April is the finickiest month

SMOKE PILLARS

April is the finickiest month, sunshine & snowfall

confusing the fiddleheads.  Atop the bluff

across from St. Paul, three tough-

soft Indian mounds are igloo-domical.

A little further down, the buried poet-man

dreams in Resurrection Cemetery.

& further yet, across from Eero’s airy

Gateway Arch, Cahokian terraces remain –

vernal ziggurat earthworks climb into sky.

The river moves in swerves… &

doesn’t move.  A copperhead,

unblinking, eyeing you… deciding – live or die?

Flanking that rushing flickering stillness

the mounds are more than motionless.

How… curious crowds can only guess.

Perpetual smoke pillars curse & bless.

Yet these temples are only an analogy.

Even the priests understood

that much.  The man tied to wood,

the woman in flames… perverse apology

in the bloodshed glass – recognition

forsaken.  Of the friend

nearby, who takes your hand…

(a glance to the heart, beyond perdition).

These vast mausoleums of bone & ash

frame unwavering grief.

Magdalenian memory, beyond belief.

& the light will not die (dwells in her eyelash).

4.13.20

where the spring is found

ROBIN HUM

This plaintive spring, like a lonesome robin

piping his distance at the riverbank.

Out of The Tender Land, I think.

The vast bronze river is one serpentine

vibration.  A continental vernal sign,

stretching with catenary smiles

from Lake Itasca to the marshy isles

off New Orleans.  & Hobo sez – all mine.

Dotted with gravity of local bridges,

1132 miles (up & down).

Their almond arcs a pontoon

cascade… cavernous vector of ledges…

climbing toward a flimsiest first whorl

of fiddlehead crowns

at the source of sounds –

where the spring is found.  All shall be well

& all manner of thing shall be well

when the blazing rose shall dwell

at the matrix of clay wheel,

& Thunderbird boom his bronze bell.

& the cry of the mighty bird & the sigh

of the river sound one octave :

unison, played in the key of Love.

For though I sing like angels & men… & though I

have all knowledge – all prophetic wisdom

of stars & planets, capitals

& kings – yet I have not caritas…

I am but sounding brass.  Hear Robin hum.

3.19.20

print on linen by Grace Tagliabue & Phoebe Gould

like a dream

BLIND EYE

Like a dream in the womb, in the mind of a maid

before all things were made.

Came naturally, she said

when the foundations of reality were laid.

Providence, burnished by smoky November.

Like a canoe on the edge

of the cataract of knowledge...

at Prospect Terrace.  You remember.

Roger Williams, sturdy son of man.

Dark grayish blue

Hope Diamond, you

whisper (below junk jewelry scams) your plan

for Providence.  Triangulated eye

over the Mammon-pyramid.

Re’s Eye, long hid

in our blind eye – to crucify,

Henry (in RI).  That woman in the wilderness

of last things (Chinese vase

still circuiting her stillness).

French, blue, Jeanne.  Fiery duress...

Only a child’s distress.  Cordelia.

Le coeur de Lear, de l’ear...

Coeur de Lion, here.

Skinny crane-bag (of ocean spray)...

St. Paul’s most blazing eloquence

out of heart’s Pig’s Eye.

South of the city –

Mississippi limestone (fossil evidence).

11.16.18

banquet at the end of time

PUSHKIN MOVE

The banquet at the end of time,

the invitation read –

the living & the dead

to celebrate.  This pantomime

of solemn feasting they perform

beneath cavernous timbers

(burnt resinous embers)

foreshadows that preternatural storm

of joy, tasting our expectation –

when Eli’s empty chair

so hopeful (floating there)

is overflowing with affection

once again.  As we well know,

observes bright Magdalen –

beseeching, in the garden,

gardener (raw moon of woe).

& what it all may mean for Hobo

Hank, lazing out

his salvation-boat

conundrum (Solipsism, ho!)...

Can it be can-do canoe?

If anyone thinks they

know anything (See

St. Paul!) they’re in Pig’s Eye

sez he.  My inconsequence

is like a Pushkin move;

chess is like love,

government... clear as Providence.

9.16.18

crest of Summit Avenue

DIVERS STARS

Brune muscle-bound mansion of J.J. Hill

on the crest of Summit Avenue

surveying the valley where two

rivers join – where the railways spill

from St Paul to Seattle (Great

Northern empire, spread

with iron & steel).  O head

taskmaster, engineer, we celebrate

Twin Cities’ renaissance beneath

your wood-burnt work desk

(Richardsonian Romanesque) &

spiderweb of railroad ties (gold sheath

of Gilded Age gloaming, applied

so lovingly above

the banquet table).  Move

across the river, where they hid

Rez Cemetery on the bluffs.

There Berryman is buried

too (J.J. expired

on a May 29th).  Henry still huffs

& hovers overhead.  Clouds bank

their gray matter in shapes

like dolphins, angels... apes

ape each other, rank on rank

while divers stars shed Ocean light.

From Romanesque to Gothic

unison, one fractured brick

serves as keystone – wound tight

                 *

as Daphne or Coatlicue

rooted in broken clay

await another day

when Churnagogue stirs milky

honey   & Apollinaire

attends his Rite of Spring

uncoiling everything

like smoke from Calumet (a Bear?).

Old poison lingers in the verbal mold.

The Sack-a-Jew sad cruiser way

shone from St. Louis ‘til today –

Lewis & Clark & our New World (behold

the Old).  Shoshone shone her pilot

smile, O Sacajawea.

Solid light, our Bona Dea;

stars’ Primavera (bolting nut

arced out of nought).  She dances there

in place of sacrifice –

her graceful feet efface

the facade over the serpent’s lair;

she is the Jonah from the Ocean depths

who croons grey wavy shapes

for blind eyes   leaps

with a Nazir tambourine   & skips

a cartwheel through the broken glass

spoking a Morning Star

within that tender rose   O far

Pacific angel door   lamb-glowing Mass

3.28.17

traveling Walter Whitman

ALMOND-SEAL

A luminosity of grays

above the winter river.

Bands of peach, & silver.

A quiet surge past Pig’s Eye,

which became St. Paul.  John

Berryman sleeps on a bluff

nearby.  Once is enough

for everyone (a long time gone).

One casket will suffice.  Paul

was Saul once; an orange

angel flared so strange

his blade curved into burial.

He felt the change upon his skin.

So Queequeg tingled

where the needle angled

in.  The tattoo (Ecuadorian

gold) blood-red – indelible

recapitulation

(via serpentine

Cain-crozier) of Abe-Ape’s edible

ancestry (just incredible).

The primate history

of human mystery

incarnate in a star (blind, Oedipal)

                   *

who fell to earth, not far from here.

& like Walt Whitman, wandered

swamp-deltas... milk-&-honeyed

Hobo meadows... (poplar, cedar)...

all the way to San Francisco.

Golden Gate grandeur

sparkling orange-azure

not one whit less marvelo

than Solomon’s Templo.  Yet neither

will surpass one friar wight

who flutes across deep night

his piccolo arpeggios (Breather-

Bro to Sister Sigh-Nature)

lifting his humble sign’s

Venetian-blind design

beneath that glory-span – sheer

delicatesse of silver threads

raveling safety net

for one slight violet

(shorn, scarred by callous crowds).

She is your Imogen, who keeps

weight balanced on a wire;

fleet-footed candlefire,

light houseboat over frosty deeps,

your witty Sophie – at the wheel

of supernatural law –

sailing toward Awe

full-smile (lips compassing her almond-seal).

1.11.17

A ruffled mirror

INFANT BIRDS

In the ruffled mirror of the lake

scatter sibylline shards

of ice-light – winsome chaos

fabulating carousels a child might make.

To the attunement of a ball of clay

dissolving into Mendelssohn

spring mud – spry union-

unison of infant birds (with day).

It cannot last, cry Paul & Augustine.

Yet lasted long enough,

croons woodman Joseph’s

son – justifying all her children.

Afternoons of used-up antique men

shift with shy Psyche –

hope to melancholy,

grief to resolve (determination).

Dusk filters into codex ink.

The dapple of the harbor

shrinks to one iron

anchor, parallactic (in the drink).

Yet teeming Earth still whispers

its new whorl – the mind

rewinds, sea-myths unbind

their clams.  Heroes (Coke, Roger)

ripple in the river, over the rim

of light birch canoe;

Psyche’s eyelids flicker too,

tap signals from tall Joachim.

12.4.15

Grace Ravlin, Gloucester (ca. 1920s)

Celan 1 December

Read a few poems by Paul Celan at lunchtime. Experienced that mysterious & very special Celan-effect : the sense that out of extreme frailty come words of great strength & encouragement. Not so much for the poet himself, but for the reader. Reminded me of that phrase in one of the letters of his namesake, the Apostle (himself quoting the prophets somewhere, I guess) : "my strength is perfected in weakness."

So often it seems Celan's addressee is Mandelstam. Not only in the book Die Niemandsrose (which is saturated with Mandelstam). But say for example in this poem from the book that followed, Atemwende - the poem which begins "IM SCHLANGENWAGEN...", which Michael Hamburger translates as follows :

IN THE SNAKE CARRIAGE, past
the white cypress tree,
through the surge
they drove you.

But in you, from
birth,
the other wellspring foamed,
on the black
jet remembrance
dayward you climbed.

I think this poem can be said to be addressed to the victims of Hitler, the victims of the 20th century. But I surmise there's also a specific subtext here, a poem of Mandelstam's (one from Tristia), which begins "Upon a sled laden with straw." The poem sketches a scene of the "young Tsar" being taken away on a sled or wagon, in the midst of his persecutors, to execution.

cf. the NT (Paul's epistles?) phrase - regenerate, spiritual humanity as "living stones".