relativity behavior at the end of May

NEF-TUNE

& what if all the Seekers, Roger’s progeny

– that prophet-salt of the earth –

assembled in an ark (Bertha

the birth-canoe)?  Like an almond eye?

Like tall Sophia-Top, spiraling from sky?

The quintessential star

of relativity behavior

in the Great Congregation, at the end of May

(5.29.1919, to be exact).  When Albert

raised a toast to the memory

of time & space, & we

felt that fire... like Baked Alaska in the desert.

Birthday for Ocean, constellate;

malingering little reprobate

always castigated by Bay State,

always flaming in a pentagram – complete

salt sea-bird tugboat-gal

who lofts Old Ironsides

to cosmic shipyard one Ides

of July (my Galilean madrigal).

It is the nef-tune, from the underside

of the sea, of the mind;

Love’s ecliptic incline,

like one grain of sand.  Wave, light... abide;

to launch us from our shadowy shells

& melancholy corners

into this brilliancy of yours...

all-human cradle where the hearth-fire dwells.

1.29.20

so Pocahontas might emerge again

PONTOON BRIDGE

The timid sun blanches behind these clouds

of January dim.  The miniature

ice-floes speckle the river

as they move south.  Chilled Hobo nods.

Yes, Henrah, there’s sleep-work to do

in this hibernation.  Dream-

boats a-building.  My trireme’s

a ship-in-a-bottle (of Irish brew).

See through the glass?  A beauty she is.

A bloom of almond petals

like a round of Grumman metal

canoes (nickel-dime aluminum Kris-

Kraft, maybe).  Like a micro-tuned

pontoon bridge, bent

from Iron Range to Ghent –

gildered from Gravensteen to Gravesend.

Henry slumped on a frigid cottonwood

stump, stumped.  The lantern-

bark in Hobo’s paw turned

green... little nef of oaken holly wood.

Cathedral Mary mine... he intoned.

Turn back the puny gangsters

of the bleak – these drugstore

Minotaurs – high Fraudulence enthroned.

So Pocahontas might emerge again

& roll Rebecca out of Gravesend

lifting her golden wave of corn

enchanted, vertical... toward Washington.

1.13.20

one foolish man & three Magi

TURTLE-SHELL

Henry wakes from an old man’s nap

with a child’s sense of space

& time.  Heart’s relentlessness.

Here be the river; here the wide gap

between whispering grassland, distant sky.

Epiphany.  Three Wise Men

camel out from high Tehran

to find one homeless king, in a spare pig sty.

Tonight the belligerent intelligence of war

sent guided Minotaurs

heat-seeking vengeance.  Stars

were collateral damage (kids no more).

The ragged tent-flap & the drafty stall

are Henry’s flimsy turtle-shell.

His mind & heart a broken spell –

a wasteland shack, no longer fit for Grail

or Calabrian hermit-monk, or Parsifal.

Only bring me the gift, Melchior

of your toy myrrh-nef – your

river-sense, emerald, mercurial;

like a 4-leaf clover made of almonds

interlaced... like 4 canoes

bent to the whirlpool’s

mandala (Itasca spiral of palm fronds).

This Providence of tight-coiled J

anchors the Pacific Ocean.

Knots its rose-clay revolution

to a bottled ship – ensign of Milky Way.

1.7.20

OK, one more (God, I could post the whole damn poem.)

 17


  
 I built a way-too-delicate
 ship-in-a-bottle and threw it
 into the sea.  Was it Lucky
 or Sophie – or only

  
 Titanic ox taught to float
 too soon toward no one?
 A wheel was borne
 down to the delta (a

  
 paddle-wheeler, lazy
 catamaroon) into New
 Orleans, like an ark of J
 d'Esprit or some Degas

  
 jetty-gazetteer-in-brick
 Isaac molded for gargoyle
 atop Notre Dame.  Soil-
 heavy, a thrown-back

  
 blue-gill forehead-
 figured she-Marie or
 Rust & Rosie O'Green
 maybe – a Marian, sad-

  
 happy-again at the
 cap-tall pen-arcadia
 turkey-shoot.  A florid,
 a rapt – windjimmirror.

  
 Some medieval mother
 wounded by arrows.  Your
 forged seventh to the fourth is
 one loft-angle-barn green anchor.


     
                             6.9.99

Today my name surfaced in Ron's blog history of the po-po-universe. It must indeed be Bloomsday.

  Fire licked the Rome
  of your smile, indivisible
  Petrogram – where RW
  touches Jerusalem

   
  and threads knot
  above Las Cruces.
  The nef rows, rows...
  palms, heartbeats, light.

[Nota: the long poem Forth of July is bookmarked by the homonyms rose/rows - Empson's emblematic antinomy in 7 Types of Ambiguity. But here it's more like a 7-sided pun, because the poem (out of Mandelstam's Voronezh) emerged from Rus (Kievan Russia), a word some think stemmed etymologically from the Russian for (Viking) "rowers". (A nef is an ornamental miniature ship.) Rus - and Rhode Island, that is. Double vision.]

Something odd & green & quietudinous for St. P Day (from July):

 16

  
 Lifted   in crossweft timewarp
 from a flowing delta’s   fan
 of phenomena   the nef
 left behind the perimeter

  
 (centripedalling   kenosic canoah
 hen-brewed   where bees dance
 above closed lips)   ascends
 into Enrico’s rich F-rica

  
 a sharp clft promontory near
 victorious falls   the iron
 bells’ aye ripples rings
 there   and the rain

  
 glints   on lfbld
 splld   like rndrp
 on lfbld of prrie
 grs   enflded

  
 lf within lf
 shrp swrd
 grnswrd
 flld

  
 now with
 bhved kbzzzz
 of hzzzzryl bskts
 of   hneed   wshprrd

  
 hmmng   and ksszzs
 where the alfabt iz effybt
 O’hnd mmmmm   (bllft
 for the klsn   of the csqd shp)

  
 and the shp baaaa
 and the b   shbaaa
 nd the shp (a bshfl
 shmrk offrd Abrm)

  
 flts like a spr   slwly
 into the crcle of
 the jwlled crcle
 where a flt whstls

  
 to the pt   the fxtpt
 of the lv-lw
 rvld unrvld
 crsrd  prfct

  
 now nt Mmmn bt
 a pnny fr hr nme?

  
 The shrp shprd’s prvn
 prw of the shp anchrd
 now   a rs rsn for shrn
 the Chrn crst frvrlstn

  
 and trn the jls shl
 of Jls to flcy ltshp

  
 lightly   armor to feathers goes
 from Julius to   lucky July
 in the twirl   of elegiac
 shamrock   Sophie

  
 overshadowing the ark
 overshadowing the crown
 overshadowing the crowd
 and lifted  so carefully

  
 into the bkwrd mrk
 with a shshshmm
 goes the shmrk
 like tny crmb

  
 vmrmrs
 immrhd
 inmyrrn
 myrrrsd
 
 a figurehead   curled
 sharp prow back
 efjlgqed
 like

 
 grn
 grs of
 grcefl
 flft   ngr

  
 now  upstream
 qrnd   Qn or pn
 pt of spd   a Qn
 of mstrd   time

  
 mstrld now
 in a ryl flsh
 of blJ kfshr
 Jbl ay  won


    
           2.21.2000

I too try to "embody the word", in a poetry way. Here's an inkling of the "number, weight & measure" involved. (I'm sorry to repeat myself again on this blog - but I'm trying to outline a particular personal framework for poetic "embodiment".)

I wrote Forth of July in Rhode Island. The guiding spirit of this place is Roger Williams, founder of Providence; RI is considered the first political entity founded explicitly on the separation of Church & State.

Williams' worldview rhymes (roughly, an off-rhyme) with Dante's perspective, in the Divina Commedia and the essay De Monarchia. Dante believed that the Holy Spirit provided a legitimate role for secular humanity, secular government, in the providential historical process leading toward the renewal of the earth, the "Earthly Paradise", corrupted since the Fall. Rome, and the Holy Roman Emperor, he considered the true authority under which this renovation would occur. At the end of the Commedia, in the Paradiso, in the center of the heavenly Rose, Dante placed an empty throne, destined for the messianic Emperor who would oppose Papal pretentions to secular authority, restoring Italy, the Empire, and thus the whole world - Emperor Henry VII.

As Stubborn Grew/The Rose moves into its central volume, a certain numerical structure crystallizes (and then expands in the following volumes), based on 7/4 (4th of July), 5/28, and 5/29. The central volume (Grassblade Light) consists of 7 chapters (actually 8 panels - the center chapter containing a double panel). Each chapter is made up of 28 poems, each poem containing 28 lines (7 quatrains). At the center of the 28 is a 29th poem with a kind of square structure (16 quatrains total). (This is the template - & though there are slight variations in some chapters, the total line count for each chapt. is almost exactly the same.)

I designed this octagonal structure after the shape of a castle in southern Italy built by that great opponent of the Pope, (Holy Roman) Emperor Frederick II, which has 8 sides, and squarish towers at each angle.

The following volume, July, is designed as a mirror-image to the 1st vol., Stubborn Grew. It comes in 2 halves: the first half consists of 5 chapters, each containing 5 poems of 28 quatrains each. The 2nd half of the book has a very complicated structure (again using poems of 7 quatrains) which I won't get into here.

William Blackstone, RW's friend, Anglican preacher-in-exile, planter of the first known apple orchard in the New World (in Cumberland, RI), & figure in these poems, was buried on his property on 5.28.1675. His property ("Study Hill") was burned to the ground the next day, 5.29 (this was during King Philip's War).

5.29 is my birthday, and RI Statehood Day.

The entire poem (Forth of July) was finished on 5.28.2000, with this line :

"the nef rows, rows... palms, heartbeats, light."

"Nef" is a word for boat with no "r" in it. (I also like barkentine.) A nef was also a technical term for a miniature boat which was placed in the center of the medieval king's or queen's table to hold napkins & such. In Breugel's great Epiphany painting, Melchior, the African wise man, is handing baby Jesus a green jewel-nef, with a tiny monkey peeking out of the cabin. Almost all the goofy onlookers are staring, not at Jesus, but at the nef.