Morning to Evening Star

CIRCLE LAKE

Blindly, Hobo inches toward

the Keys.  In Florida.

Toward the delta,

in Louisiana.  His handy old

eye-in-hand in hand (light

portable fire-drill).

Ply all your skill,

Hobo.  Hi huraru ra’a,

Hi awari ra’a.  A muddy ray

from cold Atlantic

like some frantic

foundering Santa Maria

threads yarns toward that western

Garden of Evening Star.

Across his eyelid, sure –

like Sire Henry, in his baby coffin

(six weeks encrypted with Guillain-Barré).

Hi huraru ra’a,

Hi awari ra’a.

Autumn leaves of disenchanted

authors, sighing in their libraries...

(the Roger Williams version,

for piano).  Dispersion

through each mental prison (Henry’s,

yours).  Dread of ocean void

spirals up from deep

Le-Hev-Hev keep –

Coatlicue (the cut-up) is annoyed

                    *

& threatens Everyman – her sheep

is black & bloody red!

– Nana, you might be dead

before you know it.  Go to sleep.

The dream song reconfigures all

within its top-spin

in your heart-garden.

Your father was a gentleman narwhal;

your son was dancing on the shore

of Circle Lake, in Midway

Mirror-Land (in Galilee).

The crucifixion of the Evening Star

will not unveil her night-reality.

Observe this family

photograph, Henry.

Miss Padgett’s ancient book quarry –

the massive double-panes of glass,

a mandorla for owlish

Actaeons (Horus,

searching for Columbia?  Atlas,

looking for the moon?)  Nana,

dancing Sophie calls me.

Grandpa.  Hiawatha

had a friend, Hart Ibis Artemis – yah...

yawning from the deep, Jonah.

You must become the dove

still dancing, love –

spun from the heart of things.  Selah.

11.30.18

and willows could not hold more

STEADY SOUND

Maple trees aflame by the river.

A lonely bench – Hobo’s?

Siege perilous

for homeless someone (shiver,

anonymous child of cold fortune).

Collateral damages

from various pillages

of community pillars... honorable men...

the violent bear it away.  Wind

blows through pinetops.

A salt wind, like to freeze.

& leaves turn bloody at the end

of October.  Washington surveys

Shawnee Ohio hills.

Marshals militia drills,

rankled by Crown authorities.

His real estate’s on shaky ground.

Who owns land?  Who owns

sea.  Of his bones

are coral made.  O steady sound

of middle C – circumference

& center of the keys.

The 88, a breeze

from Cairo paradise (our Providence).

Who be that aye-aye from before

the beginning of tomorrow?

C-Jonah beyond sorrow.

Sister-dove.  Your soft sheep-door.

10.7.18

for National Poetry Day

DOVE-CANOE

America is the greatest poem,

Walter Whitman wrote.

After the gun, the vote

& gunboat diplomacy... hums home.

Beneath sea to shining sea

lies middle C : a note

on the grand baby boat

between red & blue (for harmony).

Purple mountains’ majesty,

inverted in a mirror

lake – not so Superior

this time, but simple, free.

So must our dream end in despair?

The first inhabitants

ordered the elements

on thankful tables – mysterious share

from Wakan Tanka (Thunderbird).

The greatest poem hums

beneath war drums,

discordant malice, noisy fraud;

it is the sound of the earth itself

awash with slow rivers,

where Jonah hovers

in her dove-canoe – a constant Alph

down to zydeco Cajun Zee.

America, l’âme

riche, la mer...

coo-cawing in cloud-thunder tree.

10.4.18

If I find time & energy, I'll write an essay on Donald Justice's poetry.

Yet one more example of my backward-looking, reactionary, anachronistic, out of touch, obsolete "poetics".

Justice : melancholy, nostalgia, aestheticism - almost fatalism. A very old issue - running back to ancient times - regarding the dangers, the seductive temptations, of aesthetic fatalism. The beauty is a crystallization, a register of stoic passivity, a... a... I'm forgetting the word I'm trying to think of.

Nevertheless... I'm finding many other, different, things in this poetry. Don't want to ramble on about it here.

He's a wonderful craftsperson. Inspiring, exciting in that way. Manifold.

I'm drawn to the understatement. & the music, piano themes. (He started piano lessons when he was 5. I started about that age too.)

p.s. & I like the "balance" he achieves. These are very much "poem-song-artifacts", and yet, at the same time, they have a humane, documentary, down-to-earth quality - feeling, emotion, sensibility. Southern I guess. Wry, funny, mournful, sweet, bitter, etc.

There's always a person there : yet he avoided Confessionalism of any kind! A major victory for that time.

 

The house sported an old saloon-style (nail-hammer) piano, very dirty but amazingly in tune. Late at night, after the others had gone back to Baton Rouge & I was there by myself, I played the famous song "Can It Be" 

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties : a good title for 20th-cent. poetics. I've met Lev Rubinstein a few times, & heard him perform at the Hoboken conferences (Russ-Amer poetry). He's quite slight, like a baby bird, about 5 ' tall. Elena Shvarts' twin, actually. (They don't eat enough over there, sadly, & they smoke too much.) Remember the two of them walking together up the NJ sidewalk in close conversation, like a couple of pigeons.

As Shvarts & Rubinstein, so Acmeism & Futurism. Not one without the other. (Stravinsky & Shostakovich?)

When I practiced piano on the old upright in the ancient blue-green living room, my back was directly facing the screen door (mentioned in previous poem). Heidi Johnson (blonde daughter of chicken farmer Dale) would usually be practicing too, across the street: sometimes we sent each other musical signals.