when the players are packing up

OFF PLYMOUTH

In the beginning was the Word, &… there is

never an end to the writing of books…

the Gospel according to Borges.

Ouroboros (in a whirl of discourse).

Hamlet with Mousetrap shattering the frame

cannot escape his web.

The python in the grass… aye

there’s the rub (poison in the game).

& yet a fresh wind flows off Plymouth

of a morning… Mayflower

or Normandie.  Your

sister-dove Hermione fluttered her moth-

wings, molted to monarch, starry swallowtail;

the Constitution of your dream

became a Greek trireme (☧)

shrouded in sunny spray like fiery hail.

& at the end of the song, & the late Romance

when the players are packing up

when the ferris wheel slows to a stop

& flickering stars turn in remote silence

then the word grows simple   salt

shines in its Voronezh barrel

your father Truth walks parallel

beside you   & from a dim-lit vault

in that Ravenna sepulcher, a Jordan

river-god accompanies the Dove

the Baptist solemnizes Love

on Earth   anoints a lowly serving-man

4.23.20

under the Memory Wing

A-FRAME

Henry’s ancient mother in the Memory Wing

shows him how dying &

amnesia are kin.

When coarse indifference is the thing,

my countryfolk, how to redeem the time?

Henry tumbles down with Hobo

to wallow like a gator now

in river muck – fish out the paradigm.

Wakan Tanka, Great Spirit, O

Thunderbird of Red Wing’s

olden days – you being

transcendental I AM – hey ey yo...

The metaphysical is just outside

your A-frame, Hobo sez –

& as such, pivot of the rez

(or any reasonable maze of hide).

You get me, Hen?  Might be

the shadow of that Jonah-

bird – ur-meta-Noah

J’waytroulife, clear to eternity.

So this rough clay my mother molded

with bare hands (these

Mexique 4-face planters)

might morph a continent – dead

rising altogether from each cold silo

into the dream-sponge –

Providential plunge

uncoiling slowly (at Cahokia Ground Zero).

7.28.19

otherness of the Someone

IRON WHEEL

Her fingers fondled Red Wing clay

on the circling wheel

into Northwoods bowl

or Mexican flowerpot.  Wheels, say,

within wheels... microcosmic canoes,

Arks of the Covenant...

even Charon’s punt,

Henry (we who have passed

over Lethe).  The woman with child

in her apocalyptic

mandorla, chased by Dick

the Drag to the edge of the wild

(up north, near the Boundary Waters,

in the Iron Range, near

Itasca).  Fresco a veneer

across Ravenna beams – Jordan River’s

sleepy patron god.  Sort of like Hobo

witnessing the fire-dove

skim down Cottonwood Cove

& settle on the shepherd kid... just so...

but I just don’t know.

Iconoclasm sets in,

considering we’re human –

liable to make it up as we go.

The otherness of the Someone.

Your friend, your judge

(merciful – but won’t budge,

won’t fudge the facts).  Solomon

petitioned humbly for wisdom,

sensing the dire burden

beyond each king’s ken :

the destiny of Jerusalem

                *

under a blood moon of violent men

& the everyday mayhem

the grinding paroxysm

of atrocious cruelties – shifting pain

to the weak (convenient scapegoat,

ordinary poor).

Even blindfold Synagoga

might remember something critical, something

our mosaic Pantocrator forgot.

A little gray-brown moth

settles on Hobo’s mouth,

like a fingertip.  Hush, seraph.  That

maybe we are Hagia Sophia

with a million eyes.

Solomon was wise

to be humble before the Shekinah.

& Hobo was a mumbling bumbler

more like a river than a man

more like clay than person.

& Thunderbird was a rumbler

in Red Wing, churning the rusted wheel

until it sparked like gold;

helping her to fold

the wet clay of America on steel

braces... evenly rotating... Source

to Delta... Sea-Rose

to Golden Gate... flows

through the arch... Mud-Morse...

7.12.19

goldenrod honeybee

LAMBENT FLUTE

This bumblebee on goldenrod,

hunting the crossroad

at close of summer.  Old

Hobo character – camouflaged

in yellow-black (almost).  Henry’s

obsession with absence.

I’d go the distance

into infinite cornfields, he says.

The river subculture, the dream

of floating back home.

Churnagogue palindrome

or unknown womb... clay baptism.

The cottonwood leaves seem to flow

like golden honey, then –

in Taurida, on the autumn

wind.  Like little heart-ships, so

they swim.  Out of the tight-knit shawl,

out of the everlasting

fire.  None shall be coming

to the Father except by Son, y’all –

by way of Mother.  That absolute

Somebody – a labyrinth

of stars, wherein we are hid

like lightning bugs, or lambent flute

reflections (crane-bone twins).

Flickering far beyond

woodpecker Trebizond,

sleepwalker Knossos – wheeling fins.

8.5.18

Noah's yawl

DANTE SCHOOL

Long ago in Florence, Alighieri

smashed the limestone font

at the Baptistery – Don’t

Panic! – to save a little boy

from drowning.  His prophetic sign,

a riposte for his own exile –

sluiced out with bile

& blood of lawlessness (Italian

style).  The sea rides high, the rain

seems endless.  Human

callousness a given,

leaden sinker-weights anchored in pain

call for a coracle, a basket-woven

safety net (to keep

the child alive, upon

the deep).  Cross-stitch the waves then,

Raven – paint Noah’s yawl afloat

until we memorize the name

that hawsers through this game

of crosshairs (golden, black & white).

Only a shadow over the sea;

an eyelash, lancing

a tiny tear.  So bring

your harp now, Queequeg – free

that pearl-feathered quasi-gull

whose omnipresence bobs

the wavy globe.  Corncobs

& acorns in Polenta (Dante school).

8.16.16

Crossing the Rubicon, again...

ONE SPRING

The river across the street still flows

under thickening ice, ceaseless.

Its lesser tributaries

(Minnesota, Minnehaha) also

persist – all of them subsiding

into Ocean River

finally (only a quiver

rippling Time).  Julius is sliding

a handkerchief across his brow

in 49 B.C.

The die is cast, sez he.

Yokels on Rubicon blow

tubas now – let War decide.

World empire in his grip,

peace is ordained.  Slip

the noose over each parricide

(Brutus, Absalom); the father’s

kingdom will be certified,

et ratified, in blood.

Shadow of a kingfisher

rotating in graffiti’d alcove.

Boethius & father

(Symmachus) share

fort et dur... Ravenna love-

keen (after bronze millennium).

Time’s universal –

history’s rehearsal

for a mangy star-profundum

                 *

deeper in the soul o’man

than Solomon arrayed

or Emperor betrayed.

An agate, tossed in Jordan

sand.  Halcyon day (of almond

shade, & waterfall).

Life’s good, is all –

big benison de tout l’monde.

Reaches through the harvest of

your Martian scythe, O

Death, to something more –

the milky Rio of the Blest.

It is Beyond.  It’s over yonder.

Everywoman’s Eridanos,

Poe’s Eureka.  Moses

glimpsed it in his heart’s far

island (yours, mine) – soul

liberty’s Belle Isle –

Eternity (only

a smile from here).  Glows, whole.

There were 4 rivers flowing

out of Eden, toward

House of 4 Pines (word

lost on the wind).  All knowing

& loving, all doing & being

gathered in a khipu

knot... arc of yew

over limestone grave (one spring).

1.11.16

Minnehaha Falls

Royal Oak

A few years ago I began digging into various writings on anthropology, from The Golden Bough forward & back.  One of many things which fascinated me was the resemblance between archaic kingship rituals, from around the world, and the rites of Christianity.  It's a strange way of putting it, I know - but in some ways it seems as though the early Christians had struck a taproot leading back into human prehistory.  The story of Christ's "kingdom" (or anti-kingdom) and sacrifice - his giving of his "body & blood" in the Eucharist - was like a reflection of prehistoric human social rituals.  The King always "stood for" the God, or the Source of all goodness : he was the channel of the life-force (anthropologist A.M. Hocart expressed this quasi-governmental role of archaic kingship in his classic study Kings and Councillors).

It's as if the Biblical testimony - itself stretching back into earliest Judaism, offering a cosmological picture of the source of life - was reflected in a kind of "royal seal" or template : a gold coin with two sides, showing Past and Future...

MOSES-KAYAK

The soul’s a kind of mirror, they

used to say – the old

mystical sheepfold;

you’ll find it on baptism day

refracted in an oval, seen

through water.  Incidental

angels rim the cave-wall

(all elongate, string-bean

apparitions, seraphim)

till harvest ripens

& a scythe descends

dividing wheat from empty flim-

flam... everlasting Judgement

Day.  That Galilean

gospeller, Samoan

wrestler, flipped oval Testament

into tight spring – a seventh wave

reversed the Jordan-flow,

the eye of Moses-kayak now

recursive back to Adam’s grave

(SW of Lake Victoria,

no doubt).  My Mirror Lakes

were Mendelssohn out-takes,

rehearsals for a Globe-historia –

the young king, hidden in an oak tree

still, waits for his mother’s

signal – climbs from a mummer’s

moth-shroud – floats to the Sea...

9.18.15

Descendant of the Royal oak at Boscobel House (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Going back to comments here of 3.18:

I wonder how the Biblical concept fire - as in, "you shall all be salted with fire"; "I baptize you with water; but one is coming who shall baptize you with spirit & with fire" - compares with the Romantic notion (Coleridge, Blake, maybe Yeats) of vision.

Roger Williams' parochial battles, late in life, with the Quakers & the followers of Anne Hutchinson. He advocated a kind of scriptural realism (Christ's work was a particular historical activity & event) vs. the dangers of spiritual solipsism (pride, vanity), which he believed were lurking in the Quaker's radical antinomian "inner light".

The imagination inhabits a borderland between subjective & objective.

In what way is faith dependent on imagination? A believer would say that faith proceeds from, is a gift from, the Holy Spirit. But there is a sort of co-operation between the mind/imagination and that "inspiration". The imagination as the vital activity of the mind - the "integration" of human capabilities ("personality").

Readings in Maximus (the other Maximus, the Byzantine theologian) - about the "divinisation" of mankind by means of the Spirit.

Maybe the outcome of the co-operation of Spirit & imagination is - fire.

& what is fire? Light, for one thing. The instantaneous recognition of something which represents both the limit and measure of ordinary time/space. That light of which (in the old-fashioned typological sense) physical light is the image.