conversation for kids

LITTLE PEARL

The Hebrews found a verbal replica

for Pharaoh’s pyramids.

Conversation for kids

(& sheep, & goats).  It was Jehovah

came to intervene, to interview.

Some saw an Oedipal

triangle – shadow wall

of mud-baked bricolage (dream stew);

some saw trois anges, craning down

from Paradise – to speak

with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac

(that lightning twin would play the clown).

The pyramids are office towers.

No one will explain

how so much pain

depends on callous fingers (ours).

The just one wears a diamond pin

stuck through the heart –

QUADRANS IN IMO ET

IN SUMMA SUBTILIS (wide-eyed dolphin).

The Middle of the World, he said

& made the sign of six

ways (willow sticks,

or cottonwood).  So truth’s inbred.

Her little pearl of rectitude

is portable – rides

water as a cheek glides

tears.  That’s all (beatitude).

6.28.18

speech after long silence

DARK MATTER

On Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise”

(bronze doors of Alighieri’s

Baptistery) mute eyes

read open palms as messages –

clouds’ condensation (mist & spray)

solidifies in glints

of angels’ footprints.

Cerements & shrouds (all hands... away).

Sauntering winter by the river

leaves only this ladder

of snow – bronze adder,

subterranean shiver (moon-silver).

Anonymous Zaccheus of Topsfield

fined for making friends

with Indians &

Quakers (150 years ground

on, before the Revolution

bent the tune).  We are

the salt within the Rio

del Espiritu Santo (many thousand

gone).  We are the Lenten corn

in a maze of amnesia

to the horizon (hallelujah).

Old Hole-in-the-Sky – buffalo-shorn

tepee – pyramid cathedral, aye.

Dark matter between Bear

& Lyre; grey mother,

Jonah’s poncho (oaken sigh).

3.12.18

Angels considered as projected images of the soul.
A little flighty firebird, elusive.
Your quiddity.
That we live in a Byzantine, wooden-icon reality?


Here's an untitled poem by Elena Shvarts, translated (probably mistakenly) by me :


Why, here in this dust,
don't I say "you" and "I"?
A bit of flint given life
gleams dimly out of death.
When light blazed near
I might have dared the sun,
crying - Burn me, dear!
You - my body! Here I am!
But I'm no windmill
and he's grinding me already -
my landlord, shrouded
beneath this decaying shell.

1996

[I remember her telling me in Hoboken once how interested she was in Baudelaire.]