the general oscillating movement which runs through the whole poem. Writing returns to "crumbling moss" (ms.).

9.2 : "iron ball" - a ball & chain dragging at the poet's "foot". Contrasted with awkward "toes" which do not dance, but tromp, oblivious to the empty canyon they inhabit. Poetry's dilemmas of solipsism. "coyote jest" - bad pun on "Quixote geste" - acting out of chivalric delusions.

9.3 : "lead mines" - Teddy Roosevelt (the "chivalrous" Prez) has begun a risky journey which seems to have "led" him to a deadening lead mine. But he will be a brave Teddy bear. "El Dorado"... etc. - it was not a fool's gold dream which led him on, a dream of riches. "compunctions of the scullery" - ie., to contrast with Wallace Stevens' "complacencies of the peignoir". Stevens (in the epicurean-Romantic, post-religious mode of "Sunday Morning") is contrasted with Roosevelt's crusading-heroic attitude. "scullery" - faint echo of Golgotha (cf. previous motifs of Last Supper "table"); "sanguine" - ie., simultaneously hopeful/bloody.

9.4 : "Horse-sense", etc. - poets as Pegasus-knights, as participating in a historical remnant-holdover of domineering feudal mentality ("dominion"). "Spent millions" - both the money squandered by fraud & decadence, and the worn-out multitudes who subsist in that debilitated condition.

9.5 : "a ring/ of blue... corncobs" - sort of a synthetic image. Blue corn - Indian corn. Corncobs - old country poverty. spontaneous - both the horses bolting from the Derby starting line, and a sense of "spontaneous combustion" - the silos exploding. "squads of backs..." etc. - Lazarus-Hobo contrasts Teddy's fatherly-chivalric exhortations to rugged individualism ("character, my son!") with a different memory, the sense of "characters" as letters and numbers, printed on the shirts (& backs) of the chain gangs. This is the would-be heroic poem's dilemma.

9.6 : "Someone swings a scythe..." etc. - the sun, mysteriously, swings a scything shadow as it crosses through time & day. This is a "draconian sway" - far more elemental than human dominions. "chameleon/mimics a lemon" - ... ie. but it's not simply the sun, it's a "someone" - a person, a being (inverting, converting the power of the sun, the way "chameleon" punningly inverts a (sunny) "lemon". Who is this round someone, now "scything" the eye? (A gesture toward Blake - "a tear is an Intellectual thing / and a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King".) "windrow" - combining the "windows" of the eye and the "windrows" created by the scythe.

9.7 : This stanza somewhat shucks off the anxious formulations of previous stanzas, in favor of a personal supplication. Following up on the sense of personal presence in previous stanza ("someone"), TR makes a direct appeal to "Edith" (his wife). Let the curves end in a smile. "Be a nine, San Juan" - no longer the curve of a physical battlefield (San Juan Hill), but the spiral of a spiritual goal (cf. Dante : "Beatrice is a nine." San Juan de la Cruz was a mystical poet.) "Draw tight..." - the race is replaced by a "trace" - the inward discipline of a (horse's) harness.

Just a note to new visitors, as to what the heck I'm doing around here these days :

Have been posting an ongoing poem called Rest Note, and also providing some stanza-by-stanza commentary (Rest Note Cliff Notes). I know this breaks the rules... you're not supposed to say too much... but I like, for example, Wallace Stevens' semi-explanatory notes. Plus, I'm not telling you everything... (how could I?)

The sections of the poem are posted together over at Alephoebooks. It may seem a little confusing, because I'm simultaneously posting new, just-written parts of the poem, while commenting on previous.

The commentary always refers to sections already consolidated over at Alephoebooks. The first Rest Note "chapter" (of 19 parts) is already complete over there (& that's what I'm currently commenting on). Meanwhile, I'm on to writing the second "chapter", and posting it here at HG Poetics.

And the ship sailed on.

7

 
The river slipped through fog, and mist, and rain.
The Amazon was brooding, fanned by waves
of sullen heat.  Exploratory faces gave
the ship a garland for its rim (straining,

 
staring outward)... yet that humid blur
(airy water, watery air) merely
mirrored their imaginations (barely).
Silence offered them a nameless murmur;

 
each face on the circumference was faced
with someone's solitary thought.  The river
bore them onward; forward, toward a sterner,
saltier conclave (where the current was erased).

 
Never have I felt so far from home,
my magnetite.  Yet was the shore a-brim
with voices.  Someone spoke, they echoed him;
swift was the shuttlecock, empty the game.

 
The river bears a secret life, a bidden
Name (muttered through the wooden fountains
of the hard-pressed palms; risen through rain
into an iridescent orchid garden).

 
Unwitting fog-scouts hear it whispered, sometimes,
on the borderlands, where lonesomeness weighs
heavily - where all the sailors, Jonahs
are, their sisters, doves (tattoos, rhymes)...

 
Iris always beyond the pale for that lone
galoot (whose dreams, in fact, are signs
of a scythèd Guadaloupe - whose rose aligns
with swells of hay) adieu'd on the gramophone.

I've been doing some shuttling myself today.

6

 
A monarch ambled aimlessly toward Mexico.
Lost in the corn, he knew where he was going.
Knowledge fed humility; he was a gentle king.
There is a cypress where all monarchs go.

 
The cricket schemes a quainter camouflage.
His ordinary droning screed pretends
it cannot penetrate the summer blinds,
short-circuiting the season's slow demise.

 
But we hear differently, upon our swing.
Its iron triangles are Archimedean;
paired parallels ascend into a green
and absent-minded Paradise (creaking).

                  
                 *

 
A swing rocks back and forth, reflectively,
summoning evening summers out of night
and day.  Its governance is just (slight
scraping of the hinges, anyway); see

 
how the old saws of the legal hacks (Coke,
Blackstone) frame up sturdy guarantees
of civil equity : see how proud trees
bend branches to a sigh's brush-stroke.

 
The bookish founders of our liberties
reflecting in their libraries (on Rome,
on London), brooked a necessary home-
truth : let the flower lead the bees.

                         
                                     7.4.06

5

 
We softly cribbed the engineer's remains
in a reedy basket in the hold.  The double
lenses of his broken spectacles - what bauble-
manifolded wilderness had they made plain?

 
Worming through the undergrowth, he was
cocooned beneath those spectral bastions -
gray limbs like elephants, the vines' festoons,
a labyrinth of parchment (lost papyrus).

 
And left some papers of his own.  A treatise
on the laws of railroading; some blueprints
for a trestle bridge; A Ratio of Gradients
For Laying of the Track (et cetera)...

 
And (in silhouette between two sheets of wax)
the shadow of a Blue Morpho.  Cindered,
only a remnant - two half-oval (sundered)
wings (Aurora, lanced in parallax).

 
There must have been a hearth somewhere
for Biddle, even he.  Schooled for the line
and junction, he was mapping his emerging;
some immortal longing was that Morpho's sire

 
and fiery heir.  There was a ring, perhaps -
immersed in jungle quicksand, so to seal
ecstatic secrets home; Earth will reveal
streams moseying beneath our serpent-maps.  

 
A leaden box, dropped from Capella's stern,
buries the memoirs in their well-earned element;
borne below widening ripples, which cement
both shores in circles (like a swing's return).

Happy 4th of July.

4

       
      I never knew Biddle, the man with spectacles and a butterfly net, 
      but a first rate railway man, who left that net outside his hut 
      one morning, and at evening was buried, but now I am doomed to 
      think of him while I live.               
                    - H.M. Tomlinson, The Sea and the Jungle

 
The good ship Capella sang in the wind
like a little round oracle on the sea.
She was sound, and round, and though the River Z
was a bumpy logogriph, she could understand:

 
word married thing, in commonwealth parlance
(Adam and Eve, engaged before they met
in a net of chit-chat).  Mankind a kind of poet,
sort of, waltzing in a circle-dance

 
of hermeneutical honey-dew.  Footsteps
of the forebears paved a slow pavane (stately,
exact) for weathering reality;
life was proof (by trial) of their precepts.

 
In the shade of overhanging willow limbs,
the tail-end of the tribal trail... the compass
of an oscillating nest, or crib; slow rose
of sanded pendulum.  Some noose of hymns.

 
We took a shortcut through the twilight aisles.
It is not good to be alone.  Grey monotone,
brown boles, parchment of laurel; flowers, none.
Dilapidated lianas in the high, dark vaults.

 
Back at camp, we squabbled over maps;
the humid air had melted our concord.
If Ralph left at A, and met the pair at Z...
fumblers for words, sodden slippers-into-mishaps...

 
And where's the President?  His father's ranch?
He set out looking for shining Cibola,
found his caboodle kit, and lost America.
What's left of Biddle?  Add it to the launch.

& over the Cliff Notes we go again, with Read-Along-with Rest Note :

Poem #8 :

(dedicated to John Tagliabue, my (ex)father-in-law, who died last month; last Saturday (which would have been his 83rd birthday) a memorial gathering was held, people filled a restaurant to read poems, reminisce. A group did a staged reading of an excerpt from one of the Mario puppet plays. There were a few old hippie-zen people from the 50s or 60s - one guy who said he had come upon one of John's poems in a magazine, & it changed his life : he was holding a "tailgate" party outside the restaurant, sharing bottled water and his enormous collection of small-press Tagliabue materials, which he'd been collecting for 50 years. He could hardly speak before the audience, this old taoist hobo. It was an emotional day.)

8.1 : "Hobo drifts..." etc. - poet as exile, outsider, prophet. "privy contretemps" - could mean a number of things. Private shame, embarrassment; Yeats's "the quarrel with ourselves" out of which we make poetry; and (punningly) a secret or arcane (prophetic) anachronism, or "counter-time" : the poet's alienation has something uncanny about it. "pet raven" - his muse here is one of denunciation and doom (self-doom, too, thinking of Poe's "Raven").

8.2 : "narrow gauge" - both a type of railway line and a "gage" or glove thrown down for a duel (between the railroad - here representing social power, generally, that which "railroads" everybody, in Populist parlance - and the "thin red line" of the poet's lips - here in a martial sense of doing battle. But the lips are closed, in a "curved plum of silence". At this point the poem's emotional affect turns (on that curve). Paradoxically, the place where ships seemingly "descend" - "go down" - is a measure of the earth's curvature, the horizon : and the "promise of their tutelage" - that is, what is learned, from the exploratory effort of the ships, is a promise of concord : at the "vanishing point" - ie. at the meeting-point of all the lines of exploration.

8.3 : underlines the hopeful direction of previous stanza : "shared reality". However, this is one of the poems which is short (by one) the usual 7 stanzas, marked by an asterisk-break at the midpoint.

8.4 : The divide marks another turn in the poem's register of feeling. The second part of this poem shows not so much a simple union or reunion (symbolized by the ships or the earth's curvature) : here it is more a matter of establishing a balance between firmly separated things. "Edith, I slept.../hopelessly" - In a poem dedicated to John Tagliabue, there are a lot of personal elements emerging here. Hobo, Teddy Roosevelt, Lazarus, & the speaker are blending together somewhat. "Edith" was TR's wife's name. "Edith" is also the 1st name of my ex-wife, John T's eldest daughter (though everyone from the beginning called her by her middle name, Francesca). The "jade tree" - an India Jade - was a wedding gift from my mother, which is still growing (large) at the corner of Francesca's house. Hobo, Whitman, "Passage to India", the earth's curve, etc... "the driftwood" etc. - the image here is a sort of fusion between a sense of life & time's "drift" with the image of the swingset - symbol of a mysterious sort of constancy, recurrence, strung from "parallel" ropes from a tree. Image itself recurs in many forms through the poem so far.

8.5 : "suspended gravity" etc. - the idea is that the desire and longing in the human heart have an otherworldly (anti-gravitational), infinite aspect (the parallels meet in infinity) - which is, in reality, the ultimate measure of things and of the goals of the human will and activity. Out of the vision of this comes the "inclusive arch" (in a sort of echo of Crane's Bridge) of poetic speech; it is the source of the Whitman-style magnanimity which Tagliabue, in particular, lived out so eloquently and fantastically in the course of his life.

8.6 : "lambency/of recursion" - in poetry, the word both recurs and recoils on itself (in a doubleness like a swing's back/forth motion). "almond shadow-lens" - many things compacted here. The almond tree, flowering in winter, links back to the uncanny "exile" of the hobo (almond being the representative tree of Judaism, faith of wandering exiles) and the otherworldly "suspended gravity" of the heart's desire. The "shadow-lens" goes back to the Lazarus camera obscura; "shadow" also implying something still (or always) hidden from view. (A lens is itself an almond-shape : the geometrical vesica, joining 2 intersecting circles.) "twirled into one/untutored sport" - the oscillation of the swing takes on inertial energy of its own, twirling - into the "untutored sport" of nature. No longer under the "tutelage" of explorer-ships, the poet-hobo is an athlete, a "sport" whose "spirit-ditties" seem effortless, unschooled - like the Taoist poets & painters whom Tagliabue emulated and seemed to become, eventually, himself.

3     
          America is essentially the greatest poem.

 
There must be a map of hearing hidden here
somewhere.  If we can only find the map,
we can find the lost explorer (someone
vanishes in jungle - jungle disappears

 
in her).  That relic of remotest realm,
abandoned sapphire of the forest (Oz,
Atlantis) spurred the quest; now whose inroads
(squalid short-cuts) devastate the dream?

 
The map in the mirror, a matter of leaves
of shade above tree rings.  Where your limbs,
Mack, truck with the garden, slumberous
(a Walter waltzing to the sound of Z).

 
Oro Pendula whispers, suspends.  The weaver-
bird, she whistles while she works (a spell).
An alphabet of pilot, river, and Capella
("ship") : O fluent unison, tuned to deliverance!

 
Thanksgiving, hallelujahs in the hold.
And as the mast is to the vessel, so
the song is to the wilderness : an Orpheo
reformer (row, row, row...), a capillary

 
chantry, bold as old is young as blood. 
Heartsblood, churning (stoked, steadily,
below).  And now the pilot dances giddily
athwart the loggy junk his fingers (pre-skid)

 
understood : the current is his candor,
and the source is coursing through himself.
The map was a given, apparently : the vessel,
certainly, a coracle (an old box called Pandora).