tutelary loon

MURAL CROWN

The river rifles arctic blue today

beneath nippy April wind.

Hobo his way will wend

downhill, ahoy, with the current, hey.

His notebooks stew in crumpled chaos,

like a Burchfield swamp in June –

half cricket calendar, half jejune

palimpsest (July stinks Janus).

Bleak melancholy in Ohio.

Spooks in lean eaves.

Storks bundling wet sheaves

across the ‘30s.  Good material, O.

Hobo looks up from bottomland.

He holds an eye-in-hand –

muddy Cahokia (one grain

of sand).  Just Clay’s j-jug band.

These bricks are 28 feet thick.

A pyramid, almost –

only Hunky Ghost

(Ho-Chunk) could make this stick-up

stick.  Like Killers of the Flower

Moon.  Getch’r Manitou

(just one gris dollar few)

before she get you.  Evening hour

now.  Mire-flowering almond tree

out of Voronezh (or Galilee) –

your mural crown, Tyche.

Hyacinth madeleine (waiting for me).

4.6.18

digging in the dirty green

AYE-AYE

The dirty green of the dollar bill.

Gardener George, earwigged

on one side (with a big

little Mona Lisa smile).

The eye over the pyramid (annuit

coeptis) on the other.

Levitating, mother!

Mammon, touching his limit –

a gilded pharaoh, forced to step

sideways (into the river-

sand).  Busy beaver

out of Illinois might be princeps

round here (nobody knows

til all the votes are counted).

We are all the Lord’s anointed

Preacher-Judge (siege perilous)

leers in the face of b-flat storm –

Cordelia, ascend

your throne, bend

everyone to teeming agape (love’s form).

The government shall be upon

his shoulder (right to left)

until the desolate bereft

& greedy soul relents – a human

Imogen emerges, lowly

& victorious.

Dancing the periplus

of Arg-Noah (144, aye-aye).

12.12.17

unfinished business

LIGHT CANOE

Cold Minneapolis.  White flakes

float solo, lazily

toward frozen sod.  He

sleepy too, Great Harry – shakes

his fusty bearskin (Mister Rabbi

tucked into his cave).

Wish they would behave.

A wayward dolor over fly-by

country ekes the bile from bunny-fur.

Infinitely gentle,

infinitely... mental

clamps inhibit memory, yessir.

Over the mantle in the dim apartment

Lafayette was dancing

just for Washington.  Sing

victory, Columbia – our true intent

was Liberty.  Hail to the Chief

in Indian Country –

arctic blue pine tree

sheds secret home (Sending Relief).

Grandpa’s got amnesia now.

The old brass shell from

Belgium mourns like a bell

in the pipe-smoky corner.  Plow

up the rose from the deep well of France,

Willa – that spiral dance

Crane zigzagged in a trance,

Atlantis echoing in weedy elegance.

                      *

Unfinished business crowds a heavy

surf onto the canvas.

Painter sticks to grass

with orange tar-baby.  Chevy

waves from Davy’s Locker – swings

his palm toward magnetic

north.  D.C. frantic –

Empire stuns fleet – Mort brings

us to us knees.  Only a wee

green island merman,

imperturbable, remain –

Pacific mule (Admiral of Ocean Sea).

A little grey jay (Whisky Jack)

whistles through her veil

of salt-shaking.  Sail

on, Peace Corps – Pearl’s Clamshack!

Under the turbid rotoring

of pyramid schemes –

when trumpery becomes

a weird mudfish – a rippling

stone floats to the surface, springs

to hover – catenary

honeycomb (or berry-

gem).  All minions, toughs & underlings

flee suddenly, like shady characters

out of a bad novel

(their plots unravel).

Blue J’s light canoe threads jasper piers.

12.7.16

Palmyra, Palmyra

I heard part of a BBC broadcast on the ISIS rampage in Syria.  A British scholar was asserting that the neoclassical architecture of Washington, DC was modeled in part on the ruins of Palmyra.

That's not where this poem came from, exactly.

A poem is the idiom of an idiot, full of flounders & slurry, signifying (maybe) something.  Ezekiel saw dem wheel's a'glory, way in the middle of the air (Louis Armstrong).  Eugenio Montale waxed lyric about this particular LP.

"Nummulitic" : art historian Adrian Stokes talks about the particular kind of limestone used to build the pyramids - called "Nummulitic".  After the nummulites, small protozoic creatures trapped in Egyptian limestone - from "nummus", or coin, in Latin, because of their disc-like shape.

Somehow we got from Egyptian nummulites to American dollar bills (with the pyramid & the disc) - from money to Mammon - George Washington on the other side.

Long way from the Lincoln penny.

Poetry is a work-in-progress, like the Earth (according to divine Providence).  Ursus here is a sort of image of the State as Beast (USA, RUS, USSR).  But the bears might be redeemed.  "Without vision, the people perish."

WOODEN LOGS

August departure... evening crickets

elegize on wooden

logs.  In Peto’s brownian

study, a sad decade disintegrates

like Queen Zeno’s palm-fronds, in

Palmyra.  One wing-scratched hand

pleads Washington’s jarred band

of masons (keening for Syrian

widows, orphan sons).  Important

information inside.

Your gravy train can’t hide

from Grace, her chaste Nubian portent –

always arriving never quite,

a Paradise for turtle-

dives.  So melt the mortal

Quito coin, our double-down knight

(shy U-bird cycling her parking

lot).  Concentric wheels

of Nummulitic seals...

one bears dawn for Ursus (barking

Mammon flipping tails) – the other

gyrates toward his irate

Beatrice – oceanic

ex, Czech mate (cyclonic mother

coated in cute limestone slime).

One down, one to go

up again, Horatio.

Antique Atlantis corals rime.

8.31.15

Reminiscences of 1865, by John F. Peto (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)