disenchantment of the sacred wood

 SECOND CHILDHOOD

This is that ancient harvest night.

Hobo curls deep into his nest

of old leaves, with his ghost

of a motherland... everything all right.

The Middle Ages were a second childhood

for homesick gentlemen, broken

by the gears of modern men –

the disenchantment of the sacred wood.

That light-filled limestone in the towns

offered to Mary Theotokos...

or the tart fervor of François

Villon!  Guild banners, pennants, clergy gowns

blazed with a commonality belied

by profiles of sad Synagoga,

goad for theological amnesia.

Her crown askew, her flock must hide.

Mum Quaker Hobo snores now

in a pile of aspen leaves.

Canada poplar sheaves,

he mumbles, to a sunflower (somehow).

She’s Pando in Italian, he dreams.

Largest clone colony

below the surface... maybe

the universe.  A raven-glance beams

at prow of her canoe, slips by.

Your motherland is endless,

someone whispers.  So this mass

of dead leaves limns one breathing aye.

                                                            10.31.19

dialect of high & low

CLAY NAVEL

Literature might be political.

The dialect of high & low,

the pyramidical Pharaoh

& Erich Auerbach in Istanbul...

slaves muttering (familial)

athwart the exaltations

of regal Lion-Suns

& River-Moons (extra-terrestrial)

their jocular contra-dance lingo.

Dantean, obsolete

vernacular (obsidian);

mosaic featherweight, grave Galileo.

Everything formed from nothing... out

of a pinhole in the universe.

Clay navel – Osiris hearse

called up by current, cattail flute.

Whorls of tree-rings mantle each mortal eye.

Isis in Iowa,

Blackstone of raven-sigh –

Cautantowwit, under the Milky Way.

The tacit origin.  Your motherland,

O King.  Incipient

restoration, air apparent...

transparent equilibrium (beatitude).

Near the steel vault of St. Louis.

In the seine of the fishermen,

over the Mississippi.  Sign

from tree-logs, Jessie Ophelia... always.

6.23.19

all aboard the Midnight Sun

FROM MEMPHIS

O Lady walking by, in black

jacket & yellow skirt,

you lift me from inert

& vacant thought into a way-back

memory-milieu.  The Promised Land

of sunlight at midnight

is nest for monarch flight

& viceroys too (you’ll understand

when we get there).  The Milkweed King

is Hobo in disguise –

the motherland is prize

for steady Jim (gone huckleberrying

with Oblomov).  He walks gently

into rabid disputes,

young Nanabozo – toots

his horn – Rabbi-clown, my

Hiawathee Bigfootprints

of Peace; he’s taken down

in order to rebound

into renown, like Printemps

Spring-Rain Joan, or Franny Cricket

(she of jingling anklets

in the cedar dusk).

There’s earthy scent beneath the musket;

there’s a penny in the well.

A dinged wingèd profile

traipses from the Nile –

elopes from Memphis (into Israel).

6.1.16