your glance will not be replicated

Nadezhda Mandelstam

FOR HARRIET, FOR LIDIA

          to Lena Archer & Barbara Swanson

This falling snow at end of year

seals all our doings

& rememberings

with soft imprint of upper atmosphere.

Each snowflake is a face, or signature

disintegrated from the sky

from Ocean’s continuity

come down to live, to die – to melt, unsure

back to the common spring (indifferent

& all-encompassing).

Watch generations passing

with the calendar.  Grandma, bent

to join her friends again (under

the ground).  & we are left

to plow along... to heft

the load she bore, so bright & clear.

Your glance will not be replicated

nor your smile rehearsed.

The gentle ones, who nursed

each flower into breath, are translated

beneath an arc of sapphire sky

into their immortality –

embrace each earthy

being-born, each learning how-to-die.

There are these women... limping

over the frozen steppe.

See how they leap

now!  Lifting off... (on seraph wing).

12.30.19

like a phantom of spring

LAMBENT PRESENCE

Slouched on the couch, Hobo is

near the shortest day.

Earth’s winter way,

making her rounds – stoic old Miz.

The river like a froze French drain

her Via Francigena makes

past dirt-bent snakes

of old St. Lou.  Where Jackson

Quick, somehow, came from – pilot

on Yankee hospital ship, 1863 –

late father of Jessie

O. (caught fever, like as not).

Full fathom five, Jessie, thy father.

Like Jenny’s mother, too,

huh?  Little tree (cedar

or yew).  See my ghost dance gather.

The natural round is in the clay

& waiting for that Last Day

each grieving soul will say

O help me turn another way.

This lambent presence in the window

like a phantom of spring.

Persephone, in a ring-

dance, leapt over the fire, so –

lifted by droning hum of living

& dead, out of clay

wheel, through the Gateway –

wave-crest prow, loafer’s Thanksgiving.

12.17.19

my circuit is circumference

HONEY-OAK

Sunshine in June – one whole note

melts into the chord

of summer.  In the old

garden of Time, the poet’s boat

extends its shade toward evening twilight.

The golden ratio of the sunflower

stretches to the nth power

(its perihelion); clay speeds to insight,

cartwheeling uphill into angelic life –

that bright-gated City

whose anti-gravity

magnetic North amends all strife.

Through this fan-feathered diapason

of a planet, the limpid figure

of a limping friend, your

sister-dove (gray pebble, midnight sun);

her hazel eye takes in mortality

as a grave garden absorbs

the one whose goldfinch orb

will bend, in parallax fluidity

as rivers from Paradise stream forth

or a mustard seed

flares – life’s high meed –

a sunny gyroscope (balanced from birth).

So the Messiah-bloom of Israel

like Joachim Fiore,

Henry Flower (ey

hey yo) anchors goodness to the Pole

                 *

Star, steadfast over midnight waters;

so Infinite Presence

arcs into salience

turtledoves & fiery matières

de Bretagne (Arthurian hide-&-seek

the Once & Future King

resolves, into a ring

of riven oaks & golden fleece).

The One Who Rose from the Dead

lives in our midst –

Who left his Holy Ghost

as marigold, to blaze undaunted

Hagia Sophia (with a million eyes);

American peacock (turkey?)

or Aramaic poppycock (see

how archaic our ways – how wise!) –

only Phoenix-Turtle comprehends

how from dream-song flame

Reality revolves the same

again... as when a potter bends

her starfish over azure sand

& lofting clay from seabed

into galactic Roundhead

Cavalier (old Charley-Horse le Grand)

curling himself into green honey-oak

until the lightning stroke

flashes – where thunder spoke

the wheel that spun Ezekiel (Rose-Boke).

6.20.17

elephant burials

SOFT RIVERBEND

Snowflakes crystallize, unique

& elegant.  Mandala-

knots (of ice).  Then follow

the sun, like dew in a raven’s beak.

Into the rain, the river, Ocean.

Heart’s slow dilation.

Sunken beams of pain,

of petrified love... beyond reason.

Light tracks of salt, the tears

of trees.  Sacrament

of speechless element –

elephant burials.  Fallow years.

Inarticulate, dumbfounded soul.

The knowledge of the end

in each soft riverbend –

her fingerprint, on clay bowl.

Dreams gather, so.  The dream.

A curly wave of sheep

threading from the deep

time-meadows.  Trim trireme,

bearing a casket wrapped in fleece –

matrix of Paradise,

grail-caduceus

lifting each Jonah to release.

The air murmurs immortal Spring;

your friend is limping sweetly

by your side.  The tree

of Galilee is blossoming.

1.17.17