in the zigzag brambles

A GAP

The effect of insight is a sway

of blindness.  Hobo stumbles

in the zigzag brambles.

Fractured fractal frater Francese

camouflaged beneath the Franklin Bridge

(Brownian motion

through a brown mountain

of thorny lozenges & Persian sedge).

The little we see is like a microdot.

A pimple on an eager

pupil – light more meager

in the spokey distance than we thought

– a black hole at its vanishing

girdled with gold penumbra.

His hairs are all numbered,

Galla... fine fit for banishing.

& out of Purgatory rose the diamond

circled by dark chocolate figs

in Sydney.  Wisdom’s digs

are Solomon’s life-shade (moribund

quincunx in the quipu knot);

mild oil of Cyrus

poring shaky chess

wi’ Vladimir, in Paradise (not

Petersburg – Neva). & milky

black, El K arrays

6 ribbons in a Coke display –

the cosmic fizz is finished, Blackie

                    *

Pushkin (Abyssinian catastrophe).

I sense a communion

in an eyelid’s tear-borne

Rimini.  Her ruffled water-symphony,

her Moth Star – bracketed by wagon-

train or Charley-horse –

rose (by reverse Morse

code, or languish tombsk) to fill a flagon

slithered by play claw (dogwood

& oaken twig matter,

merged in a stream-mutter

toward Troezen crown).  Shivered

the Quaker grave.  Some Isis-ghost

of prodigal Ox-Iris lifted

Isaac from the scripted

crumb – some rose Mosaic host,

some chorus of arboreal grief.

Pacific prescience,

aquiline benevolence

ring from that innocence (belief

by kid in Hart’s magnanimous

Columbia-flow).  A simple

crossroad marks the ample

shadow every Geraldine or Uncle

Roger filed, & Dickey bird loves

just this – reciprocal

acknowledgement of all

a gap entails (Thanksgiving doves).

3.29.17

Minnehaha's moccasin

SPIRIT-WOOD

                             i.m. Edward Lewis Peckham

Step lightly in my mother’s house,

whispered a tiny elf

named ELP – himself

a watercolorist (a yellow lady’s

slipper’s footprint left the forest

on this day).  Cypripedia

reginae – Minnehaha’s

moccasin – graced this wilderness

as well, making a pair for Joy

& Beauty (graces

almost three).  Time paces

seasoned out of winter, so employ

your dancing shoes, fiery Hiawatha –

roll like Polar Bear

around that pinpoint star,

sing like a loon, like your happy

father (Thalia-glad).  Nature

& Manitou join hands;

a Turtledove blends

sea-sounds, all about green Eire;

urn burials, gardens of Sirius

swim synchronizing

rhombs on monarch wings

(a rugged Paradise for ladybugs)...

one dance-call through spirit-wood

or jadestone flute

sows dreams of Camelot

(like waves of wheat around a vineyard).

6.9.16

*Note : Edward Lewis Peckham, Rhode Island artist and naturalist, painted a watercolor of Cypripedium parviflorum - Yellow Lady's Slipper - on this day in 1866, 150 years ago.  See illustration here from the Rhode Island Historical Society.

White Rose sets in the west

SHADOW-WELL

George Washington was born today;

Sophie Scholl was killed

as well.  Her cup was spilled

in order to brim up the bloody

mystery of iniquity that is

our history – an epic-

georgic bio-pic

or tragicomedy (blind Theseus

meets Ariadne in a maze

of corn – assumes she’s

golden Taurida... FINIS).

Wings waft into a purple haze.

The moon belongs to everyone.

She set this morning through

a window shade (pale blue

the air, drawn up from Galilean

shadow-well).  This labyrinth

contains a Minotaur

indeed – his name your

own.  The light is very thin

within retaining walls of iron

chicken-wire (chain link);

quincunctial conjunction

for plowman (Sir Thos. Browne).

Wisdom B. Justified (in all 

her children).  Madre moon

sheds rain upon human

travail... silvers the plow (selah).

2.22.16

Moonset, 6:35 a.m. (Minneapolis)

Your Persian paradise

LOST PHOTO

Spotty grackles swarm the dogwood,

chatty starlings nibbling

scarlet berries, quibbling

around each drooping leaf (old

ruddy father).  They traipse a happy

nonsense o’er the remnant

garden.  Sir Thomas Browne,

strum softly til I end my Rhody

nap (it won’t be long).  Your Persian

paradise (precisely drawn)

will do for Gödel, Dante –

not so simple to sketch that Abyssinian

abyss, encircling the human plow

through history.  Your soul

is touched by lost photo

whose courteous artist limns her now –

an April child glimpsed through November

shades (All Souls, Grandpa).

One unicorn grace, selah.

O woe to me, that scarred the moon (her

face still gleams from autumn grass).

A soft Franciscan Rimini

rhymes in the memory

of your basilica (on ne passe pas).

Dear evening Matilda, 1-3-2...

(Beethoven, fowled & quartered –

decussation – weathered

sprite).  All shall be well, hums Manitou.

10.5.15

laundry line, old lilac, light Brownian diamond

Rhody backyard I must leave ere long

Lanthanum, 7/4

Here's something from the 2nd volume of Lanthanum (drawing toward the center of the poem, now...). I'm only posting this because I can't imagine any magazine wanting to publish this very obscure passage... (p.s. "soul liberty" was a phrase Roger Williams used to characterize his notion of freedom of conscience. & the bit about "Cyrus" draws on Sir Thomas Browne's wonderful & justly famous numerological-botanical essay titled "The Garden of Cyrus". & "perfect rune"? Well, in a sense this refers to the number 28, the number of lines in this poem, which is a "perfect number", & has long been associated with the lunar calendar).

6.2

Quiet, all quiet... the
boom of last night's fireworks giving way
to sunny Sunday, 7/4. Soul liberty,
he said - only a single secret path through the

labyrinth. Its perfect rune, rhyming
with lofty, solitary moon (not white
not black, but dappled by limestone light
that shines before stars start wandering)...

one seven added to those fifty stars
that shimmer in the haze of history -
for sabbath-day, for Jubilee - really
one red & cardinal number (yours)

for wedding memory & justice (everywhere).
Cyrus planted a garden once, to celebrate
Earth's intricate flourishing (a quince quintet);
the center of the world, enclosèd there,

was calm (slight violet eye, beholding
hurricane). It was his grandmother, calling;
it was his grandfather, responsive, echoing;
before Cyrus was born, before Time began -

a wedding-song, a dream, a constancy.
An octave note, for makings of one family
from reconciling tribes, & tyrants finally
dethroned - bell-booming independency

on earth, as it is... in Cyrus's garden;
when the milky light at last reigns equally,
& fifty stars are seven sisters (really
one star, one limestone pentagon...). & then...

7.4.10

If you go to the preview of Lanthanum, & look at the 1st poem, I'm happy to see how the beginning (including the snow in line 1) predicted my daughter's cover photo. But I'm thinking especially of line 19. (The shade there, in the picture, is the shade of the bridge.) Forms a sort of "decussation" (cf. Sir Thos. Browne)...

Josh mentions Jonathan Ivry's paper on "Zukofsky's Quincunx". I hope Ivry noted the classic literary source on this subject, Sir Thos. Browne's essay The Garden of Cyrus.

Maze/garden/chessboard. Thos. Browne, Borges, Lewis Carroll, Poe. (Not to mention Nabokov, & "The Tempest".)

Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted! - E. Poe, "To Helen" (Helen Whitman, who lived on Benefit St., down the hill from here.)

"Poe. . . a minor poet. . . who engendered Baudelaire, who engendered Mallarme, who engendered Valery, who engendered Monsieur Teste." (Borges)

Gabriel!!!! (you're not reading my BLOG!!!!) The Conchologist's Text-Book, 1833, by Cap'n Thomas Brown, which I ordered for the Library a few weeks ago, has arrived!!! This is the Volume that someone calling himself "Edgar Allan Poe" (re)published in Philadelphia, giving Himself as Author!!!!

I quote from page 48:

Helix arbustorum - The Grove Helix.  Plate IX. 
fig.22.  Sub-glubose, sub-pellucid, with five volutions; mottled 
with ash-colour, and streaked with deep chestnut zigzag lines; 
a single deep brown band commences at the edge of the outer 
lip, and continues round the middle of the body and the 
volutions to the apex; 3/4ths of an inch in diameter.  
Inhabits groves in Britain.

EAP clearly ripped off the sexiest book in the English language.

Joe writes:

"Henry, if what you say is true, it is an even more cynical view of the administration than the one I've been advancing. It is the lie calculated & perfected. If it is true I expect to wake up tomorrow morning & discover that I have become a large insect."

Well, it's probably not true. (& for your sake, I hope not, Gregor.) Our exchanges are impelling me to look more closely at the neo-Straussians et al. There must be a worldview for American politics & foreign policy which is not so elitist & reactionary (in the sense of reacting against threats to dominance).

Have been reading Sir Thos. Browne, Religio Medici. Certainly not a political thinker. An amateur religious philosopher & essayist who meditates on the meanings of mortality, faith, salvation. Curious paradox comes to mind, reading him : there is no path to the betterment of world conditions without unworldliness.

How so? I guess it must be a medieval outlook - which differentiates it from the classicist worldliness of the powermongers. What is this medieval outlook? Awareness of human fallibility & mortality. Life in this world an illusory stage-play. Only relief is the paradoxical gift of eternal life through the project of soul-salvation. (This is a meaningless absurdity to many, and I hesitate even to post it here. You have to see it, recognize it in the fabric of reality, inwardly, to believe it.)

So the common good is balanced on a vanishing point : a Lenten awareness of our limitations on earth and our hope in eternity. The stereotypifying (Renaissance) critique of this medieval perspective is that unworldliness leads to fatalism & disinterest in world improvement. But there's another aspect to it : the same awareness leads individuals to moderate their pride, fear, vanity, ambitions and passions to a transcendent, charitable end.

So, enough sermonizing for today. Browne is a lovable writer, inimitable stylist. Makes me ready to read Donne's essays & Geo. Herbert. Boy do I sound like Ol Possum today. Maybe it's spring rain outside. Providence is full of flowering trees.

Sir Thomas Browne was born on Oct. 19, 1605. He died 77 years later on the same day.

Recommended reading : Religio Medici.

But then : "Let your Yes be Yes and your No No, all the rest cometh from Evil."

& yes, Gabriel, I like Sir Thomas Browne too ! see here. . .