irrational Archimedean constant

APPLE PIE

On the cusp of another Ides of March

plague wracks the Republic.

Snubbing his soothsayers, slick

Julius the 4th tees off a crumbling arch.

Henry Hollow glimpses Fenris in the mirror

coyotes laughing in the doorway

the delicate gyroscopic orrery

of light & dark about to shatter –

shards of church & state, the glare

of Lucifer the puppet-master

dark Leviathan off-shore

a wilderness of the sea (whale Jonah’s lair).

But it shall not be so with thee,

you murmur to me…

                O

irrational Archimedean constant

transcendental root of unity.

Mild logos of a fisherman, a Fisher

King, fish-man… your hook

one Magdalenian smile – her look

from nocturne-cave of milky… where?

Before the granary-empire, before

domestication of the slave –

beyond star-winking nave

or curve of Galla crypt (Ravenna lore);

the ratio of infinite circumference

to one straight line.

Guillaume’s trompette marine.

Thanksgiving apple pie (in Providence).

3.14.20

ineffable seraph of the boomerang

BOOMERANG-SPUN

Love is the curving frame of things,

the flexible woven logos

of the safety net – bamboo’s

swerving embrace the sculptor brings

to public squares in São Paulo

(Alison Grace Martin).

Thus, in Pushkin & Scriabin

Mandelstam spoke of an eternal ritorno

fresco’d in the alcove of Redemption –

earth already redeemed

& art set free, beamed

through spirit-webs (boomerang-spun)

                       *

until the world becomes a nest or den

prefigured in those icons

limned for all seasons (our

pre-existent & imaginary friend

who nevertheless walks upright, smiles

& calls us by our name).

The rays through the cranium,

holes in the hands... Earth’s exiles

sense the time-scent of eternal ends.

& so the sign of humble dignity’s

grandfathered to eternity –

the nest feathered with wings, my friends.

10.17.19

Whitsun yodeling

SHADY RIVER

Hobo goes with the flow of things,

he sinks into the green

entanglement of vine

& grape, the stream’s faint ripplings.

His logos is a Lincoln knot

scratched into driftwood

while Turtledove cooed

overhead (so reads Coyot’).

The knot binds everything, as with

her singing spine, the Argo

bound over il Mar Nero –

Noé’s noeud of adoration (myth

turned moth turned monarch seal).

Echoes from a cave

one vanished brave –

Love’s breadcrumb, who became a meal.

All come to bloom in memory...

as the canoe in the garage

scented with Micòl-image

breathes again inscript in Bassani.

A grail of dew sprinkles the summer grass

with Hobo’s oasis-gems;

yearning no one condemns

uplifted where it shall not pass –

into that monarch-realm of dark cedar

where a thrush warbles

& salt breeze marbles

lilac dusk (by Po-Boy River).

5.22.18

... of course, you can interpret Prickett's theme of metaphorical "double focus" vision in religious terms (cf. "single vision and Newton's sleep" - Blake). Transcendent divinity and incarnate mortality. The eye shifting back & forth, unable to grasp the two-in-one... logos shifting back & forth, yoking & dividing the opposites... cf. Sanford Budick, Dividing muse : images of sacred disjunction in Milton's poetry. Budick contrasts/compares ancient versions of logos (Heraclitus and Philo, Greek & Hebrew) - excellent book.

. . . but getting back to what I was saying, think of Grenier's "I hate speech" and the langpo that followed - think of the general turn toward "textuality" in poetics that began in the 70s and continued - think of these trends in the context I laid out, of an emphasis in 20th-cent. modernism on artifact over communication (the creation of the aesthetically-perfect, self-contained, hermetically-sealed cul-de-sac as a defense against the loss of traditional cultural authority & its forms of shared discourse). These trends were another iteration of the divided zeitgeist (love/knowledge, faith/science) which is perhaps now over. Perhaps the answer to Ron Silliman's well-known & repeated "what's next?" queries will have something to do with poets' reclaiming the communicative function : restoring the balance by means of theme & subject-matter & more direct speech.

The post-structuralist argument which plays into much contemporary poetry, ie. that there is no ground for rational discourse, so no possibility of a return to logos or shared terms, is, of course, also a rational argument, albeit one which contradicts itself in the assertion. . .