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)

Old bells, old beret

Listened to news from Paris today, after the Charlie Hebdo attack.  This afternoon they broadcast the bells tolling - old Paris bells, deep & groaning.

I blogged recently about "occasional poems".  My method, time & again, over 25 years, has involved a sort of recursive movement - a fold-back on what came before.  I have a lot to work with.  The poems roll out for a while; then they turn, making a kind of feedback loop, & going forward at the same time (hopefully).

This process is a motif in the poems themselves.  It's about recollecting what came before.  There's also a theological dimension to this.  History is about remembering something - someone - buried or misunderstood, but stubbornly there - will not go away.

I see someone on the street who re-appears often in my poems (over decades).  At the same time, I notice the final two stanzas of a poem I posted here the day before the Charlie Hebdo incident : lines which seem to celebrate or beautify the very name of the magazine.  Very strange.  This too is a kind of backward glance, an elegiac impulse.

Here's another occasional poem, then, written today.  Another collage, another cartoon - maybe topical, maybe not.

OLD BERET

Cherish yet this goblin-goblet

buried in George’s field.

Iron curve, silvered

by time & rain – thin graphene net.

Your delicate recursive thread

bears planetary load.

Her slow gait (pigeon-toed)

& long brown coat, her bowed head

musing down the street, black hair

beneath an old beret.

Agenbite of inwit,

egret; sad, by shoreline (ancient ire).

Time shunts loom’s backbrace (thundering

boom).  Young Charlie’s oak,

febrile with Hebrew spokes

(dove-speak).  Gdspd, my blundering

cartoon – your secret sunny man

is safe with me.  I fell

from towers of Notre Belle

Dame, late of Galilee (bold Magdalen)

when the lights went out.  Hawk’s eye

& raven’s wing, a shadow-

script of Jonah’s prow

just now emerging from the sea,

the Southern Cross of everything.

Rose octahedron in

your heart... ponderous bronze

groaning (pain)... OK, Ahaz.  Palm-king.

1.8.15 

Occasional Poems

I write a lot of occasional poems.  This is one reason many (though by no means all) of them appear here, on me blog, hot off the brain-pan - because they are knotted to a specific date on the calendar or current event.  So this ongoing project, Ravenna Diagram, is a kind of crossweave of recurrent themes and motifs, with more spontaneous combustions, improvisations.  The result can be a sudden mosaic or collage of old hobby-horses and immediate happenings.

Today's effort, posted here, is an example.  What may seem very confusing on the surface is actually a tissue of old & new.  There's a nod to the late Bernard Jordan, a British WW 2 veteran known as "the Great Escapee", because not long ago he walked away from his nursing home in Hove, England to attend a memorial service at Normandy Beach (see article in NY Times today).  There's a reference to the "leap-second" process of setting the atomic clocks in Paris (see today's London Telegraph).

Then there are the recurrent motifs circling around Apollinaire, WWI, the "Rite of Spring" first performance (which Apollinaire attended, in Paris, on May 29, 1913), my cousin Juliet, who had her fatal leap from the Golden Gate (which opened to the public on the weekend of May 27-29 1937), and the French ship SS Normandie, which had its maiden voyage on May 29, 1935, and which sank in NY harbor in 1942.  A statue from the ship, called "La Paix", was rescued from the boat & now stands in Pinelawn Memorial Park on Long Island.

OK, got all that?  (There's more to it, but I can't tell you everything today.)  So here's the poem, fresh off the garage roof...

LEAP-SECONDS

Fresh snow crowns a fresh year

with infinite white

diamonds – even the summit

of that garage in back, a pyramid

of blinding hexagons, brilliant.

Don’t know if I’ll ever see

Mont Saint-Michel – may

have to cross that Jordan very ancient

& in secret, like Mayor Bernard,

Great Escapee

(of blessed memory).

Not Proust nor any Time Lord

in Paris can hold back the earth

entirely (though she’s

ralentir, apparently)

from wheeling pear-wise (O mirth-

cunning ham) toward her favorite

star.  Thus my mental

golden spider must recoil –

revert apsidal synapses, knot

quipu cloverleaf across

this bubble-octagon

(Emanu-El, the sun).

Apollinaire dreams toward his Croix-

de-Guerre; Bernard pops into PX

for a final cigarette;

Stravinsky’s Juliet

leap-seconds to St. Vitus rite (La Paix).

1.7.15