in the Grand Army of the Republic

CLEAR BREEZE

Hank limps onward, like a lost private

in the Grand Army of the Republic

through swamps above Nilotic

Memphis – or plug of gneiss granite

broken loose from Superior shoreline

(euphoric azure of sea air

lifting over the spare

curves of rusted railroad iron).

We carry so much indifferent amnesia,

sleepwalking across Earth.

A measureless unplumbed worth

overshadows our shadows (ecclesia

del girasole… sunflower’s rotation

in the silence of Ravenna

backwater).  Antenna-

headed cave figures, in Papillon

foreshadow these elongate, lantern-

eyed hierarchs of grace –

a shadow ladder, on a base

of basalt (box-within-a-box of Lincoln

logs).  A matryoshka puzzle toy

from Kiev, or Constantinople;

an emerald imago of all people

in mild irises of Maximus (old boy-

martyr).  Matrix, crosshair lens –

vertigo of San Francesco

whorled to the point of zero,

razor-sharp.  Star of St. Stephen’s,

                  *

or the sea.  Is shadow-hero

of millions of shadows, round-

about… perceptible ground

or incarnation of your own heart’s

broken-down ego (melted to music).

Is Jonah of your ocean,

Columba… is feminine

Adonai of Morning Star (mystic

bloom, afloat over Cahokia).  Is

Gateway steel of your

clear breeze, Superior –

Osiris to your adamantine Isis

(Psyche-Amor).  In Ford Theatre

the violence comes to a head.

A Service of the Dead

melds Abraham to one frail butterfly-

phantom – one solidarity of soul.

Whim’s monarch, hoboing

from Mexico, to spring

the news… Pinetop’s True-Loving Honor Roll.

In the heart of the heart of hearts

where all the waters start,

we’re no longer apart –

little acorn coracle sea-charts

mark the almond center of the diagram.

Here the luminous shadow

smiles out of clay wheelbarrow,

& love never ends (warbling I AM).

2.11.20

& know the place for the first time

STEEP HEART

The mystery of the Incas, how

they filed those giant stones

at the top of mountains

into close-fitting knots (above, below).

The slim knife-edge, the penetration.

On behalf of balance,

lamb-tethered violence...

one must die, for the sake of the nation.

Something about moss-covered stone,

arctic lichen.  Colors

on a rough-hewn wall (yours,

mine).  Collage of blood & bone.

Memory, mother of muses

lead me back to your

stone milk-splashed door.

Ancient well-bench (sea-roses).

The eunuchs of the kingdom come

& go... their simple habit

underneath the gibbet

simply to repeat the sacred OM.

Alpha, Omega.  History unwinds.

He’s humble, sheepish

as a goat – Ish-

mael, or Solomon.  Pay him no mind.

The one thing that happened, historically

was that an innocent nobody

became king for a day.

Steep heart, remind me... let us pray.

12.15.18

stone, water, light, fire

DOUBLE RING

The agitations of a stone thrown in the stream

make ripples that become

a smooth continuum

of moving wheels.  One Gothic beam

draws light through stone and water –

blending elements

into high bafflements

of rainbow glass, mind with nature

beyond nature, reason with wonder.

Agnes – her exacting threads

trace Ariadne’s leads

through wilderness of sea & thunder.

Grant – his strange & strict constructions

spin a decussated

dream landscape – fated

black dirt looming beneath confections

of late sunset West Branch foliage.

Why, then, this mirage

of images?  The poet’s rage

wells from embodied fury – & her voice

– Arachne’s, Ariadne’s – is mortal

as that scar-calendar

of dread Coatlicue

unsnagged by force from Mexican corral.

Her poem is cast-iron Poseidon-net

straight from the furnace,

thus : a human face

veiled by the smoke of calumet

                     *

morphing brute fraudulence to peace,

transmuting blank white

voids to violet

& moss-green habitats of paradise.

St. Maximus Confessor, musing

monk, articulated

in theory what unfolded

in reality – fusion of divine choosing

with human liberty in understanding,

in enactment, as the spirit

moves us : radiant

tangle of wheels into a double ring.

All spokes are joined there, in the personal –

as in a room near Golgotha

babble turned glossolalia

& tongues aflame lit one bright coronal.

The poet chants out of that mental fire

& dances like a Nazirite

her intellectual delight

inviting you & me to join the choir

around that altar of a rolling stone –

a living hearth-fire

of the Earth’s desire

for equilibrium, once we throw down

the Minotaur lodged in our hearts.

Malevolent violence & lust

& greed for dominance must

be renounced... & so the dancing starts.

7.17.18

quiet end of the year

LOVE’S CAVERN

At the quiet end of the year,

among the barn smells

a chilly infant wails –

a refugee.  Shepherds draw near.

He is king.  His mother is

queen.  His father is

a mule-driver (was,

anyway) – Vietnamese,

I think?  They live in Egypt now.

They’ve never seen Ghiberti’s

Gates of Paradise –

that brazen lava overflow

to metamorphoses of fiery dream

and rock – sedimentary,

igneous, flickery...

roiling sun to spring, upstream;

they’ve never been to Providence

or heard the Rose Ensemble

whose violas tremble

with harmonious transience...

they live the poverty of innocence.

Light flickers in a manger.

Someone senses danger –

cows murmur, chickens grow tense...

enormous shadows of the monster-men

leer over flesh & blood.

It is the shadow of the rude

star burning in the last heaven

                  *

– the red star, bringing rectitude

out of the mild mien

of that child-man –

incarnate stony magnitude

heavy past sullen measurements

of every swollen tinpot

despot in his chariot.

Matrix of cosmic elements –

the figure of a man emerges,

burning in brazen tongs

and glossolalia of tongues

from every tribe.  Sea surges

multitudinous, incarnadine...

Ocean called universe

forging one verse

with arches (catenary, almondine).

So combers crested in a tower –

moonbright Witch’s Hat

tenting her desolate

oak-limbs (snowy owl’s bower).

Quetzalcoatl, brazen serpent,

lift each refugee of time

into your feathered rhyme

of flame.  Your flicker-tongue, sent

dancing into each soul’s paradigm –

the sparkling river, bent

back to its fundament;

Love’s cavern, salting every lime.

12.23.17

sleek as raven-eel

LICHEN DOME

The last snow before Easter.

Sophie’s footprints etch

a squarish spiral sketch...

still photo (lento, Bruegelish faster).

From long distance, every

bird’s-eye view can fuse

with every other (sans

confusion).  Each waltzing orrery

links hands in Sydney – under those figs

whose natural majesty

anchors her panoply,

a fractal Dr. Octahydra (sky-digs

of Southern Cross, O dusky lady).

Bends toward akme

of the starfish now, Henry.

Meteor Hurtle Aboriginal Day.

The stone fell (odd fellow, ultramarine).

Fey otter – furry,

sleek as raven-eel –

into the gilded net of Saarinen

(Sibelius?  Some other fin).

Architrave swept (over

canoe).  Windhoover,

agile Harry Grizzly (buoy-woman,

boo-hoo – smoking Camel,

him calumet).  A Caliban

or Cain (Abel).  A Son

of Man – sad Prospero (blithe Ariel

                  *

is in the pine).  Where be the porpoise

here, Dauphin?  Your plow

scratches the surface now.

Her keen lengthens toward Paradise

(swell memory of Outremer).

The palm-lines slacken,

ease... shade thickens then

toward Wingy Rock (you know where,

Coatlicue).  The cedar forest

where the monarch dies,

lives.  Memorize

my speech, for its spooky taste

of dead bees (Finnish sacrifice).

There’s the arch, like

a prow (turn on the mike

now).  Spin the jenny, throw the dice.

Snow mantles the martyr’s tomb.

Green lichen dome

where breakers foam

from galaxies of Mendelssohn (home

run).  I don’t know where to go

from here.  The scared poem

swims down Rio del Hum

until your blues become a hollow

rhumba-Rome (flight-bud unknown).

Whispers vespers... purrs.

Her bop-team be yours,

egg-woman (inner-tube pontoon).

4.11.17

alongside the canoe

SHIP’S EYE

John Slocum fell into a swoon

in the sea-tinged woods

by Puget Sound; his words

of hope shook many Shaker men

out of their sins.  Sparks fly far

from cedar blaze – the sea

booms in a ship’s eye

lashed by yardarm to the polestar.

It’s not the size of the cosmos

but the color of the scales,

gilded when dawn pales

rippling on ice-floes

across the horizon, back to Ocean –

over hide rooftops

sun-parched corn crops

in the jungle (Squaxin, Galilean).

When Davy the Song Prince pranced

alongside the canoe

Maggie saw what she knew

was hers, & grew embarrassed –

yet her almond eye looks to the sea

& the song endures.  A stone

fell from turtle-grey heaven –

the flare of a meteor, a mystery;

an infinite cloud-bank shaped like wing

a feather of ring-dove

signifying love

left brush-marks down by Slocum Spring.

9.26.16

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

I wonder if that "pebble cabinet" I liked so much in the Guggenheim Russian show was, in part, a sly nod to Mandelstam. There are so many "stone" & pebble images & themes running through his poetry! The "stone fallen from heaven", the stones along the Black Sea shore, the "unloved grey pebble" (unknown soldier), the sand sifted from hand to hand (in the poem for Tsvetaeva), the stones of Roman builders & other architecture, the title of his first book (Kamen, "stone", acronym for AKME), and so on.

Sarah's German tutor (from Russia) gave us a box of (terrible) Voronezh chocolates for the holidays - she said "Henry will like them". Well, I liked the brand name. I asked Sarah to bring my copy of the Voronezh Notebooks to class tonight, & have her read the last poem out loud ("To Natasha Shtempel") in Russian. I hope it wasn't too much to ask.

Synchronicity, huh.

Stones, sculpture... I got home after another granitic day at "The Rock", where I spend my days [ja privistu maia dnei?] & found this week's New Yorker in the mailbox, with a really terrible poem by William Logan, and another poem by Billy Collins, about statuary [contains the word "plaque"]. I enjoyed his poem in the way I enjoyed an iced caffe-latte from Dunkin' Donuts, which I never do, but I was with somebody (Jim Chapin, from the band, who drinks them every day - we were talking about Otto D'Ambrosio...). The poem is somewhat Whitmanesque - ingratiating, but without the balls...

Here's my counter-NYorker poem (from Stone, 1979):

Statue standing grey in summer rain,
wrinkled stone worn by many seasons,
brow, shoulders, backbone full of purpose,
memory shivering in the roar of battle,
emblem of endurance everlasting,
lasting now in peacetime summer rain.

 
Rising in the shadow of the trees,
mist of thoughts returning from the dead,
comes to life within the broken heart,
comes to join the living and the dead,
statue of the mystery of glory,
statue standing grey in summer rain.

tomorrow, maybe, I start my "found poem" series...

Poetry is dumb, certainly. Intransitive. Mute. Dense. OM's bit about the modest, unassuming (gray-pebble) exterior, containing within a "terrifying density".

Title of his first book : Kamen (stone). (anagram of Akme : summit, quintessence - ie. Acmeism).

(title of my 1st book : Stone)

I'm obsessed - in my own illogical & unsystematic way - with a particular subject : the way(s) in which a person moves from scepticism or agnosticism to belief. This has been one of those fixed points or idees fixes around which my ruminations have oscillated, since the time of this adventure (& before).

A person moving from doubt to belief is like someone moving from thought to action - because a whole way of interpreting reality, along with a potential avalanche of active commitments, stem from that initial step. How this comes about - in what circumstances - can entail, obviously, some very dramatic (life-affirming, or life-threatening) consequences.

The language of belief, without that primary opening or accession, leaves the listener unmoved, untouched, unconvinced (or oppressed by a confidence he or she doesn't share).

I'm interested in the ruminations of Coleridge & Stevens (or Nicolaus Cusanus) on the impact of imaginative (theological) concepts. In their sense of a relation between vision, on the one hand, and human freedom & dignity (autonomy), on the other.

The imagination can become an end in itself; but that's not the same thing as faith. The ruminations about the mystery of belief are only a subset of the ruminations on the mystery of God per se.

"God" is a concept which tends to bring the mind up short - blocked, confused, stymied, befuddled. At least this has been my experience. One has to live with it for a few decades to become slightly more confident in some slight measure of understanding (or the illusion of same).

I've found the notion of analogy or proportion to be very helpful in this pursuit of the illusion of knowledge (cf. Cusanus, On Learned Ignorance). I mean the golden proportion, or "dynamic symmetry" (the fibonacci sequence being one example). To wit: in a shape divided into two parts, the relation of the smaller to the larger part is the same as the relation of the larger part to the whole shape. (As a result, we have a spiral of infinite (proportionate) expansion, or contraction.)

What does this have to do with God? It's connected with the ancient notion of humankind as Imago Dei. The figure that humanity makes on earth - self-conscious, creative, constructive, hopefully merciful & wise - this "abstract image" of Man in general - is "analogous" to the figure of God. As Man is in relation to time and the earth, so God is in relation to eternity and the cosmos.

(The analogical image - going back to the Greeks, the Hebrews, & Byzantium all together - underlies much of the musing of Stevens, Coleridge... Mandelstam too. Cusanus played it brilliantly from at least 2 directions - ie. "Between the finite & the infinite there is no proportion..." etc.)

This basic architectonic of theism might possibly open the door to more profound mysteries ("salvation history"). & yet it takes more than a beautiful mathematical proportion to convince a sceptic to believe in the existence of a benevolent Creator. & this question - this uncertainty - this riddle - is precisely where the path of the individual seeker, ruminator, cogitator, meditator, reasoner, intuitor, experiencer - the selva oscura of each personal mind & heart - sets out.

Mandelstam, from his first book (Kamen = "Stone" - trans. by Merwin/Brown):

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

 
Emperors try to rule that,
priests find excuses for wars,
but the day that place falls empty
houses and altars are trash.

Marcel Proust was undoubtedly the greatest archaeologist, unearthing the model of a lost artifact, within another model (time's vast turtle-turns). 1979 seems like Pre-Cambrian era to a 50-yr old BOOMER. In that year my 2nd book appeared, titled "Stone", with a quotation from Mandelstam dedicated to Francesca Tagliabue (daughter of neo-Whitman & Ginsberg-contemporary John Tagliabue) and a photo by Aaron Siskind on the cover (Denny Moers, protege of Creeley & Siskind, spender of '78 Blizzard Weekend on my wife's couch while I was stranded in Boston, found it for me); published by Edwin Honig's & David Cloutier's Copper Beech Press. Time, the Greek gift, like language. That's why I was doubly gifted when I ran away from it for a while, like Jonah.

Here's another old poem in this vein:


INVOCATION


Twilight. Beyond the high school soccer fields
the green-bronze nipple of the Catholic Church
peeks up over Camp Street. Evening
earth immerses the pedestrian horizon,
nudges the last daylight into wine.

Soon it will snow. The trees nearly bare,
a tattered blaze against the pastel houses.
The air, chill. I whisper the lines
walking home from work - a spell,
an invocation, one shadow to another.

Star to star, flint to flint. . .
someone moves from village to village,
small tornado, vortex, unpredictable
- and in the councils, whirlwind
of uncomfortable affirmation.

A veteran, I wait here (in the tunnel
of a small town planted in space)
for these medallions of sundown. Lift
the dry cup to my lips, familiar.
Drink to your seashell breakers.

11.20.92