Magnetic North

This weekend I'll be driving to Minnesota, so won't be blogging-flogging so many poems as of late.  Here's the new addition to Ravenna Diagram.  (Was interested to learn that Bruegel's great painting "The Hunters' Return" plays a role in two of Andrei Tarkovsky's films, Solaris and Mirror.)

MAGNETIC NORTH

Snow on backyard pine, a winter

scene.  With bitter words

the hunters return.  Bird’s-

eye view.  A raven’s splintered mirror

integrates the earth with cold

& calm – ravenous fire

with ice-skating, the hounds’

dire hunger with a master’s hold.

Strange distance in this place of graves.

Graven with flames... a tinder

touch.  So you will render

up the whole of life, in silent waves

windblown, articulate (ash-

hexagon from one

remote hearth-rune).

Only dappled light (reed-wash,

acacia screen).  In the continuum

of strange dream-song, a black

milk pours into Black Elk,

Melchizedek... slips back to you, O

Somno-Man (where sparrows hum

across the mirrored ice).  Your

wing-palms print once, twice

beneath aurora burial (drum-

roll, funereal).  Snow gathers

at magnetic north.  Rose

dust & wilderness

meet on your lips (coal-cinders).

1.9.15

Watched the video of the great great Tarkovsky film, Andrei Rublev, the story of an icon painter. Good follow-up to Byzantium show at the Met. Tarkovsky is a cross between Brecht & an Orthodox monk. The film is so Russian, so stringent, such a hymn to the salt of the earth, spiritual asceticism & faith, earthly suffering & fatalistic gloom, Dostoyevskian passionate sobornost (fellowship). You are not in Hollywood in this film, you are in 15th-century Rus.