curious Winter's Tale

FRAIL FOLIO

Tell us a curious Winter’s Tale

before October ends.

This cottonwood sheds

flagship – by remnant sail,

from crown of flimsy raven nest.

Berryman’s birthday.

Not a block from here... hey.

Fold him he water music (final test).

Pledge of confirming intellect

spurs poet to sole deed.

Life’s halcyon meed.

Plum plummet (kingfish dialect).

Not that yellow-gold & blacken’d

leaf, cornered in eddies

keyed to cotton levies,

blackface parodies... Huck reckon’d

not.  Rather this lightweight,

ineffable lovelight –

staging for drifting wight

her leaf-romance (it’s not too late,

Hermione).  Tale told by idiot

king, floating everything –

how twin brothers ring

the mirror lake of Camelot,

& Guinevere & Lancelot

surface (Gennesaret)

Stravinsky trance-daughter

by prairie vortex... oaken chariot.

10.25.18

aqueducts for bumblebees

JESTER THREADS

In the anonymous late grass,

among the stray brown

stalks like overgrown

aqueducts for bumblebees

Hobo looks off toward the flesh-

tone Mississippi bridge.

He yearns for the courage

to be like Woodpecker, in his mesh

of stealthy wasps & stolen honey –

I mean that Thunderbird,

drilling his fiery word

dovetailing out of Galilee;

the lightning rod atop the dome

whose inner lining is mosaic;

a kingfisher, whose beak

flings Geryon from his kingdom.

Late August air grows clear, autumnal.

He’ll shed his jester threads

like Hal doffs Falstaff duds

& lie down by the Rio del

Espiritu Santo.  Watch how that firebird

melts hearts into unison –

lifts into comprehension

both Jerusalem & Athens, toward

a chastened & revived Cosmopolis

where neighbor-love is measure

of the planetary future... &

then he’ll mosey back to Minneapolis.

8.24.18

serpent ocarina

FEATHERED WHEEL

The king is carrying his cross

wearing his crown of thorns.

Only his mother mourns.

The restless crowd is at a loss.

So history plays out

on broken banjo string –

scratchy LP spinning

over & over the tethered Scapegoat

Song.  A narrow beam of rust-

red copper, through shade

of rock.  Copperhead

of light.  Serpent mouthing dust.

Tan sand (some Navajo camouflage).

Everyman, eaten

by ants.  Has-been.

Hobo, dreaming in a stream-montage.

Nobody.  Only air, flashing

like feathered wheel –

Thunderbird heel?

Lo, him – Kingfisher, splashing.

In the clay matrix, Morning Star

pirouettes in Paris

for Apollinaire.  Pax

lounges with Liberty, while from afar

twin pillars of a temple rise

in unison – an azure

octave, lifting her

amid dew-glittering, sea-breathing sighs.

8.10.18

Saw kingfisher at India Point today. Very unusual (along with the usual doves, pigeons, gulls, starlings, coromorants, & swans). Halcyon.