beneath Corona Borealis

BLUE CANOE

While boy-o Henry skipped down Arthur St.

in birdsong Mendelssohn

a few miles up the trolley line

J. Buried-Man lingered on Arthur Ave (complete

Dream Song lament, at 57).  In Paris now

they’ll have to reconstruct the nave,

restore each curving architrave.

This knave goes drifting to St. Lou – his blue

canoe, beached crosswise (by Cahokia)

a kind of compass needle

aimed straight up.  Will weedy

Hobo ever stand erect himself?  Selah,

Ezekiel, Isaiah.  At San Vitale in Ravenna

or at Notre Dame, pilgrims

still stamp across the lurking limbs

of Lucifer – ravel a penitential way

by grace of Mary’s Ariadne-avatar.

It was her love for Theseus

(like Maggie Miriam’s for Jesus)

reeled him out, dis-mazèd – free & clear.

Lone Henry looks straight up, to Pole Star.

Ariadne’s Crown.  The toxic night

a donnybrook for his distraught

Columbia – his ark battered by Minotaur,

his Constitution of chaste liberty

suborned (sat on by Putin’s man).

Look, pilgrim, to the heights again –

whence cometh Thunderbird.  Dove… see?

3.29.20

articulated bagpipes

CICADA SHELL

Last night, in the final French class

Charles explained to us

that intricate forest

of thousands of skeletal pieces

under the armor of the vast organ

of Notre Dame, somehow

surviving the late inferno –

a delicate spider of sound, within

the cathedral’s gray cicada shell

of feathery stone light.

Now, in my monkish hideout

of twisted cedar, a mid-May swell

of emerald sheen beyond the doorway

stretches toward Iona

or maybe Compostela

or Jerusalem... & scrawny face of Henry

lined like wood by age & foolishness

lifts to spring brightness

one wee dram of hopefulness,

mayhap – someone’s vernal Inverness.

It is the ordinary light of day

flashing through our human

imago, her chaste design –

what we might be, beyond dismay

in the conjunction of clear consciences

set toward a restoration

of the common good.  One

amid many – octave’s consonance.

5.15.19

May-time

ALMOND FLING

Palmers wayfare toward Jerusalem

& Holy Sepulchre –

empty signifier

for an Easter hymn (they’ve taken him

away).  A grail of ever-floating joy –

love’s Pentecost

fire-fizz Ghost

Dance for 50 stars (Old Glory

stitched anew from burial shroud).

Rivers of Paradise

(Tigris, Euphrates,

Nile, Big Muddy) circle back to cloud

of Ocean-Stream – source of sky-waters,

like round limestone

beaded with ripple-shine

to emerald gleam (through grisaille shutters).

Hobo, fish-eyed Fisher King,

beheld this vision

through a wavy octagon

of old gazebo planks.  & sinking

down upon his quaint Vienne étable

his head (like Bran of Grain

Elevator) made moan

for Miriam, or Marian, as in the fable.

Until your May-time dawn refulgence

metamorphosed everything

into one almond fling –

Oak Restoration (eye-in-palm, perchance).

5.20.18

antipodean parks

SILVER CHEST

Uncle George the plowman zigzags calmly

weaving his furrows back 

& forth (west of Fond du Lac).

Laboring almost at rest, along his way.

The black soil teems with memories.

Childhood in Mendelssohn,

a helium balloon –

only now the fatal pine shades Miriam’s

plein air Jubilee (specific gravity

of coffin-keel).  Time,

History here touch the rim

of a labyrinth (Fro-Back, so corny)

whose perimeter outlines her face –

smiling, dreaming, lost

in the supple meadow-grass

of Eros flowering to Agape (O Grace).

Spruce Mountain rises straight ahead,

pilgrim – just south of Bonnie

Craigielee.  Matilda will be

waltzing there, in a tamarack shade

not far from the sea; she will take your hand

where kids’ bird-voices

boomerang – where earth rejoices

in equilibrium, & equity.  One command

radiates Franciscan swag of turtledove;

one cloud sheds orange arcs

over antipodean parks

of aboriginal penitence (blue Jonah-love).

8.22.16

painting by Phoebe Gould (about age 10)