where friars met the chiefs

BRIGHT EIDOLON

Like a round dime tossed in a round

lake, hermetic lady

(Mendelssohn, or Galilee)...

the circle of clans closes on a mound

of blue-white clay.  With a star

beneath pulsing waves,

to summon all the braves.

Rêve-dream, song-songe (de la mer).

Smoke rises from Pipestone, where

friars met the chiefs –

an old Amerique (Lief’s...

Hennepin’s, Marquette... le voyageur);

Rose de St. Louis, Annie

de Texas... Jessie O.

from N’Orleans – down below

rim-sleep (full fado, Ariel).

The fumes are gray & sinuous

veins within rose

windowpane (chartreuse?) –

where a rustic yokel stems the breeze

like mast in steady gale.  He’s

smiling (thick mute mule,

dumb lamb).  You’ll

toss him in a hole – he slappim knee.

The frost hurls stern memorials

across blank mirror-ice

(in Mendelssohn).  Yet twice

& twice, bright eidelon... (loon calls).

6.13.16

Royal Oak

A few years ago I began digging into various writings on anthropology, from The Golden Bough forward & back.  One of many things which fascinated me was the resemblance between archaic kingship rituals, from around the world, and the rites of Christianity.  It's a strange way of putting it, I know - but in some ways it seems as though the early Christians had struck a taproot leading back into human prehistory.  The story of Christ's "kingdom" (or anti-kingdom) and sacrifice - his giving of his "body & blood" in the Eucharist - was like a reflection of prehistoric human social rituals.  The King always "stood for" the God, or the Source of all goodness : he was the channel of the life-force (anthropologist A.M. Hocart expressed this quasi-governmental role of archaic kingship in his classic study Kings and Councillors).

It's as if the Biblical testimony - itself stretching back into earliest Judaism, offering a cosmological picture of the source of life - was reflected in a kind of "royal seal" or template : a gold coin with two sides, showing Past and Future...

MOSES-KAYAK

The soul’s a kind of mirror, they

used to say – the old

mystical sheepfold;

you’ll find it on baptism day

refracted in an oval, seen

through water.  Incidental

angels rim the cave-wall

(all elongate, string-bean

apparitions, seraphim)

till harvest ripens

& a scythe descends

dividing wheat from empty flim-

flam... everlasting Judgement

Day.  That Galilean

gospeller, Samoan

wrestler, flipped oval Testament

into tight spring – a seventh wave

reversed the Jordan-flow,

the eye of Moses-kayak now

recursive back to Adam’s grave

(SW of Lake Victoria,

no doubt).  My Mirror Lakes

were Mendelssohn out-takes,

rehearsals for a Globe-historia –

the young king, hidden in an oak tree

still, waits for his mother’s

signal – climbs from a mummer’s

moth-shroud – floats to the Sea...

9.18.15

Descendant of the Royal oak at Boscobel House (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Something rich & strange

RIVER STREET

                                      i.m. Edwin Honig

That Bluejay with a raven on

his shoulder, that trickster

was a local fixture –

like cornered kid on stony Roman

pavement, Maggie.  Now you see him

in your mind’s eye, whom you knew

from streamy childhood (blue

was the mussel surf, where the Rephilim

stamped a sweet circumference

with giant feet). & Babe

the Blue Ox, & Gabriel

w’hm seraphim, & the fish fragrance

of White Bear Lake (miroir today)...

all the waters in the world

seem to coalesce now, pearled

to a cedar point of windy memory.

Only the shrill cree-crow of the tall

iron swing on River Street

reminds you of the weight

of all that autumn.  One free fall...

Weigh, anchor.  To the bottom you shall go,

infant infantryman –

loaded with diamond

mondiale.  A Seekonk conch will carry you

across her retina’s black sail, into

the womb of Imago.

Full fado five... just so,

Pessoa.  La vida es sueño.  Ephphatha.

9.4.15

Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox