Today: Abe Lincoln & my redhead brother Bill. Happy birthday, fellas.

HGpoetics readers might well be bewildered by all this emphasis on dates, birthdays, numbers. etc. What's the point?

I go back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this present run of blog entries on the long poem : that Forth of July is built on a kind of analogical thinking. The myth of Orpheus - the original poet, who brings stones & trees & animals to life with song, & goes singing into Hades to retrieve his wife Eurydice - this myth, in Forth of July, "narrates" a poetics, or a philosophy of poetry, in which the poetic word is in turn analogous (A = A) to the creative Word of Love, which - intervening - renews, resurrects, recreates life itself.

"Henry" - & I use the quote marks consistently, out of a sense that I, Henry Gould, author, am sort of dramatized/translated in the process of the poem into something else, a figure in the song, "Henry" - re-enacts the orphic myth through what I described earlier as a process of "decomposition" - a simultaneous unveiling, unearthing, & exploration, combining personal & historical realities within a "song-framework". Thus the experience of mortality is reconfigured by song (5.29 mingled with 7.4 and 1.6, and with everything those dates (& others) come to represent) into a pattern of confession, hope, renewal, victory, and a kind of cosmic image of reality shaped by the Word. "Birth-days" marked by death & hopelessness (Juliet Ravlin's father's birthday & her own dying-day; John Ravlin's birthday/John Berryman's dying-day) are gathered in memoriam into a new day, a new shape of time. This is the reproduction of the orphic action which is the poem itself (Juliet to jewel-eye, or J-ley...).

One can analyze & talk about it forever, yet only the poem alone can justify itself, in itself, by itself, being what it is, a song. As the old poem from Way Stations has it:

The poet is monotonous, his head
resting on her empty sleeve,
his voice out of the mineshaft
muttering rumors of precious gems.

 
And stars shine in the black sky,
peacefully, released at last
from that deep unspoken gloom
by his aimless, undying lament.

5.29 intersects with another pattern of dates, around Epiphany (Jan 6th). Several sequences from the opening of Stubborn Grew initiate this complex. The "narrative" element of Stubborn Grew actually opens with an elegy for James Ravlin, "Henry's" maternal uncle, father of Juliet Ravlin:

6

                 
                  i.m. James Ravlin, 1912-1997

 
Light quick mosquitos speed flitter
and slide at latter-day angle easily
mounting every corniced ingle and
fuming, spuming, better, better and better.

 
Mosquitoes there were in Saskatchewan,
where you were born, between
Granddad's grain
elevators, Grandma's steel-eyed span.

 
Those clever, clever lips hovered
in camel smoke
like a Cheshire hookah, smiled.
And tumbled out an accent stranger

 
and stranger. What flute
troubled earth to bear him?
The bare tongue-footed ague of him?
The sweet-eyed flourish, the high note

 
of his Viennese liner?  Where now,
sailor-man, handsome PT-boat boy-o?
He sleeps in his long canoe.  He is
scattered... a late Minnesota snow.

 
Unmoored from the height of land,
drifting from Lawrentian divide,
blueberry, pine, air-filled
cliff, the taste of iron.

 
The cherry trees and the dogwood
bloom now in this sinner-town.
Pale green sprays tender
over the graveyard.

 
Soon come the clever mosquitoes,
the new swarms.  I inch along.
A snail, with prairie on my tongue.
Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose.

Proceeding directly after this poem comes the first invocation of Juliet Ravlin, "Henry's" cousin, daughter of James Ravlin, & the presiding spirit of the orphic "ghost dance" at the center of Forth of July. Juliet committed suicide off the Golden Gate bridge at the age of 19, on her father's birthday.

James Ravlin's father, John Ravlin, engineer builder of bridges & grain elevators, was born on Jan. 7th (1889, I believe). On Jan. 7th, John Berryman leaped from a bridge into the Mississippi River, down the block from & within sight of John Ravlin's home on River Road. "Henry" has been recounting these strange birthday stories ever since. From the 2nd chapter of Stubborn Grew, titled "Ancient Light":

Bruegel.  Adoration of the Kings.  1564.
In the National Gallery in the heart of London
in the hands of black Balthasar in a green
conch on a gold nef.  Is that a monkey there?

 
And the scrawny peasants and the bourgeois tubs
staring at all that gold and frankincense, miraculous!
O clever, clever, clever calculation - and finesse, too!
The has-been, burnt-out Wise Men ignore the rubes

 
meanwhile - have eyes only for the grinning pug
hidden in swaths of shrinking violet or
marigold blue (I can't remember)... for He
shall Rule the Nations - snug as a bug in a rug.

                     
                          *

 
And Henry... what about Henry?  Is he ever
coming around again?  I wonder.
Around Epiphany, his mind began to wander,
they said.  Still have a Q in his quiver?

 
On Twelfth Night he remembered his grandfather's
birthday.  Granddad, Builder of Grain Elevator,
pere apparent of his mother - of the
grainstock of generations, ruler.

 
Hardy pioneer, flower grower.
Opera lover.
Mother's middle name - Elvira.
Clay vine of Ravlin violin - e vero.

 
The higher you go the more grain implodes.
Spontaneous combustion fertilizer
mounts to flood tide and none the wiser,
the straight line of inheritance erodes

 
and out of stumped Henry begins to drift
an example of poor penmanship.  Bark
of a splintered retriever out of work
and out of time in London's night shift.

 
So many neighborhoods of rotisserie syllables!
Nobody needs your babytalk victories, your
bosky driftwood, boy.  Work another hour -
or metro enthused back homeless to Minneapolis!

Forth of July turns calendar dates & birthdays into structural numbers. Thus May 29th : "Henry's" birthday, also RI Statehood Day, JFK birthday, day after Blackstone's burial, day after saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, Black Wednesday (5.29.1453), etc.

A bald list of such conjunctions seems rather meaningless. But the calendrical "rhymes" are elements in the construction of a narrative & thematic whole : "a 28 / nestled in 29". "Henry" represents the poet in a pattern of orphic returns or resurrections, a "ghost dance" for the American long poem, for the poet-suicides (Crane, Berryman - the author of the "Henry" Dream Songs), for Juliet (the poem is a "coming-forth of Julie"). That the entire poem is completed on 5.28 "fixes" the conjunction Blackstone/Henry/Rhode Island ("the rose" of Stubborn Grew/The Rose).

The structure of the central book of Forth of July, Grassblade Light, consists of 8-in-7 large chapter-panels, each consisting (with variations) of 28 sections of 28 lines each (7 quatrains), centered on a 29th section of 4x4 or 16 stanzas. The entire book is centered on a single stanza at the center of the doubled panel "Ghost Dance", in the following section:

28

 
As the whirring shape of a hummingbird
like a miniature bluejay overhead or
bee suspended over the clover
whispered

 
Love is our North Star high up above

 
I heard and
(as the rustling of that honey-mover
swelled across a grass-clay sheep-door)
lay in the sweet soil listening for your word.

                    
                        4.10.99 [note: Stubborn Grew, the previous book, 
                    was completed on 4.10.98, the year before]

Thus the entire poem is oriented at its center on the "North Star" (in Minnesota, the "North Star State", at the headwaters of the Mississippi) - which as this 28th section relates, represents the "tautology" (A = A) - Love/Word/Cosmos (explained a few days ago on this blog).

I've mentioned before the salience of the numbers 28 & 29, the date 5.29, for Forth of July. Speaking of Blackstone, just want to note once again : he was buried on Study Hill on May 28th, 1675. The next day his library/farmhouse was burned to the ground by Narragansett raiders (this was time of King Philip's War). May 29th is Rhode Island Statehood Day.

The entire poem (Forth of July) was finished on 5.28.2000. "In my beginning is my end."

Stubborn Grew. . . The Rose (the Rhode).

A p.s. to previous note on "Green Constellation":

the "ecstatic Russian bells" should be seen in context of the many Russian topoi informing the entire Forth of July, which began (in the 1st chapter of Stubborn - "Shakespeare's Head" [a building in Providence]) with brief sketches echoing-mimicking Mandelstam's Voronezh poems. The "path P of the Pushkin-the-cat thread. . . the coccoon/butterfly metamorphoses, central in Nabokov & important in Brodsky. . . the "Letters to Elena". . . not to mention the whole number/dating system, so pervasive. . . (the numbers 28 & 29, dates 5/28 & 5/29. . .

the central book, Grassblade Light, is the most numerically orchestrated. . . each chapter of 28 poems (each containing 7 quatrains or 28 lines : 4/7, or 4th of July), with a central 29th. . . July (1st part) is made of of chapters containing 5 sections of 28 stanzas each. . .

5/28 : burial of Wm. Blackstone, 1st RI settler, the "man who went to live with Indians". . . 5/29 RI Statehood Day, HG/JFK b-day, date of fall of Constantinople, traditional seat of Orthodox Christendom (1453), date (in 1913) of debut performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". Final chapter of Grassblade is titled "Rite of Spring" (in which "Henry" finally addresses "Juliet" plainly, directly).

(Please pardon semi-repetitions here, for those who've read archive from around January.)

Here's a bit from the coda volume, Blackstone's Day-Book : one among many which emphasizes the Rus-Mandelstam threads of the poem (one etymology for "Rus", Russia, is "rowers" - refering to the Vikings who governed the 1st Rus capital, Kiev). The poem refers to Mandelstam's short stark Voronezh poem which begins "Washing up in the winter courtyard" ("mandel" means "almond"):

     1


  
         We are coming to the end of Henry
 Navigator's long voyage, Elena –
 circling around an elephant ear (Abul
 Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) – see

  
         how everything grows simpler,
 more harsh, more true.  Still
 the well is always there (and will
 be) – like the man standing here

  
         beside it in the dark courtyard
 (strange blooming out-of-season
 almond branch).  A stone,
 a star, a well.  A cup of water

  
         from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
 wine).  A circling dragon-boat
 or scrap of origami writ
 folded to float so lightly. . . there.

  
         You fold Andromeda into a W,
 a mountain range back into M.
 You cup them in your palm
 to make a diamond, or double-

  
         diamond – cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
 Delicate Blue Morpho wings
 woven with microscopic strings
 of quipu thread (gentian-

  
         gentle, violet, and red).  A knit
 crossroad, then – red, white –
 streams into Cassiopeia's
 mother-night (at last).

     5.22.2000

Here's the "Russian bell" poem from July (incidentally, July was completed on March 5th, the anniversary of the death of both Anna Akhmatova & Stalin):

          7

  
         Maybe it is the belfry   of the Church of the Nativity
 of the mother of God   but it is still cold as Hades
 60 feet up a corkscrew staircase   shoulders
 brush the cobbled walls   the stumbling ascent

  
         a blend of dirge, railroad-crossing clanger and
 shattering wine goblet   a disharmonious sweetness
 makes a beeline   what they create and give away
 no Muzak peal can duplicate   It is peace in the soul

  
         said Mr. Dorokhin, 29   cacaphonous and
 hypnotic   the miracle is that they ring at all
 its bells were carted off   the vacant building
 (gagged) became a holding pen   for circus lions

  
         When it's cold like this, it sounds better
 Russian bells are stationary   the ringer strikes
 them by pulling the tongue with a rope   carefully
 tuned, but   harmony is coincidental   a tree

  
         of iron   droning   like a cork   within ethereal
 and capering fire   or an upside-down Higgs
 particle   afloat in a cup   of gegenschein
 or a grain of faith   profound and whole

  
         lifted overhead into   far-off   rooftop watercolors
 and a basil swell   where the turbulence began
 where a spiral snakes   into interior nègre
 like a turnstone   wheeling   Hamlet's cradle

  
         of inward sin   simultaneously   out into a hamlet
 of fate   at the navel of a rippling   font of sound
 where his father's   agenbite incuse   nostos
 just   rest   spins the will   toward Elsinore

  
         a cue for the angel   troubling the water
 in a maze of circles   with a rod of iron
 for restitution at last   this diorite
 horizon of my clay   you   turn. . .

     1.26.2000

A few notes regarding the obscurities of previous post (& other excerpts like it), for anyone interested. July is 3rd penultimate vol. of long long poem Forth of July (4th vol. is brief coda, called Blackstone's Day-Book, published with Island Road). Poem in previous blog entry of today is from 2nd, final section of July, called "The Green Constellation".

"G.C." is kind of ecstatic conclusion to whole poem, following 1st part of July, titled "Upstream, Down", which is kind of an imaginary "journey into the interior", down & up the Ms., paralleling the center of previous vol. Grassblade Light (Grassblade is centered on source of Mississippi; July is centered on the Delta).

Anyway, "G.C." was composed in four equal parts (24 poems each), sort of balancing the 1st 4 chapters of the 1st book (Stubborn Grew). Though the 4 parts are printed consecutively (I-II-III-IV), they were written "across", ie. I wrote them in this order: I.1, II.1, III.1, IV.1, I.2, II.2, III.2... etc. (each poem is dated, so the reader can read it "across or down"). The idea was to create this big sort of echoing square, thinking in part of the effect of Russian bells (cacaphonous-harmonious). As you get toward the end (I.24 etc), 4 letters standing for 4 bell-tones become more pronounced : D, F-sharp, A, E - the simple door-chime tones - except I inverted them to spell "F-A-D-E". You can see that the previous poem is from the "D" section.

The spanish quote in this poem from from Vallejo's "Poemas Humanas". Among other things, the section threads together various motifs from earlier in the work, including the balance of Caesar/Cesar (Vallejo), Julius (Caesar)/Juliet/Jubilee etc, March 15th (Ides of March) and April 15th (Good Friday - death of Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln), e-mpire and e-quality (under the shadow of the "W" &/or the gold doubloon nailed to the mast at the center of the Pequod (in Moby-Dick), from Quito, Ecuador (e-quator). The "Forth of July" figures the emergence of a "jubilee-bee" or butterfly from the husk or cicada shell or military shield of Julius (empire) - basically a sort of magic letter-game. What was an orphic "Romeo" search for a ghostly "Juliet" in Grassblade Light becomes a kind of spiritual image of metamorphosis on a cultural level in July. All this was oddly & shamanistically "predicted" by the Hermes/Orpheus-figure of "Bluejay" in Stubborn Grew.

I'll post another poem from the "Green Constellation" section which points toward the Russian bell phenomena. Incidentally, the penultimate section of the sonnet sequence Island Road (1996) is titled "To the Green Constellation". (The "Green Constellation", among other things, was actually the brand name of simple Sears typewriter, lent to me by Francesca Tagliabue, on which many of my early poems were written.)

Tomorrow is the day celebrated as the anniversary of John the Baptist's beheading. Also the day Atahuallpa (last ruler of the Incas) was executed by the Conquistadors.

But today is the 40th anniversary of the original March on Washington, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which should be heard in its entirety. I was 11 years old at the time, not really aware of what was going on outside of Hopkins, MN (until JFK was assassinated a few months later).

Tomorrow I'll be flying out to Minneapolis for a few days (on NW flight 1963, as a matter of fact).

The trouble with language poetry is, that by denying narrative coherence, it denies the "story" part of history, the drama. The historian Taylor Branch put it pretty well on the Peter Jennings show tonight: "People don't realize that the King speech at the Lincoln Memorial was a founding father's speech; to this day Americans don't realize that their founding fathers are black" (quoting as close as I can from memory).

Anyway, Happy Trails (until next week), & O Happy Day.

Anny Ballardini tells me that today is a Roman holiday : Ferragosto. Turn off the lights. Lie under a silver olive tree.

Somebody wrote a book on this, I just remembered. Lucifer's Heel, or some such thing. Help, American Peeps! Milton was a favorite of the Founders. I wrote about that in In RI, of which a section appeared oncet upon a time in Apex of the M, & which a friend is translating into Scottish or Italian as we "talk". But I am n't a-goin' t'talk about m'self!! Except to add that the Long Poem which began with Stubborn Grew was completed on 5/28, the day that Wm. Blackstone, the first Euro alien in RI, was buried (after his library was burnt down), the saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, of chansons de geste fame, & the day before my birth, which is RI Statehood Day. I merely bring this up because We was talkin' previuddly about Good Friday & ghosts & their connection with Stubbornness.

Jordan is readin' Wolfram von Eschenbach. It's the 4th of July. Shucks, I mean the 5th. Bada-boom-boom - them thar is three dropsa blood in the Schweissen Schnee.

Today is the 80th birthday of John Tagliabue. His New & Selected Poems is available from the National Poetry Foundation.

Today is saint's day of Guillem de Gellone. One of Charlemagne's lieutenants, fought in Spain; memorialized in French chansons de geste. Entered religious order, founded monastery & school at Gellone, in southern France. According to some historians, descended from Jewish nobility from Baghdad who migrated to Narbonne. A distant relative, I think, I like to think.

William Blackstone was buried on Study Hill, Cumberland, RI on this date in 1675. The next day his property was burnt to the ground by a band of King Philip's men.

- "Talking of corpses," - the Consul poured himself another whiskey and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered toward the door -"personally I'd like to be buried next to William Blackstone -" He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her. "The man who went to live among the Indians. You know who he was, of course?" The Consul stood half toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry lived in Vancouver. Yesterday digging through the files I found the first letter (I think) I ever received - a postcard from Vancouver, from my grandmother Ravlin. Colorized photo of twins in papooses. I was 14 months old. Tomorrow I'll be. . . sheesh.

& then Henry wrote a fictional Providence microcosm [concluding in a Finneganesque infinity on Good Friday] about a character named "Henry" who was begotten in the orgone box of John Berryman, who jumped off the bridge down the road from the house his (Henry's) grandfather built, on River Road, by the Mississippi (John H. Ravlin, who was born on January 6 (Epiphany), the day that Georg Cantor died).

The experience of making Island Road was, for me anyway, a demonstration of this concept of tradition/"Nowness". Writing this sonnet sequence had its roots over 20 years before, in a "strange encounter" I had with Shakespeare's Sonnets - a sense of the author's "presence" which precipitated sort of a nervous breakdown. (I've written about this in an essay in the Edwin Honig festschrift, A Glass of Green Tea.)

Part of what I was doing was asking myself, how would one write a sonnet sequence today? Every poet who tries, finds their own answer to this. In my case, I wanted to re-experience Shakespeare's sonnets - re-write them. At the same time, I had more contemporary models to hand - Ted Berrigan's, John Berryman's (he wrote a set of sonnets before the Dream Songs) were the ones that intrigued me. I tried to apply Berrigan's jumpy, scattered syntax; I also developed sort of a Berryman's "Henry" (from the Dream Songs) to frame an indirect narrative, a journey through winter darkness to spring, to an encounter with both Shakespeare & the "dark lady". In the penultimate section, "To the Green Constellation", I implicated or imbricated allusions to individual Shakespeare sonnets in a systematic way, based on a study of the calendrical-numerical architecture of the Sonnets by Alastair Fowler (Silent Poetry) : Shakespeare's "day" becomes my "year". The numerical design is noted in the prose opening to this section:

"61 Henry's Dream

In my dream, Everywoman was an icon. We were at a conference on the malaria epidemic. Urban locale--refined, old European (Siberia?). We walked past the coffeeshop at 99 19th Street, around the block, past the museum at 145 10th Avenue, & entered the Birch Tree Grotto (126 Verde Triangle)."

These numbers refer to specific sonnets, which are markers in the pyramidal design Fowler describes.

So what is the point of all these compositional details? I'm showing how the poetry-making process is an activity of producing Now out of time & tradition. My attempt to fuse Shakespeare with a "Henry-redivivus" - a fictional character out of a dead poet's oeuvre - is a process of making Now anew.

NY Times today says Monarch butterflies making a comeback from terrible freeze-out in Mexico a year or so ago.

St. Valentine wrote love letters from the prison where he was eventually martyred. Tomb/chrysalis. La condition humaine. Time flowers.

The year I wrote Stubborn Grew, my father's birthday (4.12) fell on Easter Sunday. This is from the 1st sequel (Grassblade Light), toward the center of the book (a chapter called "Ghost Dance"):

30


Spring scent in the nostrils, and in the eyes
a fan of tender buds over the branches. Happy
birthday in the ancient garden. A voice searches
me out, whispers reedy Magdalen. She says:

I spotted a jay guarding the door of the sheep
in a meadow where time does not run and
a crow flies with a knife sharper than
a blade of noon sunlight across the deep

prairie grass. The jay doubled over and wheeled
in a circle like a flowering M or tall amaryllis
or bold forsythia - and soaring toward the apex
of the sky, plummeted - a kingfisher, anchored

in a mirrored lake. Rose then - vermillion-
sheep-clothed - spread both wings wide -
and - for an instant - a pied, rainbow-hued,
flared tepee floated - when with a sudden

reversal of his feathery coat, the quetzal - all
coated and colored over now in earthen clays -
spread her wings again: and monarch butterflies
and grey doves stream from that wide coracle while. . .

I listened as the woman in the garden gradually
marrigated her seedgreen purplescaled hypotenuse
(happily numbering) while my soul rode Blackstone's
white bull slowly toward Oxford on my father's birthday.


4.12.99

[p.s. note for advanced bloggertationists: for riding the bull slowly toward Oxford you should see the closing Finn-Wakean section of Stubborn, where "Akhtemydovie" Akhmatova makes sort of a spring procession toward Oxford (where she received an award in her old age) surrounded by Gould-Herefordshire farmfolk - & then recall that the symmetrical close of book 3 ends on March 5th, as explained below. . .]

Valentine's Day & DATES. More about birthdays & dying days. More dissertation fodder for the 900 pp. poem Forth of July follows.

The poem ("Forth. . .") puns on the "birthday" of the USA.

Each of the 3 large books took close to 9 months to write. Gestation.

The poem's form & themes were sprung or triggered by a short elegy written for my maternal uncle James Ravlin which appears in the opening pages of Stubborn Grew. The section immediately following is a short elegy for my cousin Juliet Ravlin who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday in 1972. Juliet becomes one of the Orphic figures : in a sense the poem is a "coming-forth of Julie".

Stubborn Grew ends on 4.10 - Good Friday. The short central section of the entire poem (#28 in Book 2 - Grassblade Light) was written on 4.10.

Grassblade Light is made up of seven chapters: each chapter (save the central one) containing 28 parts plus a central part; the central chapter is a double chapter with 2 halves of 28 parts each, centered (as noted above) on #28 of the 4th section. The 6th chapter, titled "Giants in the Earth", is kind of a microcosm/"underworld journey" of the entire book 2, and was written on 5.28.

5.28 is the date of the death of both William Blackstone & the knight/monk/ancestor St. Guillem de Gellone (discussed earlier in this blog). 5.29 is my birthday & also "Black Wednesday", the date of the fall of Byzantium. The "Russian theme" in the poem can be read in some ways as revisiting of Byzantium/Orthodoxy via Mandelstam, E. Shvarts, et al.

The entire poem (Forth of July or Stubborn Grew/The Rose) was finished on 5.28.

Book 3 (July) begins on 7.15 (St. Henry's Day; St. Swithin's Day). One of the themes running through this book is death/resurrection, empire/Jubilee. 7.15.1099 the Crusaders after taking Jerusalem visited the Holy Sepulchre for the 1st time. "July" (the month) named for Julius Caesar; the poem moves toward & alludes to both 3.15 and 4.15 - Ides of March (Caesar's death) and the Good Friday on which both Lincoln & Vallejo died. This transformation is thematized as a kind of chrysalis (empire/Jubilee : Julius/Juliet). July was actually completed on 3.5 - date of death of both Stalin & Akhmatova (Julius/Juliet).

The poem as a whole begins with the words "Time flowers". The first stanza runs:

Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay.
A spring breeze flows through the branches on the terrace.
The city below flutters and flaps, roars
and drones like a resurrected bumblebee.

You could say that the birth/death/rebirth themes are encapsulated here. What is the meaning of this 900-pp muttering toward a birthday (5.28 to 5.29), while visiting dozens of other "holidays" along the way? In Stubborn Grew, the 2nd chapter, called "Ancient Light", serves as yet another miniature model of the entire poem (the title & the plot of this chapter revolve around a chance visit I made to a lovely Greek Orthodox church in London, where there was an old paint-chipped sign posted mysteriously high up on its wall : "Ancient Light"). It begins with a Breugel Epiphany scene & African wise man Balthasar (should be Melchior) offering his green-golden nef or toy boat as a birthday present to baby J. It ends with a christmas carol scene in a small London church shaped like a boat.

The poem is about moving from the vessel of the womb to the ark of Jubilee: the nef or star or angelic UFO which re-winds reality & intervenes in historical time (so that "time flowers"). It's a very American poem about timespace flight (July ends with these words: "come fly. . ." The entire poem ends with these words:

the nef rows, rows. . .
palms, heartbeats, light.

5.28.2000)

(p.s. one theory for the etymology of "Russia" is that "Rus" comes from the name given to the Vikings who founded the Kievan empire: they were sailors, "rowers")

I'm writing my own bloggertation. . .

[p.p.s. click here to see a picture of Julie & my sister Cara (on trike) & me, Gull Lake, MN, ca. 1968 or 69]

my brother Bill's birthday today. the roll-call:

Bill - Lincoln
me - JFK
Cara - Constitution Day
Grandma - 4 July 1900


from my own Cornell box (July):


5

With fog in rearview mirror end
of the span ahead lost in blast
of X-ray light (darkness visible? M.
Purrly's frwcks greenhorde lunge-dragn

tales?) Mississippian suppositories are
homing devices I will triangulate
some December with a Florentine
grandmother and a Negus-ancestral

mother of millenniums MOM grand
on the far side of blindness at the head
of the dinner table in the ancient
apartment off River Rd (or Niger?)

swirl of communal clay chert
deciphered only dimly and a little
child at the table with Lafayette
dancing in the painting in the country

of his father looking on after a late war
D.A.R. Florence Ainsworth 7.4.1900
cardinal pts of a maternal Negus
feeder reddening unraveling on

the other other side (these variable
sublimitations mean I need a M.A.P.
(relief if possible) or Nazca poem
(excellent, Ray!) visible over the Iowa barn)

raison d'état and Inca terraces (mirth-
impervious) in foiled embossments of
rain-porous Thursday's stunned pain's
cup of sorrow (vale JVL you're through)

and it's Marian Anderson Peru out of your
flaming dream from Indiana to the tall
Andes from musical tomahawk to capitol
steps up to the microphone and I am a poor. . .

1.21.2000

The "occasional" aspect of this poem can be sketched out as follows: it was written on Nov. 22, the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. It is also the birthday of former longtime RI Senator Claiborne Pell. Pell lives in Newport, where JFK & Jackie Onassis were married. There is a "memorial" aspect built into Forth of July as a whole, around the numbers 28 & 29. The poem closes in various points on Good Friday, in particular April 15, the day of the year both Lincoln and Cesar Vallejo died. There are many more instances of this sort of calendrical design, a few of which I have already mentioned here: such as 5.28, the saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, & the day William Blackstone was buried - this being the day before 5.29, JFK's (& Henry-narrator's) birthday. The central poem of the entire book is titled "Ghost Dance", the implication being that the poem sort of scripts a re-birth or resurrection of all the ghosts it memorializes. Probably the most direct version of this is the carnivalizing of the name "Henry", which plays on the idea of John Berryman's "Henry" redivivus (Berryman, as I have mentioned, died within sight of my grandparent's home on River Road, along the Mississippi). (See this poem from the sonnet sequence Island Road.) All this play around ghosts, names, iconic figures from history, birthdays & dying days & saints days, is a way of presenting a carnivalesque image of Incarnation.