invisible Henry Church

LIGHT WINKS

A cup of sunlight floats across

the cedar octagon

of the gazebo.  June

leads summer nearer endlessness.

A squad of orange day-lilies

freckles the riverbank

where weedy Hobo sank

to the wheat.  His mother’s frieze

of blazing international neon

(banked by green hosta)

outshines them today.

These lily-petals arch a grain-

vault – great grey elevator

rounded with cloud-pillars,

where the safety-net was

knotted, finally – in memory

of J.  Shadow of a tacit planet –

moony-silver Saturn

waiting for the Golden

Age, maybe – foggy parapet

where earth meets sky (grey

overlapping waves

& clouds).  Dante’s grave’s

invisible, behind a clutter of gray

paint-pots, now – beneath a blur

of ink-wings over parchment

– where the bald eagle bent

his beak, pinned torn souls in tar

                  *

each to his or her last judgement.

Hobo looks up through grass

toward his own Ravenna’s

golden youth.  Incandescent cloud-sent

Tadzio, back from the ashes –

gesturing an orant Orient

from shore to shore.  Went

Jesus thus from Galilee, eyelashes

wet with tears (witnessed); so Henry

Tadpole Turtledove

breaches, scattering love

like baby spouting sperm whale (verily).

Invisible Henry Church is vagrant

as St. Franky’s mule –

flutters in a monarch school

through silver double dove-doors, bent

toward Mexico.  When that last Adam

lingers in a weed-garden

for Mary Magdalen,

she coos, Columbian, for him;

it is the beginning of the end.

An ancient raven hovers

over Hobo, bearing leftovers

(crumbs from a wedding).  Mend

your way, she caws.  Men do not know

how swift the river-flow,

how salt Gulf breezes blow.

Light winks from coral reefs below.

6.27.17

Transfiguration of a maze

FOUR PINES

To imitate Francis, or Guillem d’Orange;

not to turn from the world,

but my own greedy churl

to whom the world panders (strange

profit in dust).  In the sweet flame

of yearning day-lilies,

to glimpse a dew-sprung rose

labyrinth... Love’s beckoning game.

Transfiguration of a maze of sighs –

of Giuliana’s longing,

Henry Cat’s sad reckoning...

all those winding trails of Psyche,

Ariadne’s ingle eye.  The far Gate

shimmers there, in Frisco Bay;

an M, as of a catenary

smile suspended, doubles you (checkmate);

your azure horizon draws its line

between twin vanishing points,

like pillars of four pines

feathered to a target (mine).

The wellspring of the soul is as

a lodestone (from beyond

the Milky Way).  Fond

depths of Holy-Land – Eureka-adze

or axis of the earth.  Bee-mouth,

hinge of honey-door

where uncreated light pours

through... sunbeam, raying north & south.

3.30.16