in Deserto Rosso

LITTLE ROOM

Like Giuliana’s little boy, in Deserto Rosso

for 6 weeks I was on a ventilator

(“iron lung” back then).  For

Guillain-Barré.  That was 1956 or so.

Paralysis for Henry Fish Quattoir -

great reckoning in little room.

Like coffin-casket, in full bloom;

like April, breathing frailty to power.

Who shall restore the sickly Lord?

There is no temple on the earth,

no glorious basilica that’s worth

the wonder of a single child (a word

once heard with flooding tears, in Ramah).

You who are sum of all

creation – telos, quintessence, lovely corona…

behold the Argos-eyed canoe of Noah.

How the universe giulianizes in you,

Giuliana (as Cusanus wrote)!

You are both verde crown & mote

of mustard seed… the whole tree, Julio!

Now Henry faints… his epileptic storm

of vertigo (at sight of blood)

flings him to Frisco neighborhood.

Where Juliet ascends… to join a swarm

of victims, falling like rain from Golden Gate

(our Twin Towers).  He stretches

out his arms… the King of Wretches,

Grail King.  Melek, MLK (Good Friday fate).

4.1.20

wheezing in an iron lung

PATIENT BURRO

Utterly subjective universe

of the poet, Hamlet

dreaming action... what

was I thinking?  A serious nurse

stood by my cradle (Abbott Hospital).

I was four years old,

wheezing in a cold

iron lung.  Paralysis (total).

1956.  Guillain-Barré.

Dr. Pohl – I

don’t remember (sigh).

Osiris in his casket, hey

ey yo.  The photo in the Star-

Tribune – toothy Henry

hugs his scarlet monkey

in a wheelchair.  Recovery! (Bizarre.)

Like the slight son of Giuliana

in a clinic in Ravenna.

Watch her parabola –

purple violet (or cypripedium

reginae) fringes the pottery;

congregate, massive

unguent jar, evocative

lure (hand of Lippo Memmi)

harboring anointment oil.

Milk, sap, honey,

wine, blood...  See

the star-eye riding the sea-roil

                  *

on her prow, lancing the Black Sea!

Magnet of gold foil,

handle for plow-soil –

wave of personae-galaxy!

As if the searching character of Isis

were encapsulated in

this matryoshka-queen.

Vierge Ouvrante (Hagia Sophia’s

magnifying glass, or Henry Church)

sums up significance

of eucharist – each instance

in a suffering kenosis, the human lurch

(from safe beatitude to surf

beat attitude)

leading to passionate

étude (H. Gorecki... – it is enough).

Prow like a beak, eye like star,

the solidarity of Polar

Bear – it is our

birthright, people everywhere!

Metaphysical, incomprehensible

Love, that finds an echo

in the infinitely patient burro

suffering everything.  Your fable

inches toward the human heart

on light footsteps...

so Nora’s rose keeps

Eros innocent (sweet garden violet).

1.25.19

I died 45 years ago

In about an hour's time I turn 65 years old (May 29th).  Hard to believe.  But I'm relatively OK with getting old... I guess.  In part perhaps because I died 45 years ago.  I was mantled with some kind of mysterious psychic death and rebirth, which I've been trying to come to terms with ever since (in my life, my writing).  Uncanny, unheimlich.  Personal un-hinge, you could say.

Ever since (O youth!), at least some fraction of me has been on a spiritual mission - really a stumbling, on-&-off effort to express & explain what happened (as far as I can see).

When you have died 45 years before you turn 65, there are psychological ramifications.  When I was 4 years old I was hospitalized in an iron lung for about a month, with a severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (French polio).  I was immobilized up to my neck.  As a result, I've put a premium on breathing, and also perhaps endured a subliminal sense of paralysis.  & maybe something of this early childhood experience carried over into the later crisis and its aftermath.

I've been a poet for all of those 45 years (and longer).  A longtime member of the Dead Poets Society, I guess.  But my membership has been accompanied by few of the standard benefits.  Somehow I write my poems on a different map from that of the mainstream literary traffic highways.  I have trouble connecting there.   The poems exist & flourish, but on a different planet.

I don't blame the world, or the poetry gatekeepers, etc.  I really believe it all stems from the fact that I died 45 years ago.  I'm engaged in a soul-struggle of some kind.  My poems try to straddle a double dimension, & hence are at cross purposes with the purely literary or the purely political or the purely anything.

Yet I try to maintain the integrity of the poem as sufficient creation, as work of art pure & simple.  I believe in that, because I feel it - every time I experience a work of art myself.

Somehow the soul-struggle, the crisis of faith, has to come to expression - yet without succumbing to the desire for an intellectual resolution (a tendentious, rather than free, expression).

This is starting to sound very pretentious.  I'm like the unprofitable servant in the parable (I forget which one) - stuck between two paths (spiritual & worldly).  Neither here nor there.

That's how it is.  I've written a lot of poetry since 45 years ago - & it seems to be whiling away the years in an ineffectual limbo of disregard.  Not needed by anyone.  I can't explain it.  But that might change.

I'm not really worried.  There are larger issues in life.  And it shall come to pass... that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons & your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions... (Joel 2:28)

old poet geezer