like a small town playground

LIGHT GOLD

The restoration of all things…

what’s it about this phrase

corrals my shifty gaze?

Some infant stimulus it brings?

As at the source of vast rivers

(Mississippi, Danube)

a baby spring’s hubbub

purls out of ground… shimmers

in bitter February air & light.

The restoration of a truth

too plain, too clear, to booth

as Peter would (its glare so bright).

Universal constant, Einstein’s measure;

flexible cinch-thread

of muttering light gold

sent to bind man, through rose embrasure.

Power’s byzantine – but truth Franciscan.

Peaceable polity

is founded in equality

chaste as a child’s eye (Petersburgian).

The restoration of the human world

is like a small town playground,

where the rusty sound

of an ancient iron swing is curled

within your inner ear.  You heard it

years ago, once… now,

again.  No one knows how

the goldfinch’s tricolor obsignat.

2.16.20

ancient West Branch watercolor

CURVE PRONGS

Everything gets more simple

in old age.  Trust me.

Thanksgiving pumpkin pi =

two stone pillars, plus an ample

roof.  Henry Mewl, hee-hawing

NNW (out of Apuleius)

checkmates template Isis 

planted in West Branch (settling

in river-bronze).  Like that watercolor

Mary Negus limned

in high school – skimmed

from unlocked memory (her

Grant Wood brain, a dusty library).

The curve prongs back to earth

west of St. Lou. – Ft. Worth.

Van Cliburn Plumbs to Victory.

I was walking up from the Mississippi

this afternoon, & met

(in Voronezh sunlight)

an ancient babushka, smiling at me.

Thinking of Nadezhda, & of hope...

of Mary Magdalen,

who witnessed Russian

irony in the garden (roped-

off Gesthem – Tsarskoe Selo).

The dream song blinks

until your lighthouse winks.

Wry rosy Providence (all systems go).

1.11.19

the rubles flow from here to there

SAND UNDERFOOT

A mouse ran across a bridge

one winter, in Leningrad –

his name was little Vlad.

He had a key, which was his badge.

He wanted to be Czar one day.

It made things easier.

When life got crazier

he took control – things were okay.

The rubles flow from here to there

in pockets of his underwear –

he makes a face, to scare

the other wolves (the sheep won’t dare).

He liquidated people in the way.

It wasn’t always easy...

Scotland Yard (like Stasi)

fingerpoints (Polonium 1-A).

The light flutes in another realm –

coral reef of seraphim

& monks on mountain rim

(Kievan polyphonic Argo-helm).

A scattershot of goldfinch tunes

or chords of Marian

sis-diva Anderson

lift off cimetière dunes

Pushkin or Berryman would know.

Sparse salty grass.

Sand underfoot, hélas.

A Black Sea seething, as of long ago.

8.28.18

to the Open Road

PINE-SAP

Hobo took to the Open Road,

from Minneapolis

to ancient Providence.

Like Mark Baumer, or Johnny Appleseed

or Pippin, off the deck of Pequod

unto lustrous ebony

of kings (their feathery

full fathom five... old sacred wood).

Gray tintype of elder Whitman,

stiff lead butterfly perched

on his hand.  We searched

for you, O monarch soul – your Plan

a prairie zigzag into Mexico.

Across the Rio Grande

to feathered-serpent land

pacing a shadow like raven-arrow

(Narragansett shade).  Crumbs

for Elijah-bird, Joachim-

eagle (from the seraphim).

Who plummets (wings like snare drums

thundering).  A way of traveling back

into deep green earth,

Hobo – measure your worth

for cedar berth (from Hackensack

to heavenly Jerusalem).  Transfiguration

chicken shack – here Hen

gathers his brood again

into the spare refectory (Franciscan

                *

cornerstone) where Piero limned

an emerald almond branch

lit by a thread (match-

fuse flaring) like sun-skimmed

honey-milk.  So Hobo burbles home

downstream.  The Gulf beckons.

Blue radiance of suns

(YHWH, YInMn) out of Pacific foam...

& in RI, in San Francisco Bay

orange arcs of rainbow

(mulitocular O-show)

fan skyward Hagia Sophia spark-display.

A yellow-black viceroy wavers

from Petersburg, southwest.

Grave resurrection, chaste

Akme-vision... dark cherry life-savers

Persephone crane-dances

limping to the spring.

Natasha’s creaky swing

for Julietta 484   rusty romances

when we dead shall rise   ghost-dancing

circling into the cloud

of dust   meek now, not proud

Frank Muleteer   Jennifer Sing-Sing

abracadabra... Alcatraz

rock flung from sky

become canoe   your eye

be dew   pine-sap    river to Paradise

5.31.17

compact Mayflower

ACCORD-HARMONIUM

Memorial Day.  The little flags

for birthday boys.  A vast

lime hillside park, just

north of Harriet.  My scraps & rags

of memory.  Twilight apartment

in the 50‘s (60 years

ago).  Mahogany.  Grandpa’s

brass shell from France.  The scent

of pipe tobacco.  Suntanned print

of Washington & Lafayette

skipping a minuet

après la Revolution... ancient

icons of a Constitution, hereby

animated (in the flesh).

How to start fresh?

For the remembrance of me...

for 1st Minnesota, Cemetery

Ridge (clumped there

after the last full measure).

Play with your toy soldiers, Henry.

Hawk-wrought republican scriptures

underwritten by compact

Mayflower... covenant

of friendly fellowship (yours,

mine, ours).  Underscored in turn

for soft flute melody

out of forgotten Gypsy

music-box, deep August forest (yearn

                *

for startled stars, green, coppery).

The absinthe reminiscence

of a Peto (Still Decades).

Time’s overrated.  It’s your history

that’s in your making, Liberty.

Out of Itasca spring

a major serpent thing

treads sinuous Welsh-knotty

tanglements, under lightweight bridge

(it’s only gravity) –

your shadow-play, Psyche,

Eurydice.  Reunion.  To the edge

of black-&-yellow double-eagle

eggshell canoe (viceroy

cocoon?) from stony

Petrograd (oscillate, seagull).

Black-orange monarch of your soul.

This little mustard seed

of pilgrimage (Venerable Bead

or Columbaa) will ravel up the whole

into an Okie safety catch of swinging

carousels – Francesca

slanting out of Rimini

(doggèd by Pound) is bringing

Beatrice in her wake – a hurricane

accord-harmonium,

an oriole some-hum bonum

renewing memories (Van Windowpane).

5.26.17

Hermione's return

MAYPOLE CALCULUS

The park bench by the Father of Waters

is Hobo Henry’s throne.

Where he comes to his own

like Leontes (late to his daughter’s

recovery, Hermione’s return).

That sidewinding father

plays hide-&-seek – with another

voice, another fleece.  Like someone

you met once, on the road to Emmaus

or St. Petersburg – sly

Queequeg, tricksy Bluejay...

warbling red Robin in burnoose

of raven-ink.  His tattoo labyrinth

the cave he trails from –

a smoky-flutey hum

folding the whole into a ninth

symphonic inning (end-beginning).

This personal boomerang

widens your gyre, bright Milky-

Zed – like a shadow slowly shrinking

toward your noon.  Come back again.

Global res publica

out of Exodus.  A prairie

equal sign, Mississippian –

grass salience across the river (Monk’s

Mound) still reminder

we were slaves once, here

(Dred Scott & Gateway Arch plunk

                     *

side by side).  Slaves kept by others,

& slaves to ourselves.

Whose arrogance resolves

into a Minotaur of rival brothers

(orange vs. black – harsh prison stripes

mirrored across scarce

monarchs, dense cedars).

Vlad in Kiev?  One of them types.

Or Nabokov, in camouflage.

A Frisco safety net

might bolt this Nut

who stretches out her flamande bridge

into an arch, over the Nile –

osprey transfigurement

of J to fundament

(her spirit flaming into smile).

This late romance, Leontes-Hobo –

some Pygmalion’s design –

lifted La Paix from Brooklyn

mud, with Liberté (moss-emerald glow).

Her incarnation of a crocus rose

& spun gold gyroscopes,

kalimba-periscopes –

around a Maypole calculus

of loving fingerprints, & penny-clues.

The Earth, in shadow of

one flighty Jonah-dove...

your arc of fellowship (King of the Blues).

5.1.17

 

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

the whole sweet Seine will glow

TINY BULB

A ghost of snow hung in the air

like glittering smoke.

Dusted from a hemlock

by a twirling jay – like nothing there.

Harsh cold rain goes crystalline,

shines in white waves

of domes (over sea-caves,

graves of grass).  Adamantine

turtleshell or judgement seat

of green sea-swell

beyond heaven & hell...

only a murmur makes complete

your copper frame, chère Liberty.

Emerald cicada husked

in tamaracks, at dusk –

vesture & camouflage for thee,

O soul set free!  Out of the spiral

gloom of time you come,

crown of the human kingdom –

like yellow-black spry swallowtail

up from your petrified cocoon,

or incognito monarch

skittering from ark

to ark (Amsterdam-Rangoon

Line – Mendelssohn to Mexico)

– or like a tiny bulb

planted in mirror-hub

of rose islands – blazing so

                *

bright the whole sweet Seine will glow

from end to end –

the safety net, my friend!

Jonah’s repast (Apollinaire’s tomorrow).

Thus the planet’s plain warm hearth

was set in diamond

& salt – with two kind

hands melded was gentle Earth

into a homely heart (Heimlich

maneuver from afar).

Gates cracked ajar –

the broken cistern, Cain’s conflict –

the Minotaur in every man –

the frozen ideologies,

bitter mythologies

of gulag-mind, in her began

to melt... the light played on the iron

spring... rust turned

green... mold burned

clear... the Psyche-lamp of Zion

lifted from the harbor.  Then

that fireplace couch of ages

in the molten kiln of sages

rose from black soil – crowed the Hen-

Cock!  Morning gathering beneath

the lighthouse surfaced

in your radiant face

O Matrix of candescent wreath.

12.13.16

in Red Wing

JOY-DIALECT

The great apes crouching toward the east

to meet the light

Cautantowwit in flight

southwest, southwest (a raven-feast)

echo the caw-caw over Noah’s ark

(breadcrumbs for Elijah).

The future is for Jonah

or for Jeanne to bear (as oak

from acorn weathers Thunderer,

Earth-Shaker).  From these

enormous clay crocks

of Red Wing pottery (grain elevator,

stoneware casque) one Blue Morpho

or ochre-black Monarch

skims toward blind Psyche-

park (houseboat for mosey-Hobo) –

when Hero rises from the womb

of Nile or Mississippi

like Huck, like Jim (she

will be free!) across the loom

of frozen rim (Troezen or Petersburg).

In Red Wing, Frances Densmore

heard the drums pour

rhythm underneath the river – bug

slant like water spider’s perfect

pitch-black whispering

through tympanum – sing

beyond ice-frame (joy-dialect).

11.1.16 

Frances Densmore exhibit, Goodhue County Historical Society Museum (Red Wing, MN)

Rock Candy Neva-Neva trail

LIMESTONE PROFILE

The little white cabbage moth

& the dragonfly, following

Hobo down his bumbling

Rock Candy Neva-Neva path

beside the river.  Past the bridge

nearly finished, almost

restored... some ghost

dance out of Petersburg (knowledge

from chaste vision – redemption

blooming like a morning

glory – everything trembling

at the dawn of time – the Galilean

tacking in the wind across the lake

zigzagging like a monarch

slanting orange-black

over sumac, milkweed – to be forsaken

& his cup to take)...  So the dream of a girl

is the grail of a dream, when

startled Magdalen

beholds him (where fern-worlds unfurl).

Like a fiddlehead figurehead, a nettle

Beatrice, the dream ramifies;

what was there always

unveils, the whole sweet kernel-coracle –

as Hobo finds his bearings in the smile

of a limestone Ursus profile,

in the lofty Milky Whale

of a firefly Jonah (rainbow trail).

9.6.16

all aboard the Midnight Sun

FROM MEMPHIS

O Lady walking by, in black

jacket & yellow skirt,

you lift me from inert

& vacant thought into a way-back

memory-milieu.  The Promised Land

of sunlight at midnight

is nest for monarch flight

& viceroys too (you’ll understand

when we get there).  The Milkweed King

is Hobo in disguise –

the motherland is prize

for steady Jim (gone huckleberrying

with Oblomov).  He walks gently

into rabid disputes,

young Nanabozo – toots

his horn – Rabbi-clown, my

Hiawathee Bigfootprints

of Peace; he’s taken down

in order to rebound

into renown, like Printemps

Spring-Rain Joan, or Franny Cricket

(she of jingling anklets

in the cedar dusk).

There’s earthy scent beneath the musket;

there’s a penny in the well.

A dinged wingèd profile

traipses from the Nile –

elopes from Memphis (into Israel).

6.1.16

hove-to before Frisco

LOAD-BEARING

Strong wind in Minneapolis

today, & slate-gray

clouds (stone solidarity

on high).  Big Wind, my father’s

nickname (Indian Guides).  I picked

West Wind.  Some air

in the ceremony there –

pre-Scouts, & pre-Socratic

too.  How a breeze shoulders a mountain

into laurel blossoms;

how one lilac sums

a people in a spell (for funeral train).

The Word-as-Such... the Word is such

for we who have passed over

Lethe.  It is more

than scent of orange – it is a torch

lit by shaping lips, a summons.

One hectoring nation

circles on its chain

thirsting for liberation... the romance

of Spring on earth.  It is only a turtledove

salience, a gray-feathered

stone from Petersburg;

just a load-bearing mule, hove-

to before Frisco.  & you are called to join

the company of saints –

where Livingstone faints

in swamps of cedar (violet, African).

5.23.16

Once upon a time

Once upon a time there lived a Mississippi riverboat captain, named Mr. Lawrence, who had two daughters, Jessie Ophelia and Cleopatra Desdemona (not kidding)... Jessie Lawrence married my great-grandfather, George P. Gould.

DELTA QUEEN

The hobo-poem stumbles out of Itasca,

a somno-ambulant mutter

just west of Superior

like a Nile-canoe in Minnehaha

or Thesée-en-Argo, lost at sea

in a maze older than time.

A stone-barrow, or lime-

burnt spacetime spruce-vortex (little tree

Apollinaire chased down in Paris

listening to Stravinsky

on the 29th of May).

Distant thunder... blessed senseless

mote.  What acorn happiness

coils beneath necrolithic

Moscow?  What lithe

Pocahontas limns Potomac offices?

Lightning rives gnarled raven limbs.

One glint from gold iris

shakes the paralysis

from icebound Neva aisles – low hymns

drone from limestone fish-caverns;

there is no place on earth

where Psyche’s sighing hearth

cannot ray lamplight (ask Jules Verne,

or Edgar Allan – ask St. Joan).

My Delta Queen glides on

toward perihelion

engulfing sorrow in her zephyr-zone.

4.18.16

A missive from Petropolis

DEAD RECKONING

In the clear winter light, the bright life

swings through memory

like steady Mississippi

viewed from a bridge.  My wife,

whispers a tottery unknown Schweik,

hugging his beloved

flak-jacket (bullet-

holes & all) – Maya Jhenna, that Mike

mumbles to Neva (ghost of a muzhik-

moosh)... my shining

inkling, engravening wing-

back turtledove... (nuncle be sick).

Awhile soul clap in jail, this bird

will penetrate the day –

a wormhole P-Jay,

serpentine (heart’s own sail-shroud).

Like Raven, still criss-crowing

over Noah’s bobble-head –

whose flinty beak’s dead

reckoning will note the gorgeous

hillside, blooming afar, over the sea –

so that prophetic castaway

(Hobo-Jonah) will play

black Orpheus to Coulombe-Bee;

a missive from Petropolis

(long-axled hasp)

plumbs Negrepontis –

limns Clio’s last golden gasp.

2.9.16

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Russia (label : subject/Russia).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

byt, Futurism, Glazov-Corrigan, Potebnia, Russian Ark, Russian art, Tom Epstein, translations, Tsvetaeva...

OK, moving along with our turgid pilgrimage, here's the Read-Along-with-Rest Note, for Poem # 6 (for those of you who are new to this, I am providing some mini-Cliff Notes to the ongoing poem, which you can read in installments there). Maybe these helpful hints will allow Jonathan or some other wanderer in Gould blog-jungle to solve the puzzler posted previously.

6.1 : "House of Ice" - see here for hysterical background. "We were married there..." - ie. we were (complacently) a part of this social construct, rooted in autocratic fantasy & whim.

6.2 : "Dreams are hash" etc. - one of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms. Combined with Hamlet, it sets up an amalgam of poet-prophet, one who flings jeremiads. "Something rotten in the state of Denmark."

6.3 : "table set amidst mine enemies" - this is a line from one of the Psalms, praising God for "setting up" the Psalmist in security among his foes. Here employed ironically, considering the "table" where Hamlet reached its poisoned denouement, as well as the table of the Last Supper. "Courland" - the little duchy ruled by Empress Anna's new husband. "Cour" - ie. heart-land : another glance at Hamlet, who at some point mentions the tables of the covenant written on his heart, which he must uphold. "A cup and signet seal" - the seal - his father's royal seal - which Hamlet used (on board ship) to foil his uncle's plan to have him executed. That seal is covenantal, "promissory".

6.4 : "we hushed ourselves, behind a hedge of speech". The poets, in general, fail to fulfill their prophetic, critical social role. "The Empress collected..." - because of this critical failure, society continues to move along in its fantastic clockwork fashion, leading to soldiery and war at the end.

6.5 : Both earth and sun wait for expiation (brooding, drowning, wayward). "the earth (formed long ago for everyone)" - something primordial countering the rigid, frozen social structures created by human beings.

Have been correcting that troublesome little piece posted yesterday. It may be a keeper, or not.

A replica of Empress Anna of Russia's elaborate "House of Ice", constructed in St. Petersburg around 1740, was built there last winter - article about it in last New Yorker.

Some think the House of Ice was partly responsible for some of Coleridge's images in his dream-poem "Kublai Khan". & that was the poem Teddy Roosevelt kept obsessively reciting as he was near death from fever in the Amazon jungle.

I'm trying to pull together various distant seasonal & weather & political threads into this poem which is focused for the moment around a sort of Lazarus figure emerging at springtime.

Regret the obscurities of this particular section. The line about the "table among enemies" is from Psalm 23. The bit about the promissory seal etc. is from Hamlet.

6

 
It must be cool inside the House of Ice
(stalactite pleasantry, in Petersburg).
We were married there, on a barge,
by decree.  The Empress flung the rice

 
herself.  The Patriarch was very nice.
We were as Swedes in Sweden (washed
and plush).  - "Dreams are hash!"
jabbed Hamlet suddenly, at minstrel mice –

 
thus endeth our parade.  A table set
amidst mine enemies (in Courland, wee duchy).
A cup and a signet seal.  Promissory,
sped across nimble floes (writ from the heart).

                 
                   *

 
We hushed ourselves, behind a hedge of speech.
The Empress collected dwarves, antiquities,
eunuchs, slaves (she loved the country
ditties, too), everything within reach

 
was reached for.  Tall toy soldiers
tumbled out of tumultuous versets –
uniform figures, in pungent vermilion
and puce, new-fangled armor... curious!

 
Along the brooding river, wayward light
dangled from a drowning sun.  So
the earth (formed long ago for everyone)
stoked her furnace for a rainy night.

Article in this week's New Yorker on the House of Ice (actually, a palace) built by Empress Anna in the 1700s & replicated last winter in St. Petersburg. Ochin interesnye.

Story of Pushkin, his poem The Bronze Horseman, & the Petersburg flood of 1824. How can I relate this to Katrina? Maybe I can't.

Elena Shvarts' memoir, Vidimaia Starona Zhizni, is made up of little 1-2 page sections. According to my Slavicist pal Tom Epstein, there's a section toward the middle about me. I'm a little nervous about reading it (I identify with those graphomaniac failed playwrights whose scripts her mother used to find hilarious) so I'm starting the book at the beginning, in Russian, which with me is pretty slow going.

The book was published in Petersburg a few years ago. It's a nice little red paperback. It took me a while to find a copy, through a Russ bkstore in Boston (Petropol).

Tom says Elena has also written a short story in which there's a character who resembles me named "Henry Silver". Then there's the poem about the seagulls meeting over the Atlantic, which I posted here in translation many moons ago.

So it's been a bit of a Russ-American literary game, when you think of all the versified epistles (epiphanies) I've sent her way.