Ides of July

MARBLE TOY

On this defunct St. Emperor Henry’s Day

the cavaliers of Christ broke down the walls

massacred the cityfolk, & found

the Holy Sepulchre.  & it was empty.

His midget kingdom was a bit of ground

6 ft. x 6.  Beneath Jo’s linen palls

that Body slept, 3 nights… then slipped away.

So Earth corrals the sun again (at mid-July).

Old Henry rotates his lugubrious clay

like cenotaph, or marble toy.  Through hells

of blinded crowds – mesmeric crown

for snobbish mobs, heartless autocracy –

deracinated tribes, bent for destruction.

So humankind spins round its Book of Kells

by fiddlehead bronze… on heaven’s way.

                                                          7.15.20

speaking the poetry of dense & difficult

GOLDFINCH APTITUDE

In the late afternoon, old Emperor

Henry the Ghoul lies abed

beneath the wallpaper’s red

roses (spread by his late father

for his mother).  The sun is not a god

nor is his Uncle Ez,

despite the pitchmen on the rez.

Frayed tribes will not succumb; Benito’s rod

is not benign, nor ever shall be.

The motorized dream, from

vortex of survivor-shame

after the panoramic slaughter-sea

of Ypres, Somme, & Meuse-Argonne –

like a neoplatonic fantasy

of utopian autocracy,

with phantom Isis Medusa-icon

wailing like siren out of Empyrean

over the shattered spectacle

of your culture-chronicle,

Ezra – so who shall have the succession?

The special providence of a sparrow...

the goldfinch aptitude

for simple gratitude.

& when the Eternal comes, you will know,

Osip (along the axis of the earth).

The covenant of love

donated from above

for good – so we might share it forth.

4.29.19

egalitarian cathedral

CEDAR HIDEAWAY

In this rough wooden octagon

in the backyard, wrapped

in frayed mosquito nets,

in mid-April, Henry will try again.

The anniversary of Abe Lincoln

rhymes with a shock in Paris.

Notre Dame no longer is

bedecked with lilies for communion.

Entourée de flammes ferventes

Apollinaire, at Chartres

peeks through his bandages

back toward her... makes his lament.

This humble cedar hideaway.

Chaste April light.

The massive stone takes flight

from every heart, with equal sway.

Like a fool in a mystery play,

a cloddish egalitarian

circus, is the Son of Man.

Anti-king, anti-autocracy,

he rides the shoulders of a donkey

(Henry’s stubborn mule

from Berryman misrule

locale) on Muddy journey to the sea;

he’s Jonah, prophet of humility

and poverty, flung to America

to give the motherland a caw –

lift a palladium for Lady Liberty.

4.16.19

the rubles flow from here to there

SAND UNDERFOOT

A mouse ran across a bridge

one winter, in Leningrad –

his name was little Vlad.

He had a key, which was his badge.

He wanted to be Czar one day.

It made things easier.

When life got crazier

he took control – things were okay.

The rubles flow from here to there

in pockets of his underwear –

he makes a face, to scare

the other wolves (the sheep won’t dare).

He liquidated people in the way.

It wasn’t always easy...

Scotland Yard (like Stasi)

fingerpoints (Polonium 1-A).

The light flutes in another realm –

coral reef of seraphim

& monks on mountain rim

(Kievan polyphonic Argo-helm).

A scattershot of goldfinch tunes

or chords of Marian

sis-diva Anderson

lift off cimetière dunes

Pushkin or Berryman would know.

Sparse salty grass.

Sand underfoot, hélas.

A Black Sea seething, as of long ago.

8.28.18

domestic hellenism

REMBRANDT WORLD

Imagine a humble Rembrandt world

(domestic hellenism, say)

where everything is (replay,

rusty Super-8) revealed –

unsealed, familiar testament

wherein you were sown

amid Grant Wood corn

(Birthplace of Herbert Hoover), bent

beneath pewter thunderheads

like wheat long-planted

at a battlefield (wind-

harrowed silos, homesteads).

By the rude bridge that arched the flood

– the wordspan, carved against

despair (Grace hastens

with her furnace-lamp... slight lift of mood)

here once the embattled farmers stood

– measuring early earth,

where your Dream (4th

of J?) becomes flesh & blood

& fired the shot heard round the world.

Ariosto in Ferrara,

say – that avian eye

on tyranny (Limentani’s branded

heron-lid).  Poetry is resistance

against the Emperor

of pyramidal distemper;

Concord... Voronezh... (buoyant equivalence).

4.19.18

in the conning tower

SALT PATTERN

Sophie sketching a choo-choo train

in blue crayon, & a trio

of engines in bright yellow-

black (Union Pacific) planing

across a dented overpass

share the light matrix-

argot of a peacock’s

fan-continuum (sea-surface).

Your eye that opens like a morning

glory forged into fusion

stronger than the sun

this amorous union, splendoring

a plume – your planet, raveled into

one.  Its gyroscopic

spin is geodesic

liftruweight – a feathery canoe

scaled up the hoary Nile to be

fair, kind & true

(peacock’s mosaic view

breathing accordion transparency).

Who then can be my enemy?

Why do the ogres rage

& tinpots ruse to stage

mock war upon me?  Jealousy?

from lambent arboreal North

snow slants softly down

a rose meridian

to blanket aboriginal South

                *

radiant in sibylline East

as tawny dogwood leaf

light welds a choral reef

to Liberty’s gull-dappled West

A shady chess piece in the tower

angles shark advantage

with a flanking edge –

the twisted blade, the bribe’s power;

on prison railroads to the pole

pecking iron grain

by long division

sowing lizard’s teeth (drum roll)

all for a subterfuge of thieves

who plant not (neither

shall they hive)... where

then their homing in the sheaves?

Like a black hole torn through

ice-gilded armor, light

gravity sets right

your kayak’s calm ellipse (true

almond eye, beaming beyond

all scheming pyramids).

Whose birchbark lids

one cosmic hexagon – fond

snowflake angel-star – salt

pattern at the end

of Everychild’s roadbend –

bright rainbow out of Ocean vault.

1.13.17

a Jewish refugee

Welcome back to Henry's late-night improv.  Record cold in Minneapolis tonight (Keith Richard's birthday).  We see foxes, turkeys, deer, packs of coyotes, rabbits & owls in this neck of the Minneapolis metro area (SE, along the river, by the University, where both sides of my family have lived for the last 150 years).  A few blocks from weird John Berryman's last home (33 Arthur Ave.).

Advent.  The Messiah is coming.  A Jewish refugee, he nurses in a barn.

I myself identify with Shakespeare's dreamy, soulful, effete Henry VI (recast tonight on PBS - The Hollow Crown).  Wars of the Roses.  "We are two shadows cast by Henry's body", declares one conspirator.

Civil strife... was Shakespeare part of a fake-news, Tudor messianic cult?  Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?

Think not.  I perceive the Globe & other theaters were implicated with royal politics... yet echoed something older, something medieval (mystery plays).  The master plot of the medieval theater, of the Byzantine labyrinth, was this : all earthly political authority is subject to the King of Kings.

So when you listen closely to the Delphic pentameter strophes of the Bard, you can hear this parochial, medieval, local, humble, Franciscan, monastic, Dominican, scholarly, ancient, simple, salty, truthful royal whisper... something to which both Eliot & David Jones, in contrastive ways, were attuned... the sovereignty of the Son of Man.

There is a spiritual resistance audible in Shakespeare - isomorphic with Osip Mandelstam's "oath to the 4th Estate".  A resistance to the usurper, the tyrant, the oppressor - recognized by his fell signs of inhumanity : his lack of grace, his murderous ambition, his rejection of his own eternal soul (with its attendant values).  Shakespeare's Richard III (who wasn't actually so bad, in real life).

This is the straight redwood of righteousness... the prophets' vow.

I confess, the inner world of Henry is quite unique & strange.  The sleepy king, the drowsy infant, bobbing along down the stream of his milky entitlement (the barn) - mumbling calm platitude-poems, radiating ridiculous ease, contentment... & only very slowly awakening to his fatal inheritance.

Oh yes : we must confront these usurpers.

I speak not of the minor satrapies, the lotos-eaters in the provinces, the solipsism of the echo-pond.

The poet's drawn to his true rivals in the lists, the spiritual enemies of Man : the despots, autocrats - the Putins, Erdogans - the Trumps, the Kim Jong-Uns, Dutertes, Xi Jinpings - the Stalins, Hitlers, Pol Pots... all the honchos riding out of Hell.

They will attack you, oak tree - like the termites gnawing at the life-marrow.  & yet the Child-King nestles in his oak-leaf hideout...will prevail against all Philistines (both high & low).

He is Man, after all.  Advent comes on.  Epiphany.

for the future ages' resounding glory

Arctic cold here.  Just returned from a beautiful concert of medieval choral music by the Rose Ensemble, at the Basilica of St. Mary (over by Loring Park).  Incredible freedom in the rhythm & harmonies - you sense the hardship of life in those days (nasty, brutish & short), stamped with this otherworldly exaltation.

Makes you think anything is possible.  Also reading a translation of brief, lucid biography of Osip Mandelstam (Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov).  My hero & imaginary friend.  Makes you think anything is possible.

What if it were possible to transmute contemporary American poetry (poetry in American English) into some completely revised, unrecognizable system of relations & values?

The relations between poet / poetry / language / nation-state (or people) are a knotty spider's web.  Think of Shakespeare, setting his seal on English poetry, while advancing the historical legend of Tudor supremacy (there were other poets in English).  Or Dante, basically establishing the Italian language, and the Italian nation, by way of mutually-reinforcing rhyme-schemes.  Or Whitman, the loafing disreputable hobo-bard, inventing a template for the American dream?

Poetry per se - individual poems - subsists as a subtext of these larger narratives.  The unresolved suspense of Hamlet (the play) is a dramatic effect - the plunging of quasi-historical characters into a tragic allegory of their own (semi-suicidal) demise.  Actual England, actual Elizabethan London provides the tacit atmosphere, maintaining these translucent symphonies of lyric speech.

Anything is possible.  What if we initiated something like an American "charismatic (bardic) poetry"?  What if HG Poetics replaced AWP, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation, and the Library of Congress?  What if the charisma of the flinty bard - the stubborn, indomitable shaman/patriarch/prophet/holy fool - what if the drama of poet vs. official anthill - became the most interesting thing happening?

For some reason, I've always found Osip Mandelstam more interesting than any poets or poetry surfacing in the United States.  He emanates this uncanny/contradictory rightness - this resolution in the face of autocratic, totalitarian social control - so as to present the inimitable profile of the free, loving, creative human being.  The person.  I, Walt Whitman, speaking to you, whoever you are - my equal, my soul mate, my camerado.

We need more national drama in poetry today.  Down with the protocols, away with the moneychangers !

Take me into the night, where the Yenisey
flows, where pines reach the starlight,
because there's no wolf's blood in me,
and only an equal shall take my life.

(trans. by A.S. Kline)

Deserto Rosso

RAVEN-VERSTS

In the film like a dream, or film-like dream,

amid inalienable pine-

swamps of yourself, a line

scratched by crow divides team

from ox, sheep from flock.  Ineluctable

quiddity of ramshackle

vernacular.  You will tackle

each day’s unaccountable trouble,

snaking sly-inching replicas

of raven-versts across

your brow (Voronezh

barb-shears).  & those hills, alas!

in Tuscany... & here the tang

of spoiled fish, seaweed,

salt-marsh...  Hobo-reedy

outcast, you’ll note the rusty clang

from vertical train-tracks – glamorous

icons of onion-dome

supremacy, driven home

by battery ram.  Yet chasteness

still shines from Black Sea mirror

(gray pebble in a seagull’s

beak).  Galilean silence

rustles on lakeshore.  After the furor

of a jealous djinn tears past, the sun

will peek forth without wrath –

retrace your raven-path

in filaments of violet, moss-green.

12.14.15

(Chester, live cat, in the rocker; metal replica of Pushkin on the floor)