train to Boston

FATE-LINES

Hobo follows his instinct to the river.

A serpentine circulation,

labyrinth – heart’s burn.

Romans might haruspicate the liver

of an ox, or note the forays of a raven

like smoke-signals overhead;

Hobo lingers with his own dead

Providence photos – train to Boston

or that old blind man who walks the plank

straight off the cliff (at Prospect

Park).  Ghosts intersect.

Eurydice in San Fran hits a blank

wall of blue salt water.  Prince Henry Hal

uproots the better part of soul

to be the bard imperial –

shelving himself with racks of Fleurs du Mal.

To be refuge for troubled consciences,

Rhode Island was.  & was.

Hobo works with materials

by eye-in-hand (fate-lines, hunches);

commissioned for a wedding-song

of earthen pots (Cahokian)

& Morning Star – where one

Virgo-conjunction plants her Gateway prong

the Rio del Espiritu Santo will merge

St. El with Muddy Waters

& Ravenna’s virgin martyrs

with a N’Orleans fanfare... cosmic splurge.

12.10.19

Willow River twilight

ANOTHER YULE

Civilization is a natural good.

Valleys are honeycombed

with anthills – tombed

with moral titans (Lincoln would

live up to his Memorial).

Government’s innate,

then – our pleasant fate

to be so compagnevole,

says Alighieri (after Harry

Woodpecker).  D.C.

marbled with majesty

will have a double Jubilee

this year – May 29th (the K

of Camelot’s birthday);

crowds cry hurray

up to the pint of vanishing

& glory glory hallelujah.

I love my country too.

But pride, you know,

leads oft to suicide – King Saul,

alas, fell on his sword, & Henry’s

Clover (sad antithesis

of photosynthesis) was

mortised into concave penury

(her veil of Isis hoovered out

of Iowa).  Her star

twirls like Ishtar

above a Willow River twilight

               *

where gold prairie meets the far

horizon (at the green

mountain, where shriven

penitents climb to the door).

Pride be the world’s blockade.

Banners of orange black

& green (by Jasper Jack)

are complementary, not made

for nought.  Pete? Smoky Pete’s

still lively, though John’s

jotting paper crayons

with encaustic slivers now.  Wheat’s

blonde for Brother Jim’s Great

Purple Hairstreak – what

a butterfly!  Yet

there’s no sketchy moral shortcut

to self-centered celebrations

for a nation, in this world

of woolly worms curled

into cottonwood canyon-

cocoons.  No idle soul-solace

– an oxymoron in

the China cookie tin.

True penitence proceeds apace,

slowly, like Frank’s old shaky mule

inching to San Francisco.

Sorrow made your child go

sailing.  Grief tacks up another Yule.

3.16.17