signum of yearning

DOOM-BELL

The simple poem sets its seal on the day

(signum of yearning, lack

& bronze heartbreak).

It doesn’t create, but confirms, I say –

tacit equipoise of universe,

with roaring hearth

mirroring each heart

in Milky Way (our fiery nurse).

& of that translucent softest koinonia

the poem’s just a line.

Graven tattoo or riverine

El (whorled conscience of Columbia).

So when the Rabbi hums a restoration of all things

we understand what he means

& feel it in our bones –

sunlight in the kitchen supersedes all kings.

Liberty-tyranny-liberty; light-dark-light...

your Florentine chessboard

migrates its word-hoard

to Skye, & beyond (stern Ocean slate).

Your buoy rides the moiling salt

like a lucky pawn

become kingpin again;

Hamlet swings the doom-bell... halt,

who goes there? – solo Ophelia

hoovers up all Denmark

from her West Branch park,

& Evening Star glows like Astraea.

12.9.19

the sense of being right

GREEN EYE

The sense of being right, said Mandelstam

confronted by the Kremlin

goons.  Gumilev’s vision

of sweet radiance (chaste equilibrium

of morning dew).  The restoration

of all things might not be

some dystopic unreality

but a balancing of earth & heaven –

the way a canoe takes wing downstream

like feathery kayak

or golden bubble-track

across the sky (the Ocean River of your dream).

Kennedy, Jack.  A 4-leaf clover

assassinated every day

along with brother Bobby, &

King, Martin Luther (justice-lover).

A green eye floats, engraved over

the pyramid.  I calibrate

the shifting angles of a late

Atlantis – one heartbroken sky-rover

whose tears will magnify an Iris

in transit, like Venus

(from luxuria to lux

aeternam).  She was born for this –

to be the eye-in-hand of muddy clay

transmitting Jonah to Columbia;

to launch a hallelujah

from Monk’s Mound to D.C. (U.S.A.).

11.17.19

essential graphene histrionics

AUTUMN NIGHT

My biographical Brown Decades tumbled

rapidly by, in Providence.

How simply the silence

of these beseeching trees (autumn

at the Arboretum) speaks to me!

Alex Weinstein, in Mt. Auburn...

stood there with Sandy (Grecian

Urn?  Likely committed it to memory).

He played the violin at 91.

Emigré from Odessa –

fruit-fly research @ Columbia –

loved poetry & science... (thread-thin,

stooped, seraphic gentleman

of Cambridge Mass.) –

& so the fleet years pass,

callow Henry, to Thanksgiving (amen,

amen).  I put my faith in one

contextual canoe –

dry tacit Quaker taboo

against unquestioned superstition;

a sort of Boston Personalism

accepting each whorl

of conscience as the real

sign of some ineffable wisdom –

spring, source, coil, J

spiraling beneath a moon

brighter than cogitation

tonight... in a jumbled chaos of hay

                  *

stacked (by osmosis-creation)

across twistronic history

into graphene infinity.

Histrionics of pacemaker nation?

No, kid – it is the equilibrium

of a canoe or gyroscope

emanating (spilling hope)

out of the heart of the Imperium

accosting the Seizer of All Good

with adjusted reciprocity

of infinite mercy –

that normative hearth-neighborhood

established on the everlasting rock

of I & Thou, of eye

& dhou (equality

the ratio of the basic J’nah-Ark).

& so the weird Isis-receptacle

of Mirror-I-Am

fuses in twin-rhyme

with Notre Dame; so the spectacle

of male narcissism becomes unviable

at ordinary crowing

of Rhode Island Red – being,

like palm at the end of the mind, able

to hoot like Owl o’Athena

in the autumn night of

history   (the shadow of love

bending over your cradle)   Ephphatha

11.5.19

limestone eyelid

TEXAS HERON

The smoking poilu, in his pink turban

like a blasted basilica

bent over Ravenna

marshland.  Many thousand gone.

His ferrous requiem for Texas heron –

wings on migration,

Zion to destination

unknown (indifferent shotgun).

A ghost dance of repetitive waves.

Arthur in Otranto,

Geo in Ferrara...

Micòl & Black Elk (lead-gray graves

in crowds).  A quiet cemetery

full of new-mown grass.

They Shall Not Pass.

Heaven & earth... won’t fade away.

The Magdala Stone... hasn’t figured

yet.  Her equilibrium

of magnanimity (come,

stay!) – like rain over the weird

Mammon of idle selfishness...

a motive for release.

She’s coming, Orpheus –

returning, Willy – rose of Inverness

or little almond tree – Mary

shedding lambent grace

or Jenny Falcon-Ace –

Love’s fiery knot (bright quipu-tree).

4.25.18

The word in poetry, as an end-in-itself (we read it for its own sake), is in that sense like a person, or like the cosmos considered as a creation or work of art.

It has been popular for quite a while to emphasize the transitive nature of art, how its value lies in the fact that it leads to something else, that it represents possibility rather than telos (end, purpose).

But a major quality of aesthetic experience is stillness, intransitive repose. The thing at rest in equilibrium - or better, active in equilibrium.

The poetic word inhabits a borderland, a dawn/dusk liminal area, between the visible & the invisible, known/unknown, things/values, being/intellect, time/eternity. Out of this well emerges mysterious water.