season of myths

AUDACIOUS FRIGATE

Yearnful melancholy Hobo ambles

through the cool autumn air

beside his ancient river.

The stately ship is in shambles –

audacious frigate, Ironsides;

the man of lawlessness

fills sails with loopholes,

fraud & force cloaked in bromides.

The mellow colors by the Mississippi

figure a buoyant hearth

where a woman might give birth

amid flame-tongues of domesticity –

like these nests of bold maple leaves

mingled with cadaverous hearts

of cottonwoods (Hart’s

premonition, Berryman’s Osiris sheaves).

& Henry, patiently delving like a wasp

through its oak-apple shell

or a worm through the skull

of a defunct Lear, will suddenly gasp

like an infant breathing her first air –

where oak-leaves chitter

beneath Roundhead October;

a restoration from crypt-keeper’s lair.

Hobo, following the copper shoreline

bends toward St. Louis

& his bark of Jessie, O.

Light churnagogue (twin trees becoming one).

10.16.19

Cordelia in the wasps' nest

AUTUMN RITE

In the car coming back from the memory unit

I catch the tail end of Mahler’s 9th

the slow slow strings’ fading strength

bent like snarly willow limbs into some resonant

sweet culmination (ancient Mendelssohn

elegy in mind).  Autumn’s

rust-blood golden sun’s

quintessence now, O silent one?

Cordelia in the wasps’ nest, at the axis

of the earth... Lear, trembling

like an oak gall wasp – bleeding,

stung by the crypt-keeper (Euderus

Set).  The wasp within the wasp, Osip –

Shakespeare’s quaint acorn-

crown of happiness (shorn

pharmakon).  & shalt thou drink my cup?

The box-within-a-box, the matryoshka

toy?  Like bloody JFK

in Dallas, on a Friday –

Jackie’s pink tiara (autumn leaf regalia)...

The river of violin sound measures time

to its serene delta, my friend.

& the tree (Hagia Sophia with a million

eyes) harbors the wind like a nursery dome –

you hear the sound of it (that waterfall

through twin cities, Berryman)

but you know not whence (my son)

it comes (oak’s Galla rite, imperial).

10.15.19