the continuum of life (i.m. Margaret Treuer)

MORNING STAR

                             i.m. Margaret Seelye Treuer

There is the fabric of the poem & there is

the continuum of life

as with Ojibwe mother & wife

& federal magistrate Margaret Treuer, otherwise

Giiwedinookwe (North Wind Woman) –

first American Indian

female judge in the country

(requiescat in pace, strong dancing one).

& I can’t always mesh the two threads

right – in poem, & with life

with my dull carving knife

rough-shaping sets of Minny-figureheads

for meanings I can’t quite project.

& in a one-room cabin she

grew up, ambitious to be

of service from the start – & heck,

she married a refugee from Nazi Germany

– Scattergood while you can

laboring man, & chairwoman

in labor.  Adamant to bring out of many

threads, & ivory husks of sister birch

one floatable resilient bark

or local replica of Ark…

wild rising, riding on waters of Ur-church

or paddling Churnagogue… to lift

the mournful tapestry

from scorn & travesty

to something like the glowing starry gift

                   *

it was meant to be, in the beginning

& she loved her Native ways

served as mentor & guide

teaching her children how to rice & sing

& hunt, tap maple, living off the land.

I was searching for a figure

like Pocahontas, Morning Star

stepping up to dance out of Gravesend

someone like starry Virgo or Corn Mother

to represent (in my rough-

sketchy way) just enough

for my own District of Columbia (another,

older coulombe, a deeper-down coo-coo). 

& as le printemps approaches

& spring tiptoes on lady’s

slippers through the forest, & you

sense the great symphony slowly expand

& breathe, toward end of May

a chord of Restoration Day

sounds in my heart & over the land –

when a glossolalia of babbling Pentecost

races glittering across

the coppery brook, & as

we rise in spirit toward that almost

ineffable perfection of the Everlasting

Thunder-life… we sing

of grace & thanks-giving;

our maypole wisdom-song we bring.

3.21.20

& that beauty - when it confronts & represents all that life & the world can throw - when it rises to the theme - may be fierce, stern, austere, complex, profound, ironic, uncompromising... magnanimous, comprehensive, compassionate... moving...

Poetry. OK, we were explaining it, right.

Seems to me I've been explicating it hereabouts at great leennngggth for many a year now! Heavens, yes.

Two things come to mind when I think the p word (no, besides that thing!...):

1. Poetry is... uh... simply put, an exploitation of the innate music of language. Thus, the grand & middling poets of all times & eras with whom we is acquainted, are thems that are fluent in a particklar manner of transmuting the regular matters of language inta something beautiful.

2. & it follows, then (if they are beautiful), that poems are, as I've enunciated at other times & places, in some sense, complete, finished, satisfying, whole, integral... and, strictly in this here aesthetic sense at least, or from this here aesthetic angle, ends in themselves. In other words: the innate music of language - the music in particular, that is - finds its telos, or end, in poems.

But here we's approaching a mystery: what (in the world) is Beautiful?

Keats already answered that one, Hank!! TRUTH is Beauty! BEAUTY is TRUTH! an' he got that off some old greek clay mug!

It follows, that, in this tired old ugly world, this stupid unjust crazy old world, this sleeping half-dead ignorant old world, this weak blind mortal fleshly old world, this hungry starving & confused old world, the appearance of beautiful truthful beauty-truth will be a vital stupendous transfiguring event. An event the borders & substance of which we do not comprehend. An event for which Poetry simply is a symbolic representation or trial balloon improvisation.

In the book Stanza My Stone, a study of Wally Stevens, a conception of Wally's conception of poetry tended somewhat, very roughly, in this direction. The poetry of poetry & the poetry of life were 2 different but somehow analogous things.