paradise thirteen

ELEVATOR MATRIX

An eagle gliding motionless

& swift under the rain...

a message from the sun

outside my window.  Inverness

beyond the clouds, it says.  Dauntless

Dante beheld a double wheel

like Charlie’s Wain, meal-

sifting Hamlet’s dead-end eddies

into Ariadne’s crown of yellow

maize (Paradiso XIII)

at the center of the sun;

Dominican, Franciscan, we shall go

along with Beatrice too,

into that Minneapolis

where incognito Jesus

is a twin St. Paul (aboard canoe);

from White Bear Lake to Resurrection

Cemetery, we’ll unbury

Berryman & Mary

Magdalen right now – a Raven

intersection at Jonah & 4th,

a Jubilee bird-fest

out of the cosmic nest.

Jerusalem is raying mirth

from every corner of the universe;

the gray hide of a mule

hides one God-Jewel –

gold-sprinkled fiery agate-cosmos

      *

spiraling like fingerprint

of Everywoman, every

man.  The ordinary

ferris wheel begins to glint

with light most cosmopolitan –

green emerald of soul

freedom (personal

live-oak of Okeanos – constellation

of the Showy Lady’s-Slipper).

Be careful how you tread

this living woods of dead

leaves, sprouting crocuses – your

difficulties are not partisan,

your cures are neither red

nor blue.  The crownèd head

of King George, or the plowman

trampled underfoot by Mammon,

or the young stranger, mortally

undone by poverty,

her kids tossed into pauper’s prison

by our favorite mythologies...

we’ll mingle in the great

grain elevator matrix,

where the brightest of celebrities

& most anonymous of soldiers

meet.  Before the stars fall

through the vortex – Love

wingspans our last full measures.

4.18.17

unfurling Providence

ANGE D’OR

Pythagoras & Aristotle

felt both stars & sun

move (by persuasion

of love) around the atlatl

of the Pole – slow sarabande

of heart’s desire (my soul

pines for your solo Yule

just so, trompette marine).  &

though we scoff now, Harry,

your wedding dance is just

a veiled illusion – dust

on cosmic rewind, arbitrary –

yet those ripples on the strand

projecting gracefully

sound waves of sea

through particles of sand

put me in mind of relativity,

so that behind this mesh

of silken crossweave rush

soft murmurs (hush little baby,

don’t you cry)...  & a kind face

beyond divisibility

windy invisibility

ghostly ellipse of human race

gathers in gravity & mass

like a cloud-pebble

or magnified Hubble-

infinitesimal, lifted by windlass

                 *

into a masque of morning glory

from the outer darkness

with a rose compass

to inward salience (galactic story

of grave milky equilibrium

outlasting mirror-war

of swollen Minotaur

to bind the wounds with honey-balm).

The Earth’s unfurling Providence.

Slow-forming pearl

beneath the gray whorl

of a clay-worn shell – immense

agate of Agape, threaded

with light gold fleece

around a centerpiece

of Paradise (salt bread

& wine out of a stone casket).

Indomitable almond

branch, a blooming wand

cut for a lilac shoot, whose trumpet-

vine leans like a flinty mule

against vain headwinds

to Pacific ends –

vast azure of a wingspan’s rule,

bright Gate of international

ange d’or (meek door

for lambs, forevermore).

So sighs your shell, antiphonal.

2.9.17

the angry clown is not your father

HEAVY THINGS

If we look once more at your Topsfield

Aquinas-map, Dante –

that earthy horn of plenty

floored by starry sarabande (sealed

fan of luminous phenomena)

the heavy things of Time

rehearse the Salem crime

with simple weight of rigid clay –

ice-cold, stone-cold, bereft of life.

The line sags from the bridge;

the daughter of a lost age

droops, off-balancing (soul-grief).

Quantum quirks of spooky action

powder another image

for displaced rage

into the time-funnel... dissatisfaction

with oneself provokes a personal despair.

We do not know who’s there.

Halloween is in the air;

brown leaves congeal to pumpkin hair,

the angry clown is not your father

anymore.  O Juliet,

the phony craven despot

crafted no safety net... look further.

A rippling of seashore memory

brings grey gulls to sleep.

The peacock’s eyes gaze deep

as Argo... hold her now, Hagia Sophie.

10.21.16

thy brother calls thee

CATENARY TED

The cosmos hangs from a thread, a

lifeline.  Yes, Flem

was with us, up at Verm –

helped Dad, me & Jim (brother)

dig the cabin foundation.  Flem’s

father was MN State

Epidemiologist;

Flem died of AIDS.  There are these themes,

signs... the padre of Hart Crane,

manufacturing Life-Savers...

Abraham with scimitar

squeakin’ by with a warning... O Cain,

thy brother calls thee from the ground.

Hobo sleeps by the river;

his thyrsus nods, a glimmer

of August grass.  Mullein, dock... diamond

pine-cone (piñata by the Po).  The tree,

the tall cedar of life,

Malcolm!  She’s your wife,

you know.  Nehushtana of Liberty.

Evergreen, year-round.  The shadow

owl knows (lives there) –

Spinoza cave-winds tear

up the forgery of terror (low

blow put into Vladimir Kiev-doom).

I’m singin’ with the stars,

Flem, Jim – after the wars.

Mr. Catenary Ted bojangles home.

8.31.16

Jesus Thoughts (7) : in the beginning....

Improvisation is part of this thread; I'm not always completely sure of what I'm going to say.  This is just a journal, Henry's Logos-log : I have to seize the day, free time is scarce... so when the moment is opportune, then here I am.  Maybe this diary will accumulate gradually into something of value.

Someday I'll try to write in more detail about the crisis, back in 1972-3, which entirely reshaped, re-oriented me.  I've posted scattered things here & elsewhere about it (including an essay in the 1994 anthology for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea), but much more could be written.  Someday.  For now, let's just say that - to paraphrase Simone Weil - when I was about 19 years old, I had come to the end of my "natural" self - I reached an inner limit, my merely personal spiritual resources were exhausted, burnt out.  I was sinking under the weight of my own natural  gravity - I was in need of supernatural grace.  & grace arrived, in the nick of time.

Faith itself is a spiritual gift.  Without it, the mystery of truth is too deep for any one person.  I know exactly how meaningless these phrases sound to someone who doesn't think they believe in God.  I've been there.  I'm still there.  But my convictions are firmer now than they were three, five, ten, fifteen years ago.  When convictions and principles are weak, then the short day's distractions, mistakes, temptations are strong.  Yet, as Roger Williams well knew, and proclaimed from his rustic rooftop - you can't force belief or conviction of any kind, on anyone.  An imposed conviction is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms - a mode of intellectual tyranny.

No doubt I could be dwelling in utter delusion; yet I feel confident instead.  I feel my vision of things as they are is growing more clear.  Not wise myself (& never have been) - still, I sense my perception becoming aligned with a truth that is inherent in reality.

I say these things because, to repeat, I understand how extremely difficult it can be to attain a rational basis for a spiritual truth.  I spent many years in the mid-1970s as a kind of wandering seeker, a dreamer - mostly in a kind of meditative trance (while hitchhiking around out West, or doing odd jobs in New York City or Minneapolis, or traveling to London with musical ambitions) : reading, reading, thinking, pondering... trying to grasp 1) what had happened to me, and 2) how to imagine - realistically - a "personal" divine Being.

Many writers & thinkers fall back on mystical paradoxes when confronted with these issues.  I can't disagree with them : I agree (reservedly) with Nicolas Cusanus, that there is a fundamental distinction between the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine - a logical distinction, in other words - which is, nevertheless somehow bridged and transcended in the Incarnation (the union of finite and infinite, of divine and human).  But mystical paradox can result in a sort of explanatory cul-de-sac.  It's poetry, not prose.

So today, here, I am going to sidestep in my discourse, make a flanking maneuver.  I'm simply going to assent to the irrational bridging of that distinction (as the diagonal bridges a square with an irrational number).  I'm going to take it, for the moment, on faith.  And I'm going to turn (return) to a schematic mapping of what seem to be some implications of such a (cosmological, ontological) logos-design.

To do that, let's go back and reiterate, in a new figuration, the main plot of the Bible.  We recall the "hexaemeral" cosmology of the opening chapters of Genesis.  The story is metaphorical, analogical - we were never meant to take it literally.  When Genesis states that God created the universe in 7 days, what the author is doing is aligning the cosmic, seasonal order of solar time with a theological explanation of that order.  It's convenient : it's "fitting" - it fits, since the 365 days of the solar year and the 12 months of the lunar cycle divide into 52 weeks of 7 days.  The story that the world was made in 7 days is a kind of hymn of praise disguised as a prose narration : it allows a people, a tribe, a community, to align itself with the cosmic order on a human level - on an ordinary, daily (weekly) basis.

All the seasonal festivals of ancient peoples are simply elaborations of this fundamental cultural orientation.  This is what is called piety : the structuring of human works and days on an attitude of trust and supplication offered toward the logos, the divine order, of the universe.  The dome, the house, the temple - fundamental, global phenomena representing what Osip Mandelstam (in a literary analogy)  termed an attitude of "domestic hellenism" - a radiant push-back against harsh existence with "teleological warmth" : confidence in humanity's ultimate place, a being-at-home on earth, a dwelling.

Of course, we are no longer ancients : we are modern.  In the context of 19th-21st century history & science, the voices conceptualizing a remote, impersonal cosmos, subject to randomness, chance, violence, and the finality of death, have grown strong.  For many, the notion of a cosmic Spirit, a somehow "personal" God, simply outrages our own rationality.  It's a shock to the mind.

Yet the mind itself is the key.  One meaning of Logos is "ratio".  The poet, the seer, deals not so much in analysis, but with analogy (leading to synthesis).  An analogy is a kind of ratio.  The fundamental ratio that structures belief in God was narrated at the climax of the creation story at the opening of Genesis : when "God made man, in his own image and likeness".  This too is a literary fiction : it was never meant to be taken literally.  But it symbolizes a ratio inherent in nature, in the entire cosmos.  Here is the analogy : just as the mind of Man (male & female) senses, interprets, & orders life on this planet, so the ineffable mind of God orders the cosmos which emerged from nothing.  Body is to mind as Man is to God : and the "Son of Man" is the verbal sign given to the summary, the totality, of that physical manifestation, that embodiment of the logos, the ratio.  "God is Spirit," declares Jesus, "and those who worship him do so in spirit and truth."  In this spirit, then - in this light - it's possible to recognize the signs of the "Son of Man" as omnipresent and pervasive throughout the natural world.

Suddenly we understand we are participating, mostly without being aware of it, in a planetary and cosmic mystery play : as St. Paul wrote, we are all dying to this "body of death", all at once - & all rising too : into that "third heaven" (the intellectual heaven, above the 1st heaven of the sky and the 2nd heaven of the stars).  Into the dimension of the eternal, "uncreated" Logos.  There the spirit of God is the living "person of persons" - that is, a personal being more personal than our own deepest experience and consciousness of personhood (as we have known it, imperfectly, in our own lives).

These are the strange metaphysical mysteries I've come to accept, after much hard experience, seeking & searching.  I know exactly how drastically they overturn the modern "rational" worldview.  But this is the way home; this is the fireplace in the kitchen of "domestic hellenism."

What I wrote yesterday about the architecture of human/natural cosmos...

this weight-balance of relations...

maybe what I mean is "specific gravity". Maybe poets sense the cosmic harmony or design intuitively, by the sound of weight, or the weight of sound.

1132 : mysterious number in the works of James Joyce (& also Henry). Rate of falling bodies (32 ft/sec? something like that)

I tried to dig down into things this way (which JL thinks about so intriguingly) in the poem In RI. Anny Ballardini (who translated it into Italian) will be making an expedition to Rhode Island next spring : hope to give some readings.

If you read Paul Fry, poetry (according to him) is not so much anti-fiction, pro-history. It's sort of pre-fiction, pre-history. Pre-cognitive, so to speak. Unplaceable.

For these theorists, humanism = anthropomorphism, essentialism. False consciousness. Blinkered by species-solipsism & historical conditioning. An interesting idea, has a lot of appeal for our presently human-battered, overheated planet.

I'm too ignorant of their whole mentality to argue with them (yet). Provisionally however I harbor a couple caveats:

1) if you're going to accept the notion of universal sentience, pan-consciousness (thinking rocks, etc.) then you have to consider the possibility of super-consciousness, a higher sentience.

2) an architect fastens onto the weight-balance of relations. Ecology is a kind of natural architecture. So also human being seems to have a certain symbolic/practical "stature" in the ecology of life on earth - an architectonic. Yes, our notions of that place & stature in relation to other creatures is changing : but I'm not quite ready to accept the idea of NO structure. Even if the human self-concept has to change - from "lords of creation" to servants & stewards of creation (gardeners) - that still leaves us with a certain concrete role in a structured ecology (history, the house in Michigan) of reality/life.

3) and what if history is not the indescribable chaos of scripted fictions/errors of the Yale boys? What if history is an enactment of a growth-process, a manifestation-process, a flowering?

4) a Byzantine, iconic-triadic architecture (Urs von Balthasar's history as "glory") : Mankind as body, mind, and union of the two. Personhood inherently relational (parent & child, self and divine otherness).



(p.s. my little brother Bill is such an ecologist.)

I'm getting toward the conclusion of Lee Smolin's book (Trouble with Physics). This is a very engaging, exciting book. I'm in the chapter where he contrasts "seers" and "craftspeople", the philosophical deep-thought approach of early 20th-cent. (European, mostly) physics, with the latter-day (American) pragmatic-technician attitude, which has paradoxically led to a sociological "groupthink" impasse in the academy. Smolin underlines contemporary physics' dire need for seers.

Led me to pick up Arthur Eddington's 1935 relativity classic Space, Time and Gravity (1935) (which I happened to have on my shelf!). Gratified to discover that his famous astronomy experiment (in Brazil & elsewhere) of 1919 - which was able to determine (by way of a solar eclipse) that light rays are bent near stars to a degree that supports Einstein's theory - took place on May 29th (my birthday). That annual date is the best for such observations, since the sun is passing through a background region of very bright stars.

Just for fun I'm going to exercise my rights as a card-carrying (non-science, non-math, non-physics) dillettante, and play seer for a minute (stolen from work). Smolin discusses great unsolved problems & conundrums in relativity & quantum theory. Here's my very seeeerious contribution to their solution :

Henry's 5/29 Cosmology Sketch (or, The Eureka-2 Theory, or, The C-C (Cosmic-Ceramic) Rider Theory)

1. The simplest way to describe the universe : mass (or matter) set in motion (at very high speed).

2. The universe is composed of mass in its simplest and most efficient 3-d geometrical form - the sphere. Spherical bodies + motion = direction + spin.

3. Gravity, at its simplest, is an effect of the acceleration of spherical masses. Gravity rays and fields are thus an effect of matter in motion.

4. Light and electromagnetic rays are complementary (similar) effects resulting from specific types of matter. In other words, the energy-effects of both gravity and electromagnetism stem from the more basic force, which we will call the motion-force or spin-force.

5. Atomic and sub-atomic energies are manifestations of this same force on a minuscule scale. The smaller the mass the greater the effect of spin-energy. Thus quantum (sub-sub-atomic) effects - such as quanta-leaps (discrete energy packets) and "non-location" (the uncertainty principle applied to quark-level particles) are simply observation effects of spin-energy on very minute quantities of mass. Quantum leaps are so tiny & so fast that we are unable to observe the actual movements from here to there.

6. Relativity theory is substantially correct but incomplete. This is because the 20th-century effort to solve the observed contradictions of Newton's classical physics (the laws of our familiar local environment) over-simplified the spacetime geometry of matter in motion.

7. The problem of "dark" matter and energy on the cosmic scale is a result of said theoretical incompleteness. The incompleteness of the theory relates to unexplored aspects of cosmic equilibrium or "states of rest". Einstein's brilliant simplification (relativity theory) did not take sufficient account of this threefold relation : matter-speed-rest. In relativity, motion and rest are equivalent. But what is not understood is the state we might call "permanent-motion-and-rest", or "resting-in-motion" (TS Eliot's chinese vase, in Four Quartets). A motion/rest complementarity or duality, that is, rather than a simple equivalence.

8. Local environments of equilibrium and rest (such as our complexity-manifesting and life-supporting planet) are developmental or teleological, in Aristotle's sense. In other words, planetary ecologies, for example, have a developmental teleology comparable to that of biological forms (seed to full-grown plant, lamb to full-grown sheep, etc.).

9. Thus we should further characterize the primal motion-force or spin-force as the teleology-force. The as-yet unaccountable combination of high accelerations on the rim of the universe with the holding power of dark energy/matter is a function of the same teleology-force : local planetary equilibria are symmetrical (ie. pervasive) on a cosmic scale.

10. "Arguments from design" or "anthropic principle" theories are tautological, non-scientific descriptions of effects, not scientific explanations of causes. Such descriptions are certainly within the range of philosophy, and perhaps even logic; but they don't offer scientific avenues for hypothesis or proof.

11. The resolution of the conundrums in relativity, gravity, and quantum theory will not stem so much from research in particle physics or string theory, but from the investigation of this teleology force. For example, the action of this t-force may provide a real "background geometry", which will have to modify relativity theory (which disallows any such unified background spatial geometry - and which disallowance has led to all the baroque mathematical extremes of string theory).

12. Think of the "t-force" as primarily conceptual (for the moment). For example, consider the contrast between Euclidean geometry and Einstein's non-Euclidean timespace - the geometry of bent light-waves. Euclidean geometry is rooted not so much in points, lines and shapes, as (more fundamentally) in equalities. An "equation" is a complex "equality". A square is an equality of lengths. A parallel is an equality of distances.

The conceptual structure of Euclidean geometry is not negated or invalidated by the non-Euclidean effect of the material spacetime universe : it is only limited in some of its applications. Euclid is a kind of abstraction (in the form of geometrical laws) of our familiar, local (classical, Newtonian) environment. The equalities represented in Euclid are what we might call metaphors for states of local rest.

Think of the teleology of the t-force as utilizing non-Euclidean, relativistic effects in a developmental process which results in the Euclid-like geometries of our local world. In other words, the state of Rest (with a capital R) which preceded the "Big Bang" is reiterated in the equilibrium (the state of rest - of seeming-equilibrium - happening at actually tremendous cosmic speeds). Thus the (restful) origin of the universe is replicated, in miniature, in local environmental states of equilibria (as Einstein himself emphasized, steady motion is equivalent to rest). "In my beginning is my end". The spherical revolutions of matter are the most basic and pervasive image of the time-sphericity (or cosmic circularity) represented in the developmental history of the universe.

Fontegaia, onward, underward...

18

 
Under alp-bank in Switzerland, scientists
mole through superdimensional cheese,
carve expansive titanium race-
course for unknown particles

 
(Higgs hobos - shifty-eyey - elusive).
Junior Einsteins carry oversize
branes across antimatter (sideways)
toward theoretical, onion-beehive

 
Domesday - can they count every bee?
We seem to be alone in the multiverse.
A saddle-shaped cosmos.  Our hearse
or hers (Bootes up backward)?  Maybe.

 
He's the oldest son of the youngest 
paisan.  Prodigal scrabble-player,
dense brown dwarf (WIMP).  Here
and gone, we hardly nothingested

 
his talent for tunneling (with pencil)
athwart our own plain planet.  Maimed,
drawn (with quarters in the subway) -
shame on her, was he, dense exile,

 
doodlemeister.  Sand Franciscan
on rocky road, indeed!  Heartbreak
of the Protons on TV - let's make
Caesar salad spread veinous marzipan!

 
HOBO RAY MIRRORS HOMO-YEAR
crows crazed witless Addition (EZ-
duz-it) - REASON? SLEPT IN BREEZE-
WAY OVERNIGHT chortlez Shanty Choir.

As biologists grow more dogmatic (all is brain chemistry), physicists are becoming less confident (all is dark matter/energy).

(See last weekend's NY Times Sunday mag article. The billions of stars, galaxies - the entire known universe - makes up only 4% of existent matter. Physicists are confronted with a cosmos, 96% of which is unknown, invisible - conforming to no currently applicable physical laws.)

Another interesting post over here. Romantics & post-R's, theorizing about the cosmos & poesie.

The thing that seems hard to grasp, for reinvent-the-wheel Americans, is this : universe, reality, as a (supra)personal drama or event. Thus Law or Truth is not just an abstract proto-scientific philosophico-ontological thingness : it is Chaos ordered by some act (or ongoing judgement) of moral choice or will. This is the old meaning of divine Providence.

Scripture : testimony of abiding Ordinance. What binds People to gift of Land by way of observance of that good Law.

Who understands this? Some theologians, amateur & professional, I guess.

MLK-TSDQ - Melchizedek - "King of Righteousness". MLK - Martin Luther King. melek in Biblical Hebrew - "king"

I line up with all the antique poets of olde, who assert a (spiritually) vital, rather than a mechanistic, cosmos. This is where I was tending, qua poet, before and after the crisis previously related. Of course intelligibility & design don't rule out mechanism, chance or law : the advantage is, that they don't rule out life, uniqueness, anomaly, purpose, or beauty, either.

Let's gab some more about long poems, OK Hen? OK.

Both Warren & Dale Smith, in that issue of House Organ, point toward the messianic/utopian. Smith, in asserting a bond between the poet's line & the actual (natural/cultural) locus poeticus or environment. Warren, more specifically, seems to judge the "messianic" as a sort of aggressive ethos-formation or ideology, formed in conscious or unconscious conflict with deeper psychosocial forces (patriarchy, anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism). (I think Warren displays sort of a Catholic-Jungian syncretism, in which apocalypse, messianism, utopianism are "outer" phenomena, which fall short of a more complete & substantial inner integration or paradisal state. But I'm sort of guessing here, having given his essays only a cursory & intermittent reading.)

The long poem, with its collective & holistic ambitions, applies itself especially to utopian aims.

Seems to me that in order to approach such aims, any such work would have to have:

1. some kind of cosmological worldview, social-scientific philosophy, or religious base.

2. some kind of holistic or encyclopedic representation of social life.

(Northrop Frye & others have written a lot about such generic requirements.)

How do the American examples stack up in this regard? More in a minute.

Here's Jonathan on the aforementioned latin bit. (& he becomes reader # 8 of Stubborn Grew, the book that changed history (at least until the Johnson-Silliman Pact of 2004, outlined by that Walden guy) - thanks - & congratulations!).

I would never think of Robert Creeley in relation to that notion. Ars et celare artem makes me think, not so much of plainness & simplicity, as of a kind of crafty guile, combined with all sorts of indirections, including perhaps a surface moderation or transparency. But Jonathan's concept may be more accurate.

This gets me to Jordan's aside on "depth". I'll have to think a little more deeply about this. Somewhere in the book Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here a while back, there is something about archaic astronomy-astrology as the search for. . . man, now I can't think of the word! It's not consistency. . . it's not continuity. . . but it's like that. . . it's like a philosophical term for steady duration, a pattern which remains the same. . .

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it seems to me that hermeneutics or interpretation of art works often involves searching for the deep motive, the wellspring which connects all the dots, the answer to why an artist or writer chose this particular obscure symbol or image or emphasis.

The presence of such a motivating plot or plan is one signature of depth. You could also talk about an artwork's "emotional depth", but such is usually brought, paradoxically, to the surface (the crisis, the denouement). Depth of purpose, on the other hand, often remains hidden & disguised - and the reason for this is because there is the deepest emotional commitment to the deep-ocean argument which actually triggered the work in the first place.

Have been reading (or struggling to read) Plato's Timaeus, which is really a companion volume to Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here recently. Written in 300 something B.C., it holds, delicately, a borderland between myth & science, poetry & reason... wonderful to hear the ironic paragraph of this person, living almost 2500 years ago, when he differentiates between his own cosmology (built on astronomy & a fairly reasonable defense of the "argument-from-design" : ie. there are living things & dead things; things either move themselves or are moved passively by some other force; living things, as opposed to dead matter, are self-motivated (they move around by their own will); the freedom of self-movement is "life" or "soul"; since the most complex things in the universe have life or soul, then the self-movement of the universe must be propelled by Soul! I love it) & the traditional "gods" of myth - those same gods & myth-stories which Santillana & Dechend (Hamlet's M.) pretty convincingly (to me, anyway) explain, are also symbolic formulations for star-observations & time-measurements - only from an earlier era!

Anyway, all this seems pretty distant from some of the daylight proper concerns of poetry, which have to do with social justice and human values & how these must be defended NOW...

Struggling in my own way to move along, sometimes going forward in writing you have to go backward, to things you've left behind & forgotten. I tend to write a lot, & then find old ms. lying around... this sequence from a couple years ago sort of startled me with its own star-obsessions... so I'm going to post some of it, though some of you may have seen it before on a list-serve, sorry. It's a sequence called Shakespeare's Head, which is a building in Providence, & as you can tell, it's also a sequel to an early sequence (called India Point, another Providence locale).

from Shakespeare's Head

 
1

 
Snow muffles Providence in soft light.
Orpheus-Hobo shuffles through the streets
beneath immaculate rooftops, slanted
toward the drifting sky.  He is late

 
for the wedding.  In his pocket, a gold band
lifted from the sidewalk (in Fox Point,
on Washington's birthday).  In his heart
an image of a toy city - Atlantis, Golden Land.

 
He'll hold it toward you, shivering -
America in miniature, a tiny Ironsides
reflected in a bourbon bottle - shades
passing through fixed stare (his offering).

 
So needy excess issues (crystalline)
just as fireworks spring a constellation.

 
                 *

 
There is no better world for contemplation.
No butter-word for such a battered nation.

 
Only extravagant hobo longing
reaches past fright-monuments
and furniture of Nineveh (arrogant
roar, ablaze with dominion, fading);

 
only the eyes of Jonah will behold
a green star hanging over gardens
buried in slanting dunes, oblivion
(...distant, pining, as of old).

 
The bottle toy will sleep in his hand
until a starry shade stoops down again
to shape a nest for Everyman - and
bring a skyborne Jubilee to land.

 
               12.6.02

Happy Flag Day

Have been reading Wallace Stevens lately, along with Leggett book previously mentioned (Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory). Also re-reading Hamlet's Mill (Santillana and Dechend), the terrific, crotchety essay on very ancient astronomy & archaic myth. Actually, the last 2 poems I've written (& posted here) reminded me of this book (rather than the other way around). (Some of the "deep-dive" adventures in the latter portion of Forth of July drew extensively on this material.)

Thinking a lot about some of Stevens' obsessions - the symbiosis of imagination & reality, the nature of the human myth-making capacity and its relation to religious belief. Pondering the "culture war" with fundamentalist Islam, & our own homegrown fundamentalisms.

Hamlet's Mill is fascinating by way of the window it opens on culture's deep past, exploring how star-reading was really the first form of literacy, and how myths are not merely projections of human relations, but attempts to comprehend real time measurements, and the meaning of time itself, through long & close observation of constellation/planetary movements. Of course now we understand that the ancient notion of movement was kind of an artificial planetarium (the earth as fixed plane around which stars revolved), but this doesn't diminish the incredible complexity & specificity with which ancient cultures tracked the stars.

I'm finding this archaic science of interest (as you can tell from those 2 poems), 1) because it was a global phenomenon, found in folklore of many many cultures, 2) it provides an interesting way to get behind or beneath mythological-imaginative projections & narratives, the rituals by means of which different cultures identify themselves, and 3) because star-gazing & myth-making were part of the traditional "serious" poet's vocation.

I used the sort of ballad-form refrain style in these 2 poems, not because I felt like imitating Yeats or Villon, but because, basically, it can be effective, I think.

Cosmipoetics. From an article in Tuesday's NY Times science section:

As they try to figure out how this strange behavior could be happening to 
the universe today, astronomers say the ultimate prize from all the new observing
projects could be as simple as a single number.
      That number, known as w, is the ratio between the pressure and density of
dark energy. . .

You could say that Stubborn Grew (or at least Bluejay's presence in) is about the pressure and density of dark energy. Here's Bluejay, intimating to unknowing Henry what he's about:

Hey!  C'mon Bluejay!  Live ain't over yet!  Let's go -
up to the Terrace!  There's old Roger himself, up there!
Bluejay turned SE to see.  Yeah, I see the ol bear.
He got up and shook himself - blood to flow

 
into his phosphoric, porous feet and hands -
and said:  you know what you doin, Henry m'man?
You know you zigshaggin?  Raven an zigshaggin
a sweetblack rizebury W, man - donch U?  Unnerstan?

 
A what?  Sho.

& then the letter "W" takes on a multivalent quality in many sections of the poem : a shorthand for Whitman or William Blackstone, a reflection of "M" (both Mandelstam & Dante's stellar icon for Justice in the Paradiso), & other things. Here's something toward the end of Forth of July as a whole:

         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

(Cassiopeia being a constellation in the form of a "W", and linked mythologically with Ethiopia - another thread in the poem - source of Nile, "dark energy", Ark of Covenant legends, etc.).

Watched the happy-go-lucky PBS show on cosmology last night (Elegant Universe). I could identify with the neglected string theorists & their rejection slips from science journals hither & yon.

Over the weekend the true impulse returned & I went back to my template quatrains & I think it will work. Some excerpts below from the new version Dove Street.

  It begins like this, on a dark autumn day.
  The wind is blowing, you don't know
  where it leads.  Pussy-willow, dogwood
  wave their last leaves.   The lead-gray sky

   
                  shrouds the universe in its camouflage
  of sleep and melancholy.  Ravens
  mark your place in the book of dying
  and being born.  Goldfinch paces his cage.

      
                                        * 

   
                  In Bruegel's The Dark Day, the herdsmen
  follow a ridge in the foreground, drawing on
  their oxen, charcoal outlines seemingly stolen
  from the Lascaux caves.  In the distance

   
                  storms lash a somber, mountainous coast
  helmeted with desolate castle;
  shipwrecks ornament the entrance
  to the harbor.  A wintry violence

   
                  looms in murk above muted ruddiness,
  ramshackle roofs of valley and village;
  Bruegel grins in the teeth of all this rage,
  shepherding home his cataclysmic canvas.

      
                                         *

   
                  Every leaf bears an image of the tree
  (as when the underside of an autumn olive
  stands upright, tall - a tiny silver cypress).
  Every book bears an image of the Book To Be

   
                  and every child bears an image of the singer
  (almond-eyed) who left a humming shadow
  in the neighborhood - that summer cicada
  shrunk to autumn cricket (fading, lingering).

      
                                      *

   
                  Cosmologists are gathering in conference rooms
  with maps and diagrams and arguments;
  Anthropic Principle, String Theory, Branes,
  Dark Energy vents, dents - various dawns, dooms.

   
                  I walk down Dove Street almost every day
  to watch the silver-gray autumnal sky
  mirror the shifting moire of the bay
  (soothing my heart this way).

   
                  Orpheus fingered the space between the strings
  of his imaginary lyre (he'd thrown the real one
  in the river, after Eurydice had gone).

   
                  Only a pearl-gray shadow (lightening).

      
                                    *

   
                  What mutters and broods in an undertone,
  the doves and pigeons underfoot, gray
  wing upon gray stone.  What flits off
  at your lumbering step, O ponderous one -

   
                  through a gap in the trees in your heart,
  under your eyelids, beyond memory,
  beneath, behind.  Dazed now, you see
  but can't explain:  home again - Dove Street.

      
                                    *

   
                  As if childhood were Bruegel
  panorama - tiny almond eye
  planted (hidden) at the center. 
  And the passionate quest - trial's

   
                  puzzle of yearning loneliness
  only subplot, type, analogy
  (ink-path echo - shady
  image - singular ingress).

       
                               *

Article in NY Times (you may be able to find it here) on recent theory that cosmos is finite, & shaped like a soccer ball. Didn't Plato also say it was shaped like a dodecahedron?

audblog audio post Island Road # 11 and 12. My wife says it doesn't sound like me. That's all right. Hippodamus designed cities for playful strangers, according to the phusis(nature) of the cosmos; principles of universal proportion & mediation that so fascinated Simone Weil. (See the fine essay by Peter Murphy, "Architectonics", in Agon , Logos, Polis : the Greek achievement and its aftermath, ed. by Murphy & Arnason, Steiner Verlag, 2001.)