on the 3rd of July

DREAM-WORK

On the 3rd of July, looking out of this

rain-soaked gazebo into

the yard, I’d like you,

cameradi, to digest my curious

thesis.  Because every moment is a choice

on an axle of light and dark,

& who knows?  Some dream-work

might lead a soul to Paradise.

Out of the Iron Age of infantile aggression

where malign honchos rule

by gun; out of the school

of bully shocks & clinical repression

locked tight by rapacity & fraud;

out of the surly tank parade

Czar Minotaur has made

his own amazement... into the wide

milk-meadows of a Golden Age.

But you have to recognize –

these lightning-bug sparklers

kids wave over mosquito grass image

some more graceful & inexplicable

coherence.  Someone breathing

nearby, in your ear.  A thing

beyond abstraction... elementary table

of an I AM dream-cosmos.  Someone – 

Brother?  Sister?  Mary?

– calling you by name.  See?

Here.  Hearth-dance of Daniel.  Be reborn.

7.3.19

a partial answer for Tom D'Evelyn

GREEN SAGE

We are born as the story goes, in

medias res – through the hands

of the midwife, to lands

of motherly milk & honey, the Pine

Island of family circles... onto

the clay wheel of slow

seasons – rusty merry-go-

round, with its quaint iron echo...

& you recall how the sun casts a shadow

while the river floats an image;

imagination’s green sage

is always personal, someone you know

& so the circle of epistemology

whorls back to its source.

Whitman shaken by the hearse

Dante dreaming Beatrice

body forth reality – adhesive,

compagnevole, suffused

with ineffable Providence –

thy feather-light & graceful Love

the origin & end of Universe

O playful Alpha-&-Omega.

All poetry is drama

& all storytelling is your father’s

microcosmos; all wisdom is Hagia Sophia

beneath their human dome of light,

& that Gateway Arch might

mark the navel of your motherland’s Cahokia.

6.26.19

inhabit they a shady arch

TABLE RONDE

Henry often stumbles off his perch

in his high Henry Poem.

Just try to follow him!

The pinetop sways... the oaks, the birch...

watch his Memorial to the Future lurch

from Mr. Groggy to A Hobo

Lunch.  Need not be so.

The poem simply tracks a search

for common speech, O inarticulate

idiot of  mewl-wander!

Only this, to ponder :

the universe is personal.  Its Fiat

Lux is founded in immeasurable heart,

compassionate & lovingkind –

one courier-pigeon from blind

adoration bears more light than any art.

The glittering mounds in Minneapolis

are tiny frozen hexagons.

Rough flesh-tone limestones

harbor prehistoric ocean memories.

Henry, with help from sluggish Hobo,

knots a river-seine

for safety-net.  Someone

might need a heartfelt rescue (at zero

below).  Inhabit they a shady arch

at center of the earth –

Lips Monastery berth;

her mandorla was a canoe for March

to paddle into April confluence,

her lips muttered an almond

salience – jazz Table Rond

with sweet Melchizedek (her Memphis

echoes with his vernal blues).

Ineffable seine of mutuality...

sign for soul liberty

from one Pole Star (High Rocky News)

we share out like a Lammas loaf

raised in grain elevators

west of St. Lou

& buried secretly (beneath the roof

of the mouth of a cave in Galilee).

Hobo hands Henry so

his eye-in-hand.  Its glow

is pure lovelight – it whispers : See.

& he saw the glittering waterfall

of wheat-grains slanting down

across a wide Missouri-nation

into midstream of each & all;

he felt the dream-song melding chords

(Ojibwa river-springs)

within Dakota Red Wing’s

Thunderbird – he touched the threads

of word-music, a glossolalia.

As round a high room

agate-fire will zoom –

lighting the prow of old Ecclesia.

3.3.19

goldenrod honeybee

LAMBENT FLUTE

This bumblebee on goldenrod,

hunting the crossroad

at close of summer.  Old

Hobo character – camouflaged

in yellow-black (almost).  Henry’s

obsession with absence.

I’d go the distance

into infinite cornfields, he says.

The river subculture, the dream

of floating back home.

Churnagogue palindrome

or unknown womb... clay baptism.

The cottonwood leaves seem to flow

like golden honey, then –

in Taurida, on the autumn

wind.  Like little heart-ships, so

they swim.  Out of the tight-knit shawl,

out of the everlasting

fire.  None shall be coming

to the Father except by Son, y’all –

by way of Mother.  That absolute

Somebody – a labyrinth

of stars, wherein we are hid

like lightning bugs, or lambent flute

reflections (crane-bone twins).

Flickering far beyond

woodpecker Trebizond,

sleepwalker Knossos – wheeling fins.

8.5.18

stone, water, light, fire

DOUBLE RING

The agitations of a stone thrown in the stream

make ripples that become

a smooth continuum

of moving wheels.  One Gothic beam

draws light through stone and water –

blending elements

into high bafflements

of rainbow glass, mind with nature

beyond nature, reason with wonder.

Agnes – her exacting threads

trace Ariadne’s leads

through wilderness of sea & thunder.

Grant – his strange & strict constructions

spin a decussated

dream landscape – fated

black dirt looming beneath confections

of late sunset West Branch foliage.

Why, then, this mirage

of images?  The poet’s rage

wells from embodied fury – & her voice

– Arachne’s, Ariadne’s – is mortal

as that scar-calendar

of dread Coatlicue

unsnagged by force from Mexican corral.

Her poem is cast-iron Poseidon-net

straight from the furnace,

thus : a human face

veiled by the smoke of calumet

                     *

morphing brute fraudulence to peace,

transmuting blank white

voids to violet

& moss-green habitats of paradise.

St. Maximus Confessor, musing

monk, articulated

in theory what unfolded

in reality – fusion of divine choosing

with human liberty in understanding,

in enactment, as the spirit

moves us : radiant

tangle of wheels into a double ring.

All spokes are joined there, in the personal –

as in a room near Golgotha

babble turned glossolalia

& tongues aflame lit one bright coronal.

The poet chants out of that mental fire

& dances like a Nazirite

her intellectual delight

inviting you & me to join the choir

around that altar of a rolling stone –

a living hearth-fire

of the Earth’s desire

for equilibrium, once we throw down

the Minotaur lodged in our hearts.

Malevolent violence & lust

& greed for dominance must

be renounced... & so the dancing starts.

7.17.18

round which we merry go

LIGHT GLANCES

Now, at dusk, the early lilacs

breathe out their scent.

Tired crabapple’s bent

limbs burst into a climax-

galaxy of blossoms, pink & white –

rhyming those slight cloud-

petals overhead

like Botticelli’s passionate

notations for the Paradiso

(Beatrice’s dancing

flame-spirits, candescing

in a last heaven-crescendo).

Old splendor of May-month springs

anew.  None shall judge her.

Like Osip’s meteor

flung suddenly through Saturn’s rings

Ophelia steps from a weedy break

wearing Ariadne’s crown –

grace, honor & renown

clothe her again, out of elm-book

of Primavera-life – primordial

Persephone, sharing

one diamond ring

(soul’s Solomonic seal, octagonal).

The river’s profile of limestone

reflects its lambent flow.

Each wave curls now

light glances toward one flint Person

                    *

the intellect sees through the show

of leafy cottonwood sheen

(black limbs lean toward one

point round which we merry go).

It’s personal, in a fleeting, refugee

sense, mumbles Hobo.

The stone beyond Cosmo.

The source of lightning & oak tree –

where little Henry hid one day

like Bonnie Charlie in a bole

of mossy acorn-meal.

The soul is preternatural, he say.

Soul is King, & Queen.  Mary

floresces rose, in bloom

beneath almond moon...

Hamlet, Ophelia marry.

Adamantine chair of motherlode...

gravitational pull

of con vexed out of Hell.

Adam’s evening (nails in road).

Looming in the linen of the dream,

the dawn fleece of time...

the scapegoat’s crime,

the victim’s cornerstone (walled

without seam into apex of dome).

This your chink of light

through the long jail night.

Your Camelot (milk-train kingdom).

5.5.17

Hermione's return

MAYPOLE CALCULUS

The park bench by the Father of Waters

is Hobo Henry’s throne.

Where he comes to his own

like Leontes (late to his daughter’s

recovery, Hermione’s return).

That sidewinding father

plays hide-&-seek – with another

voice, another fleece.  Like someone

you met once, on the road to Emmaus

or St. Petersburg – sly

Queequeg, tricksy Bluejay...

warbling red Robin in burnoose

of raven-ink.  His tattoo labyrinth

the cave he trails from –

a smoky-flutey hum

folding the whole into a ninth

symphonic inning (end-beginning).

This personal boomerang

widens your gyre, bright Milky-

Zed – like a shadow slowly shrinking

toward your noon.  Come back again.

Global res publica

out of Exodus.  A prairie

equal sign, Mississippian –

grass salience across the river (Monk’s

Mound) still reminder

we were slaves once, here

(Dred Scott & Gateway Arch plunk

                     *

side by side).  Slaves kept by others,

& slaves to ourselves.

Whose arrogance resolves

into a Minotaur of rival brothers

(orange vs. black – harsh prison stripes

mirrored across scarce

monarchs, dense cedars).

Vlad in Kiev?  One of them types.

Or Nabokov, in camouflage.

A Frisco safety net

might bolt this Nut

who stretches out her flamande bridge

into an arch, over the Nile –

osprey transfigurement

of J to fundament

(her spirit flaming into smile).

This late romance, Leontes-Hobo –

some Pygmalion’s design –

lifted La Paix from Brooklyn

mud, with Liberté (moss-emerald glow).

Her incarnation of a crocus rose

& spun gold gyroscopes,

kalimba-periscopes –

around a Maypole calculus

of loving fingerprints, & penny-clues.

The Earth, in shadow of

one flighty Jonah-dove...

your arc of fellowship (King of the Blues).

5.1.17

 

Michael Scharf on "Personalism"

I like the historical acuity of Michael Scharf's critique of "personalism" in American poetry, despite the fact that my perspective is about as opposite to his as one can get. I do think he has identified something deeply askew in the approach or method which turns poetry into a celebration of subjectivity without limits, as a kind of aesthetic compensation for all the limitations of actual & historical reality.

But I fork paths with Scharf when he offers a form of Marxist-historical-materialist critique as a response to the problem of the person & the personal. A hortatory & quasi-religious rhetoric insinuates itself into his analysis. We are under a moral obligation to "figure a disposition" between "possession and dispossession" - a "material site" of "mistranslation" and "struggle" - ie. it appears that Scharf's notion of the person is that of something partially determined or impinged upon by a materialist history of social struggle, and poetry, in order to mean anything, has to seek the constantly-shifting nexus or interface or locus of this set of implied obligations to the larger (& conflicted) situation.

I have no problem with the idea that individual human meaning is only discovered within a context of the shapes of time & history of the human race as a species, and the world as a whole. What I would argue is that such meaning can be explored & discovered without denying the individual human person an essential - the essential, paradigmatic role - both in history in general, and in poetry in particular.

The crux of the matter comes with an analysis of this notion of the individual human person. If we limit the concept of the person to the egocentric Self as sketched by Scharf (as part of the "mainstream" ideology of American poetics), then Scharf's critique & dismissal of such a limited concept is easy to understand. But we need, rather, to qualify & complicate our sense of the person, rather than reject a caricature of same. One could consult, just for one example, Christian Moev's The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, for an introduction to Dante's medieval-poetic understanding of the human self as essentially contingent : but not, as in the modern sense, contingent upon abstract or human-historical forces, but upon a relationship with a divine source in whose image man is made. The relational complexities of the (Judeo-Christian) religious vision of Man-&-God - within which the category of the "personal" is not denied, but rather supplemented & enhanced, while at the same time subjected to an ultimate ethical demand ("eternal judgement" on each individual soul) - these complex relations are part of a nexus of understanding, a viewpoint within which materialist historicism seems finally like a form of personal irresponsibility masking itself as social ethics.

I have gone into these issues at greater length in various blog posts here on Russian Acmeism & "domestic hellenism" : on the perspective emanating from Gumilev & Mandelstam (with deep roots in Byzantine Christianity) which asserted - in the face of revolutionary collectivism - a "chaste" vision of the dignity & beauty of both individual persons & distinct natural phenomena of all sorts. The early 20th-cent. debate between Acmeism & Futurism was another arena in which these basic philosophical problems polarized & played themselves out on an aesthetic/poetic plane.