April is the finickiest month

SMOKE PILLARS

April is the finickiest month, sunshine & snowfall

confusing the fiddleheads.  Atop the bluff

across from St. Paul, three tough-

soft Indian mounds are igloo-domical.

A little further down, the buried poet-man

dreams in Resurrection Cemetery.

& further yet, across from Eero’s airy

Gateway Arch, Cahokian terraces remain –

vernal ziggurat earthworks climb into sky.

The river moves in swerves… &

doesn’t move.  A copperhead,

unblinking, eyeing you… deciding – live or die?

Flanking that rushing flickering stillness

the mounds are more than motionless.

How… curious crowds can only guess.

Perpetual smoke pillars curse & bless.

Yet these temples are only an analogy.

Even the priests understood

that much.  The man tied to wood,

the woman in flames… perverse apology

in the bloodshed glass – recognition

forsaken.  Of the friend

nearby, who takes your hand…

(a glance to the heart, beyond perdition).

These vast mausoleums of bone & ash

frame unwavering grief.

Magdalenian memory, beyond belief.

& the light will not die (dwells in her eyelash).

4.13.20

glare attracts birds

MIGRANT ZONE

      “But,” she added, “a tribute that kills thousands of birds?  Is that really 

                what we want?” – NY Times, 9.11.19

Little Alex was in love with them.

Would run out to the “woody

area” (floored with heavy

twisted vines) & note their thrum

of peregrine wing-calls; run back, report.

He was 20 when the Towers

fell.  Now he’s in the painters’

guild – swings from scaffolds out

in Portland (surfaced a new public school

this summer).  Everyone

knows someone so, dangling on

the perimeter of gravity (lead’s rule).

Edgar Brightman says, each body

is an etching of God’s mind –

that Personage who’s fond

of persons that we are (might be).

It is some Berryman-Osiris dream

of emerald Ireland, or

Mannahatta... out of mire-

bleared violets, one twin-beam

(ineffable, 4 miles up into night).

The glare attracts birds

(like glamorous words

of bright adhesive poem).  Raven, kite...

– bad omens, harnessed by our own

self-heightening memorials.

Yet... all my trials,

Lord.  DOVE LIBERATES LOVE’S MIGRANT ZONE.

9.11.19

New York Times, 9.11.19

Occasional flight

BLUE SCHWINN

Out of the vernal vernacular,

low to the ground, weedy,

where the plane (on its way

to the White House) took a detour –

in the park, where the kids play

& choose up sides, & dream

of glory, & ice cream –

someone planted (in post-igneous clay)

a wedge of limestone, with an antique

bicycle saddled to

its pinnacle (blue

Schwinn, I think).  Joints creak,

wheels wobble in the barnyard breeze.

My kingdom for a horse,

cried desolate hoarse

Richard, knocked to his attainted knees,

blood-drenched.  Phrases mumbled

as we read along, in school –

Eli lama sabachthani... rue

the day – gave pause.  We fumbled

for our lunchboxes.  We floated

spitballs toward the furthest

pate.  Life in the West

was always evening toward sunset –

where Thunderbird lifts hefty wing

above snow mastodons,

& Mulberry Bay runs

rosy, toward plum Everything.

9.11.15

Flight 93 Memorial (from www.britannica.com)