set to sound

SIMPLE SPACE

Henry was just an American poet,

not well-known, born

in Minneapolis… a plain-

speaking, ordinary place, a cold spot

on the planet.  He had his talents

& his quirks – his great

advantages, pensive disquiet,

the serious focus of his mind, his diffidence…

but none of these things mattered in the end.

Poetry is neither marketplace

nor museum.  It is a simple space

for flighty conversation, set to sound;

a fatal stage, a public theater

where fantasy rings true –

YHWH appears to you

disguised as sister, holy fool, butler…

anything but king (or slave-herder).

King David plucked his harp,

made his obeisance sharp

& clear – YHWH is holier

than I, or any man on earth.

Henry drew back the curtain.

In his poem, all was done –

la vida es sueño… from Fort Worth

to Dallas is but a short drive.

Righteous ones must die

until the message (IN RI) bears

fruit – honey flows from her beehive.

4.25.20

Georges Rouault, The Old King

O for a muse of fire

YOUR VALENTINE

From your Valentine, scratched the prisoner

in Rome, young martyr-to-be.

To daughter of Asterius – maybe

a Morning Star? – love to configure

with philosophy, so (269 a.d.).

Skull crowned with flowers

along with more & divers

relics (Santa Maria in Cosmedin)

– & some of them in Dublin, too

(Whitefriar St.).  Ante-

dating troubadours & Dante

with his severed head & body (rue

the day with smoke of juniper, acacia)

he died young, for liberty

of conscience – thought is free;

fled upon wind, Asterius (Astraea).

The epileptic heart dances offbeat.

Dante & Beatrice

found simplest way

to unity – their cosmos whole, complete

in charity.  So ran my Yeatsian effusion

from the green island;

these pipes, my steely friend

summon her countertop restoration

in the green night of Dante’s neighborhood

where phosphorus gleams

amid Franciscan tombs

like camouflaged green acorn (woo’d

                        *

from wood) to be kingdom come

in your creaky dreambed

Ophelia (Juliet, Cordelia…)

– O rondure of love’s gentle realm!

& poetry burbles of it night & day

to multitudes in their sleep

compartments, while the creep

of despotism creeps from sordid victory

to victory (absolutism corrupts

& empowered absolutism

corrupts with most extreme

prejudice).  So the public servant sups

alone in his cold cell, & the journalist

languishes for speaking truth

in cellars of Pharaoh Badnooth

& enemies of human happiness request

your presence in the Furious Throne Room

where kids die miserably

every day, for lack of liberty

& prison sing-song will pronounce your doom.

O for a muse of fire, cried Hen’s herald –

who solders every soul

with mettle from the molten

whole.  Who clears the air, to yield

a solidarity of understanding

in the sheepfolds of Jerusalem

& Greece… Gregorian hymn

with ocarina harmony (Cahokian thing).

2.14.20

near the pin of the spoke

ALMOND BOAT

Love & harmony are the spring of song

murmured the little holm oak

near the pin of the spoke

& sanction of same, she sapped along;

so I task you, febrile Henry Hobo,

tiny A-grade acorn, flow.

So down to Gulf of Mexico

adrifted on the current, shady Penny-O

& me.  Time was an arc of aquamarine,

with cloud-ships for dreaming;

transumptive Ocean, circuiting

the galaxies, checkmating history (unseen,

almost).  Our boat was an ovoid ovum

chicken-coop (Rhode Island

Red) ruddered by hand –

she wove you liberty & welcome

for your immersive infancy of joy –

sails belling with sweet air

of solidarity & friendly care,

infinity of each one in our eye.

& Penny dreamt alongside, inside me

in the same language, dark

& light – Lady of the Ark

closer than whisper, vaster than sea.

Like Beatrice or Eurydice or Mary,

she’s Iris in her almond boat –

shimmering beyond this moat

gripped by the Minotaur, to set us free.

2.7.20

like an 8-ball in a canyon

HELIUM BALLOONS

Thus the poem is a free agent,

loosed from its cannon

like an 8-ball in a canyon.

We could go on – what they meant

you know.  Dante was getting on

when he stopped by Sant’

Apollinare.  The slant

of loneliness caresses its panopticon

of painterly rainbow eyes & forms,

afloat overhead

like a Macy’s parade

on Thanksgiving Day (enormous

helium balloons of adoration

under an umbrella

of matryoshka nesting-

dolls, like an infinite function

in rose granite aegis, arcs-

over-arcs).  In her eyes,

the grace of God buys

time with molten agape-caritas.

Jesus emerges from the cave.

Mary faints in the garden,

dream bent back again

to Gödel (his suspended-7th grave).

Her incompleteness theorem

is like Easter in 2020,

always there already

(gleaming ring, undying diadem).

12.29.19

Hamlet in the death-canoe

SCARLET WAX

The dreamer, mapping a circling cosmos

of milk & honey, starlight

& sweet fire... like Brightman’s

integral Person – with tables of Moses

in their cedary bark of mutual promise

lending salty substance

to halting hesitance

of reason (while the heart says yes).

The dreamer assembles the disparate realms

into crescendo-tango.

Hamlet in the death-canoe,

precipitous peripeteia – helm’s

Charon-pilot, planting the scarlet wax

of his father’s dread seal

for a doom they must feel

anon (political axe prickling their necks).

The tables of the covenant

written on our hearts –

sine-waves where channel parts,

Osiris-Jonah reassembled (US to haunt).

Old Ironsides, your canny constitution

oxidizes under termite siege.

The man of lawlessness will wage

perverse destruction like a weathervane

cut loose... yet that rust-bound ship

still bends toward Providence –

native Thanksgiving-sense,

red-corn grasshop (at clipper clip).

10.23.19

let me orchestrate a pantomime

NUT-BRIDGE

Epileptic Dante struggling like a trapped ant

in his centaur-world

in medias res, Gould –

in RI, for example (not so pleasant).

& nothing gets better in Minneapolis

immediately, automatically

or even slowly, gradually

& verbiage without chasteness

is only noise, eh.  We all agree, eh?

IGNIS NATURA RENOVATUR INTEGRA

– fire renews nature as a

whole – spiritual telos of poetry...

So let me orchestrate a pantomime

rooted in that ancient flame

proceeding from a paradigm

of our immaculate Ariadne-dame;

the shoreline seething with desire

under a summer moon again,

& memory of lambent pain

(Ocean’s infinite suspire).

As when Hart’s Hobo settles down

at last... rolls on to sea

& stubborn ghost of MLK

becomes triform Medusa-Charon

only to deliver newborns (on

St. Christopher’s Day).

Naked Nut-bridge, say –

or eye-in-hand (almonds in Mendelssohn).

7.7.19

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

banquet at the end of time

PUSHKIN MOVE

The banquet at the end of time,

the invitation read –

the living & the dead

to celebrate.  This pantomime

of solemn feasting they perform

beneath cavernous timbers

(burnt resinous embers)

foreshadows that preternatural storm

of joy, tasting our expectation –

when Eli’s empty chair

so hopeful (floating there)

is overflowing with affection

once again.  As we well know,

observes bright Magdalen –

beseeching, in the garden,

gardener (raw moon of woe).

& what it all may mean for Hobo

Hank, lazing out

his salvation-boat

conundrum (Solipsism, ho!)...

Can it be can-do canoe?

If anyone thinks they

know anything (See

St. Paul!) they’re in Pig’s Eye

sez he.  My inconsequence

is like a Pushkin move;

chess is like love,

government... clear as Providence.

9.16.18

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

how to say hallelujah

OLD HAUNTS

The poem reaches like a zigzag vine

through thick vernacular

toward the actual here

& now (woodpecker in a pine).

Turbulent nation, giving birth

to glossolalia.

How to say hallelujah

in Osage, in downtown Fort Worth?

Don’t ask Dallas.  Some holy fool,

some mendicant small-fry

tried to catch Caesar’s eye

before that scapegoat kicked the stool –

you know the rule.  I’d’ve marched

if I had to.  The heat

made everything complete

hell.  Our very words parched

on our lips, like crackling cicada husk.

Some said he was coming back,

some just nibbled hardtack,

but all agreed – he could really busk,

back in the day.  Seldom was heard

a discouraging word, when

he blew that harp.  Listen,

disconsolate hearts.  What appeared

before you on the road to Emma’s

echoes again like dew

before morning – will do,

will do.  Old haunts of summers...

7.12.18

the poem is a sort of Edicule

MODEL DOME

So then, the poem is a sort of Edicule?

My allegory’s all unglued.

Runny gouache, stewed

river clay.  Some no-count school.

The building, trembling in devolution

shored up like a veteran

with iron-rivet skeleton.

Metamorphosis by desperation.

My babble-model of the cosmos –

molded on a mini-dome

within a dome (Jerusalem-

fond matryoshka doll).  The keys

to a box, where lie a bunch of keys.

Over meleki limestone

slab, one forest olive-green

icon.  Your madre of collapsing gaze

rains down (with her clay ointment jar).

He is not here, he

is not here.  She’s

muted as trumpet, or Morning Star –

an eye-in-hand, an ocean tear.

Light blazes (calmly

coruscant undying day).

He is not here, he is not here.

Wind mews in muscular oak tree.

They’re up in Galilee,

maybe Cahokia... you’ll see.

Inventing deeds of agape – live poetry.

7.2.18

only Osage land

WHAT SMILE

July... all the baby flags.

Every bright young lamb

tuck to torment in Vietnam.

Lyndon moon-face – how it sags.

Hubris... alien, demonic force

unhinged from humility

(vomitgreen parrot pity).

Folds bomber-wings in remorse

after all.  Neither national

nor international;

only irrational

(November’s double coronal).

I’ll finish off this work in progress

now, Columbia –

OK?  Oklahoma’s

only Osage land (but I digress).

& poetry?  Is just a conversation

among singed beans.

You joint it, Henrythin,

to ease U-Haul into elation

(somehow).  That OK.  The heart

is made of meleki limestone

(royal).  43 lamps shine

down upon them groove.  What

now, Henry?  What hum?  What ghost

flit as yum turtledove

‘bove fry Friday pirate cove?

What smile lightum up (coruscant host)?

7.1.18

with Grace (in memory)

MANUSCRIPT ILLUMINATION

                  i.m. Grace Tagliabue (1922-2018)

In that heavenly kingdom of Como, or Maine,

his ready bird-feather

will already be there

with you, Grace – to bring peace, to make plain

the origin of the Cosmos in love & joy –

his valiant light-heart

casting out fear with an art

like child’s play.  & you (his chief toy,

rest, dream) would be there, too –

answering love with love

from the deep, from above,

tracing that birdsong in robin’s egg blue

& loops of moss-green watercolor.

Since poetry – imagination –

is manuscript illumination,

you chose to let John’s words flower

like parchment flesh in a bath of rebirth –

& as time slowly waltzes us

toward our last contra dances

you help wash our feet on Earth

& ready us for that elfin circle-dance

in the kingdom of children &

animals & grains of sand

all sparkling in the galaxies... entrancing

Entrance to Eternity (your linen

wheel of emerald palm-

prints... infant calm

babble of Phoebe)... heaven’s amen, amen.

    with grace, from Grace, by grace 

                                3.29.18

musing on time passing

OPEN SEA

Hobo lingers in his old hideout,

musing on Time passing

inexorable, unceasing.

Even that Son of Man, no doubt,

is subject to the steady stream.

That He rose from the dead

after the carmine dogwood

petals bled... is like a dream –

when broken Magdalen beheld

Him, held Him tight

as she lay, hid by night

stone still, in sleep – felled

by the noon nightmare upon the hill.

It is a mystery

too deep for Hobo, or for me.

Jesus submitted to the Father’s will –

not on Golgotha, but with every beat

of that red pulsing wheel

of Ocean River (waxy seal

for human honeycomb – complete

sweet sign of infinite benevolence).

My yellowing maroon

& off-white leaf-pontoon...

my Hobo raft snaking past violence,

my dogwood octagon, shaved off

by Time into a simple

convex fish-vessel...

my melting hexagon, snow-staff

                *

of almond blooms, shading a well

in Palestine... stone skiff

leaping Gennesaret – if

only all these metaphors knot in one spell!

The spiral of a fingerprint

in limestone sea-cave

might unfurl a concave

hour-glass – etch kind intent

in pregnant sheets aslant the wind.

Each step taken, each

wave-slap on the beach

will glance to faceted perfection – find

ripe summa in a planetary plan;

the ants have theirs, Hobo

his role to play – go

find her, who unveils the sun of Man!

Magnanimous dome (Emanu-el’s)

on Morris Avenue,

your turtleshell (blue

arc of sky over her Book of Kells)

circumferences a shady tree

of leafy ladders (Jacob’s,

Jonah’s... Honest Abe’s).

We climb together, you & me,

through thunderclouds of poetry –

counting the heartbeats

as we rise... fleets

thread the Gate, to open sea.

7.10.17

it's not the actual statue

COTTONWOOD FLUFF

The poem curls out of the soil

of speech, an idiom

of natural freedom –

not the symbolic Rose (Étoile

du Nord) but the actual rambling

pink thorn-petals

pendulous stained glass

welds to parallactic lightning

(baptism of liquid fire).  These two,

the symbol & the thing

itself, twirl interlacing

through the June weather – like Hobo

& actual Providence, the scrappy

burg Rog Williams named.

Free habitation, framed

by metaphysical hope; happy

locution for Rhodos-location.  Only

an Ocean state of mind,

maybe – where you might find

your inner JFK, sailing toward Galilee;

only a craggy Catholic Oak

whose simple fortitude

cools tempers rude, &

opened ears when Blackstone spoke –

lifting his anima naturaliter christiana

to chant that common law

inheres in English & Ojibwa –

sponge of manna-Minnehaha

                *

drifting like green Columbia

or cottonwood fluff –

adhesive, light enough

for grave thread-whispers (ahh...

I understand).  Radiant Naiad

à New York, lifting her torch

for Liberté... hopscotch

of bare feet round hummingbird

maze-vat... such were smoke signals

for a wide corn-dance –

pregnant sum-trance

of orbic humankind, out of deep wells

(perennial realtà).  It’s not the actual

statue, the actual state

but what they indicate

(A-frame of Lincoln-log) – rational

celebrations of Memorial Days...

Thanksgivings (4th

of July an afterthought

of fireflies)... myriad ways

a Union of republican consent

gathers (in common sense,

civility) at the tense

apex of divine intent –

buffalo tepee of Providence,

Manitou table

of justice; peaceable

kingdom, benevolent, immense.

6.7.17

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

invisible, indivisible

Have been reading a couple books by Borden P. Bowne lately (Metaphysics, and Personalism).  Bowne was a professor of philosophy at Boston University a little over 100 years ago.  Involved (I believe) with the philosophical circle known as "Boston Personalism".  Apparently the group and the school of thought influenced the young Martin Luther King.

Not easy reading for me.  I'm not well-versed in philosophy.  The mind tends to wander.  But Bowne's perspective seems to chime with my own vague hunches about the nature of things.  I've always thought of poetry as a counter-force against positivism, materialism, determinism - the supposedly "objective" dehumanization and disenchantment of reality.

In fact Bowne provides a pretty forceful rational and philosophical defense of theism and "personhood".  I'm a little surprised his writings are not better known today.  He's not merely a Berkeleyan idealist.  Nor is he some kind of American pragmatist.  Rather he finds a middle way between "common sense" pragmatism (ie. all our knowledge ultimately derives from - and involves a rational abstraction from - ordinary experience) and Kantian idealism (ie. human consciousness orders & thereby interprets any and all experience whatsoever - the mind's insight is what we know).

Experience is not merely a phantasm of consciousness (as in Berkeley).  Things are real, things have concrete reality.  But mind is not a "thing" : and mind provides the only continuity, freedom, and truth that we know.  Bowne posits a sharp (a "metaphysical") divide between invisible mind (or soul, or spirit, or personhood) and the phenomenal world of things.  And yet he doesn't presume to define or theorize how "things" came into being.  His Occam's razor shreds (satirically) a lot of pretentious theorizing about "being" and "phenomena" etc.  He posits a strict difference between the finite and the infinite.  And yet he proposes a kinship between limited, finite human mind (consciousness, spirit) and the infinite creative personhood (consciousness, spirit) which must be the creative origin of things.  Nothing else will do.

Bowne is not a tendentious apologist for theism : instead, he slowly explores the origins of determinism, positivism, and materialism in our "common sense" response to the apparent "thickness", the substantiality, of things.  We are sensualists.  We extrapolate from physical, material, bodily experience, and leap to universals and generalizations about how "things must be".  We tend to evade the difficult (and very ancient) question about how anything exists at all - how things happen to be (from nothing).

Again, Bowne doesn't presume to answer this question.  He just finds a rational way to propose that an infinite creative Mind or Spirit is the only plausible source of what we call reality.

Philosophy can get you thinking, musing.  Perhaps we tend to avoid God because she's actually so close to us.  There's no "space" between the roots of our own personhood (our "soul", let's say) and the infinite person - except that dividing line (and it's a thick one) between finite and infinite.  But the primal analogy is there, the imago Dei.  Bowne demonstrates how what we understand by "personality" or personhood is really invisible, immeasurable - our core identity, our rational, emotional, actively volitional personhood, is an invisible intelligence - a soul, a spirit, a heart & mind.  & then Bowne demonstrates how the most rational description of the source or "world-ground" of reality as a whole is none other than some infinite (immeasurable, unlimited) form of this invisible intelligence (heart & mind).

Think of the eloquent poetry of Martin Luther King's analogies (between the spirit of divine Agape and the troubled spirits of an earthly people).

This text from the Book of Joel (2:28) seems apropos : "And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions..."

We're close here to the fusion of a very archaic vision of reality (eg. we are all children & beneficiaries of Manitou, the "Great Spirit"), with the most contemporary understanding of the same.

Maybe we're at the beginning of a new cultural sense, or common understanding, of reality - which is not that different from a very old sense.

None of this "proves" (philosophically) the specifically Christian declaration (the "good news" of "Father & Son & Spirit").  The Christian declaration is more radical than philosophical argument per se can propound : ie. Jesus is the personal manifestation of God.  This is rather an article of faith.  But Bowne is one of those thinkers and writers who provides a general, philosophical framework or ground for an approach to (or rational evaluation of) the obscure "witness" of religious (theological) expression.

(p.s. I know I'm not being completely fair to George Berkeley here.  This is Bowne's critique and distinction, not mine.  Berkeley, to my mind, seems actually very close to Bowne in his "metaphysics".)