stars of Jubilee

DARK PILLARS

The cottonwood leaves are golden,

beaten thin by frigid air.

Graphene hearts, everywhere

now (mid-October).  What is Man?

that Thou take heed of him?

Flesh tends to disappear.

To fade – but not before

these bright medallions of seraphim

sail swiftly from the autumn tree.

Invisible beehives

of honey-gold enclaves

cluster like galaxies, ring you & me –

it is that via media,

that midway midéwé

colloquy – humbly

clustering from 6-way

crystalline antipodes – path P

of Providence, the clear

circumference (here

now & everywhere) of high Sophie.

Nerve-center of the flesh-toned bridge

uniting matière, esprit;

Venn diagram, complete

ellipse of air, water & light – edge-

mingled man-&-woman bloom,

transmuting rage & fright

with wisdom’s calm delight

to reconcilement’s sun-filled room

                  *

from midnight Minneapolis

(by way of Providence)

into your honey-dense

dawn star-forest – Cosmopolis.

Stars in the deep blue flag echo

that secret Jubilee,

when all the nations will be

reconfigured from the roots of woe

into one level plain of soul

equality & liberty.

So Salvator Mundi

implies, through Leonardo’s ball

of crystal – meek & sheepish mule

of a Franciscan king

correcting everything

with one orthogonal gesture, one smile.

Jesus is for sale at Christie’s, now;

the Earth is up for grabs

as well, it seems; crabs

gather in their gaudy, gilded scow

to celebrate the arrogance of rule;

our men of violence

fill up sad prisons,

cemeteries.  Is Man a Fool?

No... just blind.  Tall cottonwoods

stand, lean together –

dark pillars, that weather

storms of gold in planetary neighborhoods.

10.16.17

I suppose a good poetry critic would be something like a botanist or ecologist.

It's a strange helpless sort of flora that grows out of strange helpless sorts of people. You have to be patient & look at it carefully, give it time to express its little self.

With the propagation & wide distribution of so much free verse, these little sentences of prose divided into lines, without the armor of much in the way of rhythm, rhyme or sound effects, seem even more fragile. (Not that I'm against free verse, if it can manage to survive & flourish.)

A good poetry reader : part botanist, part bee.

images... a small cuppa. from toward the end of July:

 11

  
 It’s a narrow ford   across the Jordan
 a small cupola   of water-light
 and all our knowledge   but a pond
 a snoring frogpond   madjayanine

  
 when I go   kigamanin   I will give you
 gocu   surely   gabizikamun   what
 you will wear   widjiwiyun   my courting
 child   if you go with me   (the intervals

  
 were sung glissando   the metric is slow
 and not rigidly maintained   all the
 Chippewa love songs   somewhat   rubato)
 your little cuppa midway drum-waltz

  
 to the clouds  your mighty copper penny
 is   bronze s.o.s.   unfolding   as the bent
 pole-stirrer of the clay   my wee tugboat
 alight   musters that Julian   draconian

  
 taconite   turning to caritas seed-jewel
 before our eyes   and if the bluish cloud
 palm-shade   Elijah’s  ravine-dulcimer
 or Ezekiel’s   exact   X-catenary wheels

  
 are reels   ambitious mother
 then   lucky Sophie   dance!
 And do a handstand
 now   with theremin

  
 and soda (Scotch)
 through golden Appalachia
 flying the sunny disarray
 (a coupla stingy wasps

  
 are fighting bumblebees) (the bee
 already master) where the yawning
 oreship spreads dove-wings (yon Noah-
 Jonah-craft) pshmwly (buzzing in Siberia)

      
                                     2.8.2000

But back to the MN question. Back to purrty purrtry. Melville (etym. honey-city). Bees symbolic (& empiric) of Israel; he went there, writing long poem of title which I ferget.

At the center of Moby Dick, at the center of the mast of the Pequod (anybody following the "smoke shop" issue in Narragansett-land?), is nailed a gold doubloon struck in Quito, Ecuador : a symbol of chance and egualidad (have I got that right?).

Jubilee is liberation theology; the Sunday of the earth, the release from debt.

Dante represents poetry's victory over the trobar clus of medieval Romance. The vernacular reaches beyond the death of the Beloved and beyond the poetry of the death of the Beloved (Poe) to the poetry of the infantile love of God, the bambino-babble, the kingdom. A representation grounded in the Eddy-Pussy war between Latin & vernacular.

Dante represents the hope of metaphysical dance music, after the prose of Melville's penetrating dismal frightful intelligence (Herman-Merman-Leonardo : the deeper diver-diviner, the truer mama's boy. Deeper than Dante, maybe).

This is the difference between Melville's disaster & the Moderns'.