bobbing like a robin's nest

OKIE STUMP

Out of a thousand painted threads,

Agnes, you warp a frame

for some belle dame

of sanded mercy.  Mounds of pebble-

heads, broken by force... the list

of useless tears... unspoken

outrage in the caravan...

the camel’s otfe-hump (if you insist).

Henrigold the river-god

bobbers oiled Jordan

with Lorelei (raison

d’étoile – mosaic mermaid).

It was the frame, Agnes, it was

the bloom, encircling

a gold bee-sting –

it was the Viennese princess

who rose from copper strands of wire –

who lifted bottlecaps,

ineffable mayhaps

into a mossy petroglyphic spire.

O spider-thread of nothingness

O Hamlet’s hesitation

Guillaume Bier creation

bobbing like a robin’s nest

around an Okie stump (of Manitou)

twin-man   twine sister-span

love’s Everywoman

Miriam   a   song in C major   (for you)

11.30.16

Primary colors

LIFE-SAVERS

A warm December, Pearl Harbor Day.

Pale & luminous radiance

suffuses the primary colors

of the workmen’s big machinery

in the river (below Franklin Bridge).

Dazzling maternal uncle

Jim’s birthday – a Ravlin

clé to the mystery.  Mrs. Elledge

added those little busts of Bach,

Mozart, & Beethoven

to my piano-lesson

collection (when I finished each book);

I loved her.  Jim waltzed Agnes,

the Viennese musician’s

daughter, around Lincoln

Center – while his own jeune fille was

in the shrouds of late-adolescent

angst, despair.  O

Juliet... swallowed at last

by Frisco Bay (agenbite

of inwit, James).  The pearl in the harbor

was a vivid soul, before

that fall; maybe somewhere

the wind still ruffles her black hair.

The soul, like a robin redbreast, wavers

high on its dogwood branch

over each day’s routine

avalanche.  Hunts for life-savers.

12.7.15

Franklin Ave. Bridge

Antonio Savoradin writes:

I'll quote Christopher Hitchens: "It was on September 11 1683 that the
conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of
Vienna."

Josh Corey responds (on 8/28) to my Theorie of Faculties Poetickal.

Josh, I think the idea of choosing a favorite tendency (pleasure-principled, or reflective/establishment, or irascible/engaged) is probably an illusion. Not because there is no free choice, but because tendencies are like symptoms (in a society of infinite & vast solipsism). Symptoms are sub-cultural, sub-aesthetic.

I think of the visionary or contemplative as an active process, not a mechanical reflection of "things as they are" (whatever that is). A work of finding relations & connections across varied & separate ranges of things & experiences. The visionary makes sense of history & contemporary reality through this process.

Whereas the "irascible" or engage tendency moves immediately from the "answer" to the persuasion; the answer is sort of assumed (an unjust state of things, for example). The visionary shows the state of things in their complexity.

On the plane back from Minnesota (seated amidst a beery wisecracking post-Labor Day Fife & Drum Band from Boston, going home), re-reading Carl Schorske's cultural history, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Hofmannsthal, poet & playwright, brooding over the relation of artist to society. A paradox : the moment the artist (the poet) arrogates the role of creating, rather than illustrating or ornamenting, culture, he or she becomes irrelevant.