ice-breaking spring

SMOOTH FAN

This simple cup of Red Wing clay –

I thought it might be cracked.

A thick dark zigzag tracked

the rim.  Some dragon gone astray?

Quickening lightning, heavy thunder…

power of ice-breaking spring.

The bursting-forth of everything

in moss-green gold & violet splendor.

Or something darker, circuiting its wheel.

Cold-blooded Serpent, shattering

Anansi’s web (her glittering

fishnet, awash with dew)… to steal,

to kill.  Ouroboros-pelt of power

peeled from its fountain (O

omnipresent sweet communion

threaded like planetary Venus-flower).

The poet’s voice lurks with the refugees.

Exiled flint mirror, casting back

the shadow of one seamless lack

of liberty, justice – life’s guarantees.

It is a tool, a sharpened raven-knife

polished in Voronezh.

That river-town, at edge

of steppe.  O Evening Star, O sister-wife…

The river sways its coppery smooth fan

from forest spring to Okeanos.  One

willowy limb of oaken

mast… grounding the flash where it began.

4.29.20

sketchy star-map

GREEN PYRAMID

The idea of Janus.  Osip is born;

war saw.  The tiny hexagons,

whose bite is bitterness

& valediction, zigzag down

here, in our Cerealian Capital

(Pillsbury, General Mills).

Grandpa, in Saskatchewan

wills grain elevators toward the pole.

Above these winter clouds, invisible

Venus the flower-star

describes tobacco-petal arcs –

Gravesend’s Dark Lady – indelible

cartwheeling Corn Maiden – springing

& sovereign rite of way;

dewy washerwoman, our MVP

lifting the horizon over D.C. (washing

everything).  Verily... except a corn of wheat

fall into the ground & die...

Over the green pyramid, an eye;

red rose for Memorial Day (complete

now, finished).  Elvira, out of Ravlin

opera, spins toward blue clay

herself.  We go that way

with snowflakes, with January’s frozen

squeaky violin... we go together.

At our reed-muddy center

she alights on the perimeter –

Adonai cornucopia, our milky tether.

1.15.20

from David Ovason, The Secret Architecture of the Nation's Capital, p.190

J. Fisher King

WHAT CHEER

April rain soaks the riverlands.

The cottonwoods are green

with a mossy sheen

(a milky spray).  Giuliana understands

her little boy’s harmonic joy,

winding up his yellow

gyroscope (so

imperturbable, this balance-toy).

Ravenna sifts backwater Time.

The hollow tock of wood-

pecker, carving a shed

for screech owl (minima sublime,

incognito).  Little gray on gray

tree-rings of Okeanos –

oscillating Knossos,

Minerva-maze.  Flute-bird (in clay).

A copper Jonah, lifted from the well.

Dusk-rose, Venusian.

Seal of the Son of Man

like Hamlet’s ring, in wax (fell

Icarus, from labyrinth

– the ship sailed on).

Trials of the paragon,

the paradigm.  Blue hyacinth

of Shaker spirit, trembling

Will   I am

Alpha Omega   home

in my petroglyph   assembling

              *

light stars   on the horizon

Thunderbird ghost-

dance   round pivot-post

of early souls   lifted from prison

At dawn in Providence, the light

gathers gold   atop

the dome   What cheer,

Netop   the independent soul   bright

spear   at petrel summit of

this Camelot   simplicity  

a brave’s priority

to choose the good   be led by Love

J. Fisher King   Ancient of Days

as it was   upon a time

at the beginning (lame

limb   violence bears away   always)

& the smile of quiet eyes & lips

the canoe in the shadowy

garage   Ferrara iron

burgeoning almond   Natasha limps

toward her vault   in Magdala

Gesthemane   April

umbrella   of good will

the given Earth   the rose mandala

a fingerprint spiral   of gratitude

Thanksgiving feast   soul

liberty   constancy   whole

serene   uplifted   Rhody-rood

4.19.17

Hobo's continental centrifuge

PACIFIC VOYAGE

Hobo, hunching by the great river

in winter’s clamp, peers

like an Okie Okeanos

through the ice-floes’ ripple-shivers –

through the wavy shimmer, down

through faint diffractions

where the light shines

back... a silver mirror-sun,

layering her limestone shells.

A simple madeleine

(stone crumblevine,

gray rock-dove oval) wells

from the giddy stream in limpid echoes.

Raven in Voronezh,

Cautantowwit knife-edge

grips sun in her beak – light glows

like Pearl Harbor in eclipse.

Her lunar lance shall pierce

the mule’s gray hide.  Ears

perk for Jonah’s salty lips

molded like canoe gunnel

to mime Columbia.

Her dove-insignia

frames Sophie-ship – her funnel

rays its calumet of light

above the pyramid

(violent power-grid

of barbed-wire fraud, not quite

                 *

extinguishing that Evening Star

glancing so tender yet

steadfast – a mauve fishnet

looping beneath flame’s Icarus-car).

Hobo is Jonah now, in Ocean River.

The voice beneath the sea

is like a Kievan harmony –

perpetual melody of live-forever;

her flute-throat flickering dusky rings

like rain-drenched iris

round the throne of Isis –

Hagia Sophia in a peacock’s wings.

The river chimes in Hobo’s ears

of many waters, laughing,

crying.  Wingèd seraph,

sister-sibyl, swirl his tears

& yours into the continental

centrifuge (in Center,

North Dakota).  There

the massive gravity of all

Columbia hums into monarch flight –

a raven-transmutation

of infernal nation

to green cedar habitation (night

Pacific voyage of your soul).

Hobo watched the fluttering

lift-off, slowly muttering –

milkweed seed, sail; Ocean, roll.

1.26.17

his ping-pong twang

WINTER HARBOR

John Berryman, at the Guggenheim

with Robert Lowell

(twins of the groundswell

‘60s – gyrfalcons of the time)

relates a cutting parable

to illustrate poetic

speech.  Paternalistic

hot-shot banker plunks edible

& butler-polished gift-apple

into tot’s trick-or-treat

bag... You big shit!

yells kid – you crushed the crap

out of my cookie! (Guggenheim

giggles).  Jokes take place

in Minneapolis – this

much-derided mini-apple (rhymes

with Big).  Poet’s last home.

Dust-devils & tornadoes

fill his Oklahoma shoes.

His ping-pong twang off spiral womb

booms (sepulcher-recording)

up the ascending ramp

of modern art (Duchamp

is, Mr. Bones).  & there be something

weird ‘bout Henry – year-long

yearning in the yearling

lurching at spring –

light from Evening Star (so long!)

                  *

glancing toward Morning Star

across a black-iced

Mississippi (nice

Minnesota teeth, or solar flare).

The holm oak is an evergreen.

Turned inside-out, grief

lifted underleaf –

a pale moss-light, Nativity scene.

Like that Natasha veering toward

her lonesome labyrinth,

whose airy terebinth

fills sails of summer shade –

whose fluttering eyelids well up

with incomparable

change.  As in the parable

of viceroy in treetop –

evanescent black-&-yellow

wings’ twin semaphore

your sign-lingo, your

promise of new life (tomb-slow,

lentissimo).  The snarky raven

& the tremulous dove –

the starlings’ chatter-trove

amid bare, barren limbs... Olympian

Zeus rattling his thunder-oak

will never leave this winter

harbor – mangy splinter,

tuneful cove – spooky light-spoke.

12.22.16

Your moon, Apollinaire

LOW RELIEF

Air is mirror-brilliant today, even

shadows cut clean

across Touro slate.

Mid-September, slanting sun,

a New Year for an old people.

Someone plays a flute

off Morris Ave... fleet

foot sails into New World marble.

As in a low relief in Rimini –

an august Agostino

Venus, or Diana

whorled in limestone dithyramb

out of the sea.  The jutting cliff

crusted with barnacles

whittles its pinnacle’s

bowsprit, figurehead – her glyph

(lifted in one hand-wave) twin

scallop-shells, like

castanets (break,

crashing surf...) where time began.

Your moon along the shore, Apollinaire.

Limestone foundations

crest across seasons,

granite castles – seagull’s mother,

feathering horsegrass in your hair.

1321... 1132...

Joachim voodoo;

Jeanne’s grey-eyed icon (Galla’s lair).

9.15.15

"Venus Beats All"

Happy New Year!

I'm using a grayish blue pencil which I picked up here at work. It reads, in silver lettering, Venus Beats All No. 2. Hesitate to sharpen all that away.

TRANSIT OF VENUS


 
 
Morning twilight rings a globe
washed with suffering and joy,
each body under supine mind
replete with reigning images
(Allah, Buddha, Shiva, Christ)
by law and custom so entwined
into tradition’s seamless robe –
while Venus spins by like a toy,
a blind spot in the blinding sun.

 
Noonday trumpets of the West
descant for absent presidents:
gleaming coffins lie in state
resurrecting finer times,
harmonizing untold crimes,
molding echoes, out-of-date.
Shrouded figures, gone to rest
beneath a Star’s indifference,
a blind spot in the blinding sun.

 
Adam, Eve and Oedipus
circle through the fabled fate
spelt within each blistered heart
before a child can walk or talk.
Shadows layered on the rock
by inhuman fiery art
wheel around Prometheus,
lean toward One the veils create:
a blind spot in the blinding sun.

I read many of the poetry blogs every day, some of which are listed to the left.

The trip in fall 2000 to Tuscany with Sarah, Beth & Caroline (from Norwich CT), & Arnold (from Amersfoort). I was walking around in Florence, in the district with all the plaques commemorating Dante's early life - was across the street from the little church (at that time enveloped in construction) where for the 1st time he beheld Beatrice. Suddenly a young woman in a white bridal dress came around the corner, walking toward a young man, followed by a small crowd - they embraced in front of the church doors - a wedding in progress.

Vita Nuova. I have posted many an old poem on hgpoetics: here is a recent poem (written today, actually). Part of a woik in pwogwess titled Time Flowers: an effort to tie together unfinished strands in the long poem Forth of July. Some background might help here. Last Saturday morning I went to the Met to see the big exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci sketches. I left about 12:15; learned that evening that Elena Shvarts (see previous blog entries) had come to see the same show around noon (see her poem "Leonardo" in her Paradise (publ. by Bloodaxe Press). Anyway, the phrase "there (in Tuscany)" is an echo of Mandelstam's Voronezh poem, the last stanza of which (trans. by James Greene):

I'm ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.

(I still prefer the David McDuff versions, but these are pretty good. M's Voronezh ('raven-knife") a mirror image of Ojibwa midwest)

Now you have to refer back to blog of a couple days ago where I talked about the humanizing of reality through the microcosm (the Whitman-world, the Proust-world) and you have to understand that the impulse of the following section of Time Flowers (from a chapter called "At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head") was that I was pondering this idea of the Person humanizing with human warmth & idiosyncrasy the wholeness of reality - epitomized by Leonardo's immaculate, obsessive, open-minded SKETCHING, observation, handiwork.

I was also remembering Elena's comments at dinner about her "mapping" poem (The Cardinal Points) & the shock of the Challenger crash, & quoting Maria Brodsky's quoting of Inferno xxvi, and Montale's repeated motif of the LP record of time & reality (see Arrowsmith notes to translation of Storm & Other Things on this) & the notion of angelic time as a continuous eternal re-enactment or re-viving in a different dimension, & Anastasios' comment about the isometric relation between Nacogdoches & Tigris/Euphrates. . .

from TIME FLOWERS

II - At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head

11

to E.S.

Left-handed Leonardo improvises,
a palimpsest of ink-scratches and quotes,
unfinished sketches. From those notes
(from lean-bent angel-Byzant faces)

virgin hills triangulate in flesh
inimitable features, there (in Tuscany).
From incommensurate to harmony
(estranged will and strangled wish,

ugly mug and evanescence)
eye and hand combine - unite;
so we imagine a distant star might
blossom like a planet's orbit (Venus) -

so we might hear a planet whisper,
or a dear star (empalmed in your ear).

*

All we needed, already seeded in Eden:
consider, foolish counselors - what then?

The tarada Columbia flares overhead,
seven burning souls (who left their mark
shaped like a tiger or a ewe) embark
to ineffable nether time (veiled, mangered) -

slight white scratch in the long LP
over the delta of the Nacogdoches,
microgroove in a nest of destinies,
children of immersions, buoyancy

not born for brutality, but virtue,
not fear, but trust and fortitude -
a bright star-seed (both goal and goad)
near farm in angel-time (come true).

2.3.03


further notes: "a planet's orbit": see bird's eye view of orbit of Venus in Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles, by James Ferguson (1799). the track of Venus' orbit looks like a flower blossom. "Tarada" is a kind of long canoe formerly used by the so-called "Swamp Arabs" at the delta of Tigris & Euphrates. "Foolish counselors": cf. the judgement on Ulysses (Inferno xxvi). Unable to do the accent grave over estranged & empalmed. Last line of 1st section should be read as "or a DEAR STAR" (affects rhythm). cf. again for the meaning of this poem Elena Shvarts' comment about her poem & the "only direction left" (up): in relation to the notion of angelic time as an actual time-warp in which angels reconstitute, recapitulate, resurrect, & relive human time, in some kind of continuum we don't yet understand. Fare forward, voyagers. "poetry is news".