like an unremarkable cup nest

SLOW CHANT

Brown river, in a transept of browns.

In a gully of mid-March.

She slides by Arch

to Gulf, to be engulfed (drowns).

A scrawny bird scrapes overhead.

Plain sea-gull?  Or

some magpie pio-pio –

newsy jailbird finch (last heard

in 1938)?  What about Mudpie Robbins,

the St. Louis Cardinal?

Pitches his meta-material

nested steady state hysteresis (spins

on clumps of slag – chaotic shmush

of paired radii

with reversible pi

slippage).  Camouflage whoosh

like an unremarkable cup nest, filled

with grass & rootlets…

one a them twig safety nets!

Jams into stadium – an emerald,

mobile stable of staple u-particles

crowded along a spectrum

between sand, cotton… some

aleatory compass… (see Hunter King articles).

Over the chained bay waters –

rhumb line of pilot-bird.

Oscillating upward

into a faery 4-leaf clover’s

             *

earliest, minuscule sward…

as a Newport plover’s

nimble track veers

o’er sand waves (Ocean bard).

So from the lifeless mineral heart

of Minotaur, a green

sprig, emerald gemstone

springs.  With Nestorian art

(Eugenio’s grin) all the birds of the air

assemble in the palm tree;

a mustard seed (tiny,

fiery) molts to canoe (in her Ferrara lair)

& branches crossways, into quatrefoil; 

the remote & royal midnight

blue of Southern Cross (right

up there) hovers over river-soil,

& the Firebird (that sole Pentecostal

scorching glossolalia

slammed into orb-regalia)

skims from our Mater Dolorosa

biomimetic widow Rose… bent

beneath rose window

(Apollinaire’s slow

chant out of humbuggery, resilient).

So the nesting instinct of the Nazir,

the mother Hen of Rabbi

Rooster-Crow, will sigh

& spring an Easter egg (O Chanticleer).

3.18.20

Abba Tor & Eero Saarinen

GREEN EYE

                                i.m. Abba Tor (1923-2017)

If this roof were to fall on my head now

I would die a happy man,

said Eero Saarinen

to Abba Tor (Kennedy Airport, 1962).

The engineer won’t stand on cardboard –

number, weight & measure.

Concrete is dumb.  (For sure.)

It doesn’t know for whom it’s being poured.

Let’s use this requirement to let some light in.

Skylight ribbons through

the Jet Age double-U.

They builded better than they knew.  Someone

whispers like a humming bird beneath

French limestone gravity –

gray shadow cavity,

the leaden heart of black corroded wreath.

The terminal’s long-empty now

(hotel-to-be).  But the sound

of twine cats cradling profound

equilibrium is as a Finnish prow

of voices laboring in harmony –

it lifts a catenary prong

where the cartwheel song

creaks like rust in clay, or an eye

from the bottomland (circling palm)...

Green eye of Liberté

from Providential bay –

Columbia’s rose wheel, her feathered helm.

2.24.17

(NY Times obituary for Abba Tor here.)

music of ordinary things

AERIE-FEAST

Music of ordinary things...

happiness at work,

when things go OK –

when the work is good, & skill brings

flowers to fruition; then at dusk

heading home, to family

& friends, where kids play

beneath a sturdy roof (hard task

fulfilled with courteous precision)...

plain telos of humanity,

pleroma of reality,

continuum of beauty’s diapason.

Grandfather’s house of rusty brick

along the River Road –

an engineer’s abode,

who loved an opera (Elvira’s cheek)...

One high lone raven corkscrews toward

the Pole.  This pillager

is Eli’s forager –

his black-hole fleece ties ragged

knots, makes nest for bread & wine.

Look how the prophet-priest

exalts his aerie-feast

where Time peals to a finish line,

B-flat – è FIAT... è finit.

Apollinaire smiles

in the wings – miles

overhead his plane lifts (azure, infinite).

9.28.16