the legend of Guillem d'Orange

CALM EQUILIBRIUM

The frail forsythia across the drive

is leafing now, sweet

milky gold.  Is life complete,

somewhere – some honeysuckle beehive?

The legend of Guillem d’Orange

seeped into the chansons.

Found its way to Stalin’s

cantons – Osip took an interest (étrange

poète – tel joie de vivre!).  Guillem’s

a distant relative, by way

of Negus ancestry –

West Branch an Ethiopia of idioms

& Quaker scattergood.  Small world

of planetary matrices…

– a world Guillem renounces

(adieu, Charlemagne) for cloistered

Provençal sea-cave.  Knight becomes

monk.  & shall Earth rest,

also? – quaint Jubilee bequest

someone foresaw, 3000 years ago?  Sums

multiply… an exponential calculus

bending toward vertigo.  Yet

Osip & Oscar Cullmann know

an elegant solution to the cul-de-sac (us

vs. Rus… general apocalypse).

The restoration in his Name

returns the Other to the Same –

after a darkened Holy Week’s eclipse

                     *

the Wolf shall lie down with the Lamb

& whom Jerusalem encrypts

shall meet Sophie – who skips

from sepulcher to Ghent (near Amsterdam)

to gaze from candid sheepish eyes

into the crippled stadium

(where waves of human tedium

crash against hate-riddled walls)… & rise!

I see that other monk, Franciscan-

Neapolitan Joachim – his spare

horsehair, daubing seraphim

& golden Thunderbird (tall plummet-plan).

Third Aeon of the Holy Ghost,

gyring… with restoration

in her wings.  A gravitation

from the grave – gift become host;

33 years of absolute devotion

(1099-1132)

framed by crane-bone flute

& Marsden’s Melville-crucifixion.

You wonder at my curious forgotten lore.

It isn’t hard to find.

Her golden fleece, refined

by fire, still shines from everywhere;

sheep in witch hazel, murmur-dove,

pearl beyond price… she is

forsythia of everlastingness –

calm equilibrium of Pax (justice & love).

4.8.20

your whiskey mule

IRIS-ARCH

The bulb in a wild Chinese lantern

is a bright orange berry,

edible, tart (very).

Little octagon amid the fern-

pine forest, summer Halloween

memento mori; lamp

in Thanksgiving pumpkin,

blood-orange earring for a queen.

My cedar gazebo in the rain

magnifies your painted

facets.  I’m your slanted

saint, beaming gray Bretagne

matière, like old Guillaume d’Orange

in his gelato-cool

Gellone prayer cell –

the armored ape (‘tis passing strange)

grown peaceable & rocky-mild.

Repentant berry-man

in shady homespun

camouflage (as orange span stilled

leaping crag to crag – a frisky

beggar-stag in Frisco

Bay).  My Lady, O

high-hearted votary!  Your whiskey

mule I’ll be – show stigmatized

tattoos you needled through

cliff-jagged river-scars to

radiant Pacific blue... baptized

                *

in Minnehaha Falls – by Manitou!

Her figurehead (surmised

miraculous surprise)

bobs like green fiddlehead, unfurling You!

Blue-green pine haze of Tian Shan,

whose snow-cone peaks

harbor bright lightning streaks

& pure transparency of oxygen...

be like her molten meteoric smile

my natal cog upon

whose wheel of rose spun

hurtling through light’s peristyle

into galactic congregations

sharing pain et vin –

Melchizedek’s Come in,

my wounded daughters – prodigal sons!

The berry, man, the berry lives,

though crypted in the cradle

of an origami grail –

sun of Manitou, sum of beehives!

That copper moss-green Lady

in the harbor lifts her torch

as an intelligible iris-arch,

so read the sign : her rainy-shady

smoke-signal, pine-scented candle

of a little tree – her fiery

omnipresent Amor, mirrory

agate Agape, all blumen (mandel).

5.17.17

then you shall have some pie

PIE SQUARED

Down by the Rio del Espiritu

Santo, the sun ignites

the pileated woodpecker’s

red-feathered crown.  The sky is blue,

the river flows, a serpentine

spark-shimmer, bending

rainbows to the engulfing

sea.  Dido’s shade will lean

forever toward the perimetric

oxhide rim of Carthage,

choking on her rage

with tears.  Dante’s epileptic

yearning for supernal Grace

paces her transcendental

number round a circle

of circles – like Angela Mace

Christian, or a greyhound, hunting

down that palimpsest

of muffled tracks (geist-

hand behind the arras bunting)

to find F. Mendelssohn at last –

well-tuned, unlucky sister

polishing her Easter

song (spliced to her brother’s mast).

& as my poem’s radius inches

toward her hemisphere,

its eigenvalues (fear

& hope) rhyme where it pinches

                     *

here in Mendelssohn, where children

in the shade of worlds

their parents made, unfold

a bruised & tender leaf-pattern.

The family circle is a dented

sphere.  Your twin cousin

became a ghost – the other one

a cryptic cosine (marginal)... prevented

on path P to blossoming, somehow

(obliquity of bad faith,

lack-love).  Now each wraith

in Dante’s bowl of wrath & woe

will step into your Mirror Lake

as into Galilee,

so you might slowly see

circumference of eternity – & make

amends.  Dido weeps by cave-door.

Moses goes home free,

his daughters over Lethe

summoned, as in play (Cleo,

Ophelia, Jessie...) by paddle-wheeler

quick, now, here, gone

like a Mississippian –

irrational Thanksgiving number

Guillem d’Orange (not neon, now,

but international,

beneath his Provençal

shade-grove) beheld – her wavy prow.

3.14.17

in the whisper gallery

BROKEN SHELLS

My mater’s feet, that spun the heavy

wheel of Red Wing clay

dancing with gravity

to shape a starfish gaiety

for these galactic lunch plates, pink

& blue & white... her Ravlin

hands (out of that Iowan

earth Quaker Negus trunk)

were muddy with the garden soil

of Minneapolis-

St. Paul... O this

most plain midwestern gopher hole!

The soul stages a circus act

of spacy time, perchance –

her gyroscopic balance

tops an unknown Planet X, in fact

& dream.  Mary’s crafty fingers

rhymed those blue-&-white

starbeams with one fleet

bathtub tug... her name lingers

in flame & memory (Sophie).

Like Firebird in the Russian

symphony, my swan-

boat swallowed up Eternity

consumed by cigarette-smoke blaze

in Petersburg poet’s

birdnest (Elena Shvarts) –

pipestoned into a purple haze.

                   *

I pace your clay circumference

in sleep.  My blind alley

or whisper gallery

is domed – an acorn’s happiness

or Okie’s California – inward

mother-of-pearl, bent

parallactic as a mint

wrapper... green mirror-bird

soaring from rusty copper frame

into the theatre of sky.

Your crossroad, ply on ply

flexed on sine-wave of Ever-Same

& in the dust of the Ecclesiast

of human brokenness

inherited faiblesse

& all the suffering, from East to West

one mighty spindly tree, one pine

of cloudy poetry

swirls, fiddlehead – sea?

Transmodulation of the sign,

en face!  To pivot on the least

of these... gray wing

of Jonah, mutely lifting

from the broken shells... the Beast

stung by remorse (Guillem d’Orange)

– stick figure of the Son of Man

familiar, somehow – someone

you must have met, somewhere... étrange!

1.18.17

Transfiguration of a maze

FOUR PINES

To imitate Francis, or Guillem d’Orange;

not to turn from the world,

but my own greedy churl

to whom the world panders (strange

profit in dust).  In the sweet flame

of yearning day-lilies,

to glimpse a dew-sprung rose

labyrinth... Love’s beckoning game.

Transfiguration of a maze of sighs –

of Giuliana’s longing,

Henry Cat’s sad reckoning...

all those winding trails of Psyche,

Ariadne’s ingle eye.  The far Gate

shimmers there, in Frisco Bay;

an M, as of a catenary

smile suspended, doubles you (checkmate);

your azure horizon draws its line

between twin vanishing points,

like pillars of four pines

feathered to a target (mine).

The wellspring of the soul is as

a lodestone (from beyond

the Milky Way).  Fond

depths of Holy-Land – Eureka-adze

or axis of the earth.  Bee-mouth,

hinge of honey-door

where uncreated light pours

through... sunbeam, raying north & south.

3.30.16