quirky rustic poet battles orange Goliath

MEMPHIS FLOOD

It was the winter of our ill-advised

& misconsent.  Embouldered

Julius the Quartered,

housed within his wanton witness,

raged (a savage orange walrus

full of fetid fire) against

that bad news feminist

in flight from Rus (hilarious!) –

while he, with his false staff, embarked

upon a cross rubes’ con

(some matryoshka manikin!)

against Old Ironsides... which worked!

– for temporizing (time... & two times

at a time).  The war was on.

“Where is the server, then?”

barked Julius again, again.  Crimes

filtered down like snow from Kremlin

gremlins.  Stark treason,

trickling out its own raison

d’état, took aim at Mississippian

Columbia.  One fiery wheat grain

in her heart – one star-

quintessence of her

pyramid – opened its eye again;

the child she harbored in her arms

across the Memphis flood

cried – “Human brotherhood!”

– & smiled.  Light pierced the storms.

1.25.20

an aria of Ariel

SAFETY NETS

On the vast floor of the nave at Chartres

a golden labyrinth

circles the square.  Myth

of primal clay, where everything starts

over... springs up from the ground;

even the epic poem

circles back toward home –

Thanksgiving hearth of heaven, lost

& found.  It is an Ithaca

where Daphne-laurel molts

back to Penelope – bolts

from the yarn, like Minnehaha

laughing upstream toward Itasca –

primeval Persephone

(O veritas caput).  She

looms at warp speed, like an aria

of Ariel – zips through the Gateway

Arch, to Providence –

races around, from Florence

to the Golden Gate, where she will play

out safety nets, & save the day –

& from Pacific to New York

lift up her blazing fork

of sea-green, Lincoln-penny Liberté.

She is the almond in a nest of nests –

a hollow echo-tomb

from which Columbia will bloom

again, spring-fed by Galilean breasts.

9.20.16

Inland sea

BREATHING SEA

Old Hobo glances back upstream

as the spring bluets form

an inland sea – a swarm

of peacock eyes (out of a dream-

song dome) across the autumn grass.

Retrospective.  Phoebus

in an ochre crevasse,

Magdalenian cave-compass.

Your yearning for Eurydice,

so youthful-hungry, Henry –

out of want, not plenty –

ignorant (in your blind way).

An oscillation of the sun

and moon.  The Q. of Heaven

looks out from her den,

mild lioness... dusky horizon.

Henry, by his veiled statue,

thinks on Beatrice

(pine-green eyes, sea-

grey).  His melancholy’s ocean-blue.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem!  How

I would have gathered you...

the soul’s an orphan zoo

without the smile of Manitou.

A little tree in Galilee

still rustles in the breeze

from a breathing sea.  She’s

calling you, sailor.  Be free.

4.14.16

Ravenna Diagram

As testified by both Annie Akhmatovy & Wheelliam Bootler Yeats (not to mention Wally Stuyvens), nobody knows like they do how much poetry depends upon the foul rag-&-bone shop of the dump.  So I confess I am very obscurely fixated on a work of probable horoscopic Masonic garbage (if seemingly very diligently researched) by one David Ovason, titled The Secret Architecture of our Nation's Capital.  Ovason appears to have turned poor Henry Adams on his Educational head.

Adams, scion of the original American Presidential-Egyptian dynasty, built his own historical philosophy on the contrast, the dialectic, between the Virgin & the Dynamo : the feminine-poetic-Christian heritage of the Middle Ages (Chartres, Notre Dame) vs. the technical-scientific Chaos of modern Power (Washington, Chicago...).    Yet according to Ovason, the landscape, architecture & sculpture of Washington, D.C. emanate a controlling hermetic geomantic pattern, overlaid on the nation's capital by the Masons - a radiance of the constellation Virgo, or the Virgin - the Corn Maiden, the Rite of Spring, Pocahontas, the Statue of Liberty... all those images & psychic icons certain ecstatic-Platonic poets (unacknowledged legislators) like Hart Crane articulated and defended as embattled (in prosaic America).  Somehow the Corn Maiden got in on the ground floor of the national grain elevator.

So I wrote in previous blog post about my personal affinity for ut pictura poiesis - the idea that at the heart of poetry is this visionary-shaping painterly dimension.  Poetry, by way of its rhythmic sonic mesmerism, communicates wave-lengths of vivid images - drawn from life and adequately mirroring living (as opposed to absent, detached, prosaic, humdrum, depersonalized) reality.  In the long-poem project Ravenna Diagram, I reckon that, for me, Ravenna represents a kind of civilizational matrix for this particular sense of incarnational iconophilia.  The "venn diagram" of Ravenna Diagram is a visual image of the union of two-in-one, the sacred marriage of spirit & flesh.  As an historical phenomenon : as a pivotal event which frames one's sense of the direction of our future world.

There are lots of things going in today's excerpt, which cluster around these ideas, along with others... I can't go into them all.  The idea of the "lattice" and the "Path P" are allusions to the chi-rho symbol : the pneuma (Spirit) P rising (like the Ghost Dance) over the lattice of the "X"... the "Path P" also refers to "poetry", thinking of Dante, buried in Ravenna - whose masterwork was completed in Ravenna, and which features, at its very end, another venn diagram (Dante's vision of the Trinity as a mysterious set of interlocking rainbow circles).

CLAY LIPS

If I whisper out of this backyard garden

& word went forth from Ramah

Rachel weeps... no more

a cricket shuttles through the iron

lattice – churring chi-rho, chi-rho

a pigeon croons là-bas

là-bas... labarum... abba...

baa... lambs on a radius go

round, skip stones, elliptical

(up to the mountaintop).

Rough clay lips elope

for steppes, ignite pyramidical

lens – Nile coming-forth-of-July

in one almond canoe;

wooden frame for yew

rainbow (adieu beyond river-eye).

Beneath an avalanche of violence

the lattice rusts, the eye

corrodes.  Still clay

will coalesce, in tinder hands;

Giuliana in her mossy coat

& frowning eye signal

another way; lips channel

shapes (mosaic, inchoate)...

Ravenna diagram, vertiginous cross-

road into Washington.

Path P, star-tangled almond

tree – here chariots bloom (manes toss).

6.30.15

ANNUNCIATION


 
 
The painter, patient, painstaking, slows time:
quick nervous feathered strokes congeal
the gorgeous pageant of the real
to stillness, light (transparent pantomime).

 
The model, posing in a quaint alcove,
waits too (for pregnant image to emerge):
vague drafty sketches, baseless camouflage
become sharp stream of fire from beak of dove.

Luke... look... lac.

St. Luke Drawing a Portrait


 
 
It’s a game of perception.  The Virgin, calm,
attentive, aims the nipple of one small breast
toward the lips of the laughing Infant.  St. Luke,
draped in flowing vermilion, pauses, looks up
from his sketchbook, his fine black-golden
stylus held there motionless.  It’s a portrait
of the artist (van der Weyden); in a corner
behind him, an ox curls under a writing stand,
where a draft of the third Gospel lies open.
Between pillars in the center, beyond the
garden, on a bridge, in the middle distance,
a man and a woman (with their backs to us)
gaze at a river that glides to the horizon.
The man aims his index finger toward
a far-off spit of shoreline, where
a tiny church is barely visible.
       
                                 (This work
the mirror-image of an earlier one, by Jan
van Eyck, The Rolin Madonna: the kneeling 
donor, holding his book, looks up (entranced 
by mother and child) from the opposite side 
of the room (and painting); in the center,
in the deep distance, the same river,
almost the same onlookers.)
              
                             It’s a game
of perception, with multiple mirrors:
that onlooker’s index, pointing almost
out of the scene, circles back to this room:
St. Luke, looking on, is van der Weyden,
looking on: as we are looking on, absorbed
(as that infant soon will be) in the milky flow.

More on poetry as embodiment: think of Joyce's concept of "epiphany" (the particular thing seen in its "quiddity", an intellectual light). Pound's heavy acorn of light.

Think of poet & muse: Orpheus/Eurydice, Dante/Beatrice, Henry/"J" (see me being pretentious!). The child-bearer vortex - Venus, Virgin Mary, Magdalen - and her absent (ghostly) presence. & the imperfection of formulae - the vanishing point of recognitions. The embodied absent one, the story, the index. M, W, mother-night, Cassiopeia.

The black-haired young woman in the dark green skirt walking ahead of me in Fox Point (a slim stringed instrument, heft tuned to her gait).

"Heavy-hearted woodlands."