magnolia blooms

MAY-MONTH

Again, the quiet of a cloudy day

in Minneapolis.  May Day

in quarantine.  This is the day

maidens in flowery garlands would ply

their threads around the blossoming May-

pole.  Hobo is not Falstaff, I say –

he is the King of May;

a blooming almond be his rod of sway.

*

Meanwhile, archaic Hen the Rain King

by circuitous path hath circled

back to River Road.

His early neighborhood – passing

his mother’s house, her father built

– that Master of Grain Elevators

(Ravlin, J.H.).  His crop rotator’s

resting now.  River-tongues will gather silt.

An old man hoists his memories

upon his back.  Their weight,

grown heavy, will grow light…

Grace is a salty providential breeze.

I hear the whisper of her crane-

bone flute – the drone

of one trompette marine…

Guillaume’s grande dame will rise again.

*

& I sense Osip’s revolving sisters,

melding gradually their

sarabande.  Rose flowers

share circumference (O lento tenderness).

*

I never want to leave this house.

Orioles sing in the forest

under their shade palimpsest…

(oaks’ rattling snare-susurrus).

*

A fresh breeze brings the May-month in.

The sisters ring their double wreath.

The young hawthorn on Fisher St.

is blooming pink.  The almond

in her dark eyes glows, her smile

of Sheba-Shekinah… the lady

of the Song of Songs (spry

tree of Galilee, in Rhody Isle).

*

The gawky prehistoric gingko

Granddad planted is

still there (at 1615).  Its

golden Memphis fans billow

in breezes off the Mississippi.

The asphodel, acacia…

the acorns greening, high

over the house… & now I see

her – cartwheeling across a field

like some sapling tornado!

Sophie or Pocahontas?  O

that Gravesend kid – her diamond shield

my royal seal!  Her acorn coracle

my Isis barge – her eye

my Argo’s midnight sky!

Across the Black Sea of a world-debacle

shining (congruent) one American ray –

my Henry-church, our 

Churnagogue… one flour-

cattedrale – out of spiritual clay!

*

Like simple San Fran in Frisco

he crost himself, at height

of orange Golden Gate –

where Juliet booked… O

her last, self-cancelled flight.  & Henry

built a rude crossroad

in old Rhode Eye.  Sold

on Roger’s fine distinction – worldly

profiting & holy soul-seeking be not

the same.  Yet they are wed

by law-abiding God

into a single providential knot –

that normative & innocent new world

as old as children underneath a tree

chanting together of a chaste reality

where Love is as the Ocean – pearled

in tides of light (beneath the moon,

beyond the moon).  This charity

stands like a tall pine tree,

from earthy root up to invisibility… one

Union of pure dream-substantiality;

good will, reflected in the hearts

of humankind – with all our arts

in-woven there (O graceful tapestry).

*

The little magnolia on River Road

by Granddad’s elegant abode

unleashed her winter load

of fluttery wings (Primavera mode).

Persephone, Eurydice go underground

& Beatrice to the sky…

a grain of wheat must die

so spring’s magnolia blooms abound.

May Day… the worker bees unite.

The earth itself is in labor

fired in the kiln of Evermore.

Communion loaves of clay ignite.

Everything spins in the green matrix.

Liberty & justice, equity

& equilibrium… an origami

fold of love & intellect – deep Genetrix

a whirl of fiery faery feet – Elohim

twirling on galactic rim

with ocarina Jonah-hum,

to glaze the grail-stone with her hymn.

Sophie was making rivers on the patio,

& found a black-brown woolly bear –

small furry embryonic caterpillar

searching for a leaf to call ground zero.

Henry was looking for an oak-bole too.

At end of May, at Pentecost,

on Dante’s birthday, JFK’s… lost

Restoration RI zone?  Hagia Sophia? – YOU.

5.1.20

on the verso

HAWTHORN BLOOM

There were verses on the verso of 

the parchment, leaching through

like spidery veins (blue

robin’s-egg hen-scratches... mazel tov).

Imprimature of sovereignty.

Blood-red wax of Charles

sealing the 6-foot chart

of Little Rhody liberty;

beehive of ancient freedoms

rooted in that right

Coke labored to indite –

of persons to their own kingdoms

of thought, & conscience, & truth.

For Roger Williams,

riveting I AM –

rhaptor soul Nazirim, forsooth.

Because that bird circling the oak

is like a thread that knots

the agate to the plot’s

ripe dénouement.  The thunder spoke

& stone rose   like a double-ax

out of the mountain-wave

laddering Jacob’s cave

a grail-casket   for sweet St. Max

whose dream became   a vernal tomb

across the womb of Magdalen

& made of Joshua   a wren

& Henry Sol   a hawthorn bloom

1.21.17

Dance of the Giraffirmation

Periodically, in the course of writing Ravenna Diagram - as with many earlier poems - I fall into a sort of dancing fit.  This results in passages which evince a certain air of enthusiasm, an affinity with poets like Whitman and Vachel Lindsay (Hart Crane, sometimes).  It's not a popular or familiar mode today.  But it seems inevitable, built into my poems - a structural dimension, which emerges (usually near the end or at some pivotal point) in the form of these bubbles or bumps or saliences or Giant Red Spots upon the very evenly-distributed & lattice-like design of the whole.

Anyway, here goes.

SUNDANCE POLE

A poem might commence with this

little hawthorn tree

on Fisher St., fairly

overflowing with deep rose-red berries

like fireworks on the 4th of July

flaring & bursting in free

association – a liberty

of uncommon fiery wheels across midnight

sky – the pale stars in the background

steadfast lights, bespeaking

deep-down goodness (Hopkins,

maybe... Mendelssohn) – the silver sound

of a tender, melancholy trumpet

(memory of mourning dove,

her all-compassing love

that wanders wild, like autumn blade

of maple seed).  The streamlet of speech

emerges from wilderness

of your own soul – manifest

in scar-chronicles of flesh (we beseech

thee, YHWH, forgive our ingrained wrong);

the language snakes its way

along a jagged ray

of peace-pipe lightning (atlatl-prong

of brazen serpent) back to the source

rippling from limestone,

primordial marrow-bone –

a familiar voice, whose gentle force

you recognize from long before.

Comes with a question, like

a music teacher – Mike,

Jenny... will you try this score?

Do you know where you are?  Bright lens

(rose-red, white, blue) surrounds

her limpid lamp – sounds

stir from the keys – the earth sends

radiance from ground-bass depths

(a b-flat flint enchantment

striking flame – tent

flaring firelight toward the Great

Bear’s ring).  It is the sundance pole

that gathers every Morning

                    *

Star to Thanksgiving

from every tribe & people in the whole

wide Universe.  The Commonweal

of Cosmos-Wheel, the breeze

of Manitou through trees

in Lebanon, South Central

L.A. – a whisper through the pines

of Mississippi, Kansas,

California... Memphis

Tennessee... on any railroad lines

through space & time.  Even here

on Fisher Street, in Little

Rhody, her turtleshell

murmurs statutes of liberty (I hear

you, there).  Gray hawthorn branches

merge the black & white

of factional dispute,

pretentious politics – brace avalanches

of fanatics, stem the feuding tide;

her leaf-shades balance vision

with experience, precision

with that draft of lifeline magnitude –

fresh air of gratitude & calm

compassion (openness,

grace, charity).  Less

dogma, more enthusiasm –

where blossoming cities lift from soil

of civil equity,

brave ingenuity –

American can-do, granted to all

who will.  Old promise of a justice

overflowing, paid

in full – the freedom-chord,

rung with a joyful crash-caprice

of fife & drum, guitar & harp –

O let it roll down now!

That red berry you sow

in morning will be blooming bright C-sharp

by noon!  Song’s equilibrium

rests on her branch –

Love will enfranchise

multitudes (world freedom plumb).

10.16.15

Hawthorn on Fisher St.

Along the Minnehaha

Poetry enlists the descriptive, inscriptive, epitaphic, encryptionologous powers of writing - which are obviously formidable - in its campaign of resistance to time.  The poet stubbornly proposes a spiritual orthogonal (an upright L) in opposition to the horizontal flow of history, events, distractions, decay, necessity, time, death, chores, etc, etc.

Perhaps I'm delusional, yet by the same token I do have a sense of being one of the most indomitably resistant poets in America.  Everything I do in this realm seems to oppose the practical, the social, the amenable, the common-sensical, the professional approach.  It's been like this for so long I've lost all perspective on it, anyway.  I do what I do, it is what it is, it's become second nature.  People may object to the obsessive-repetitive characteristics.  Perhaps they're right.  I have no way of knowing.  Let the chips crunch where they may.

STEELY PRONG

Heidi, it’s been many a year

since we went a-Maying together

down Arthur St., in Hopkins

(Glastonbury? Mendelssohn) –

but next door, in the autumn rain

a misty hawthorn silvers

bright chartreuse berries

for the birds (windhover, crane,

starling) who may alight someday.

Just down the ancient lane

my father’s granite urn

abides, along the Minnehaha;

ravens stitch the cooling air

above the stream – a shade

those oak-leaf hands once made

over our heads (good chevalier-

Samaritan).  Yon turtledove

coos from a russet square –

fieldstone embrasure, where

vaults rise on sable ribs (alcove

beyond alcove, into the light).

Bring me your thorny ring-

around-the-rose, Heidi;

I’m ready now to dance & sing

athwart the maypole-chariot.

One drop of scarlet raven-

ink, one graven letter’s

steely prong... (one grail-griot).

9.30.15

Hawthorn in the rain