quiet end of the year

LOVE’S CAVERN

At the quiet end of the year,

among the barn smells

a chilly infant wails –

a refugee.  Shepherds draw near.

He is king.  His mother is

queen.  His father is

a mule-driver (was,

anyway) – Vietnamese,

I think?  They live in Egypt now.

They’ve never seen Ghiberti’s

Gates of Paradise –

that brazen lava overflow

to metamorphoses of fiery dream

and rock – sedimentary,

igneous, flickery...

roiling sun to spring, upstream;

they’ve never been to Providence

or heard the Rose Ensemble

whose violas tremble

with harmonious transience...

they live the poverty of innocence.

Light flickers in a manger.

Someone senses danger –

cows murmur, chickens grow tense...

enormous shadows of the monster-men

leer over flesh & blood.

It is the shadow of the rude

star burning in the last heaven

                  *

– the red star, bringing rectitude

out of the mild mien

of that child-man –

incarnate stony magnitude

heavy past sullen measurements

of every swollen tinpot

despot in his chariot.

Matrix of cosmic elements –

the figure of a man emerges,

burning in brazen tongs

and glossolalia of tongues

from every tribe.  Sea surges

multitudinous, incarnadine...

Ocean called universe

forging one verse

with arches (catenary, almondine).

So combers crested in a tower –

moonbright Witch’s Hat

tenting her desolate

oak-limbs (snowy owl’s bower).

Quetzalcoatl, brazen serpent,

lift each refugee of time

into your feathered rhyme

of flame.  Your flicker-tongue, sent

dancing into each soul’s paradigm –

the sparkling river, bent

back to its fundament;

Love’s cavern, salting every lime.

12.23.17

Jonah was a fisher of men

NO THING

Hobo couched on his frozen bench

& felt the dream of summer

flow through his mummy-

shroud (cocoon from Danish trench).

Everything from no thing,

mused the broody dagger-

raven, plastic bagger

limping toward immortal spring.

Must mean some one looking out

from furled oak leaves.

No one conceives

how close a whisper knits the plot.

Poverty’s a hollow ache.

Lento, lento, the fast

approacheth – one last

Sabbath before Easter break.

The one I love’s an almond slip

between Pharaoh & Laius.

An airborne edifice,

the bubble in the level’s grip;

the fisherman’s égalité –

gal from Gesthemane

surfacing lambent sea,

coulombe crooning Liberté.

One blinding black diamond

clothed in octahedron.

Orange junk lantern,

Hobo’s caravel flamande.

2.4.17

all caw-caw raven now

SPELLING BEE

The fire in the hearth of heaven & earth

is a quipu-knot of flame.

& she plainly a gamin

hide-&-seek – May den o’ pent-up mirth?

Jonah Noddy Ark? – in the canoe

all caw-caw raven, now?

No way.  Anyhow,

Hobo followed her, down by the slough –

down by the Mississippi, see.

Henry’s late hideaway,

in salty snow.  Say,

Osseo, if yuh know – why done the sea

surge through them limestone banks

outem prehistory?

For water tower, maybe?

Could be.  Manitou-Give-Thanks

stood up to Minna-Tor – locks in

him cowrie-eye – him

fastens agate rim

(candled Ferrara hexagon).

You lose the thread... but it can

hear you.  It co-hear.

Her lip sweeps very near

your ear.  One sad revolution

                   *

           *              *

                  *

vaults the lead-yewn atmosphere

into a convolution

of suspended animation

(catenary star... a Feininger

prismato-chanticleer).  Agnes

would understudy.  Martian

cross rude centurion

snores through Easter-eggness

of yewnevaverse... dream-songe,

Apollinaris.  She

your crash (& Povertà).

We lifted nothing halfen so strange

as vinegar & gall a pain a spear

up to him lip... who, Mona?

Uncle Djinn?  A tuna

fork.  Ev’rychile skip scotch, here.

It OK if you messed up the lacture.

Alethea in the hoax tree

won the spelling bee

(“hollow” begin w’ H – sure).

& the earth was specifically grave as

death, salt... & Henry

Rustypin.  Ternity,

O Ternity! – that our bi’ness...

It a personal store.  Your steel soul

yearn for light, like a clam

pine for raven-shiv... Am

brother Sundial, sister Maryknoll.

1.8.17

the plain senselessness of men

BIG WIND

Poverty is the best education.

Lady Poverty

& sister Poetry

are twins – identify with a long line

of holy fools, primitive peoples

punished into meekness

by most extreme duress.

Fort et dur (judicial phase).

Abe Lincoln with his Choctaw cheekbones,

Black Elk, Roger Williams,

William Blackstone... hymns

in the wilderness (breeched from stones)

float toward a gray middle ground

of sky.  Shy of names –

since the herm what frames

this Percy-dervish meadow-go-round

of constellations... only Manitou

will do (for some).  Great

Spirit.  Big Wind.  A late

night pathos, sifting through

cottonwood, magnolia.

Only the geometer

of beatitude & bitter

pain.  Familiar Maximus-Bertha

who rises (bulbous) from the plain

senselessness of men

like airy turtle-dove

machine – kind, moderate... humane.

1.2.16

Don't ask me

Not much to say about this, except that it's part of a series, and that Stephano and Nunzio are father & son from Sicily (my regular haircut here in Providence).  "Agnes" is Agnes Eizenberger, from Vienna, my Uncle Jim's onetime companion.  (Also thinking of another icon-maker & diagram artist, Agnes Martin.)

VIENNA VEINS

Klimt was a kind of crooked wicket

out on a creaky limb

in Cricket City (rim

of Rimini, Parisian rivulet).

Gold.  Vienna veins of Ravlin

violins (we were there,

Agnes).  Do not compare.

It’s only an American Robin

Redbreast, hooded, yodeling...

he’s calling out your name.

Not Stephano (fair game

for Fame) nor Nunzio (clipping

the locks that flood across your face)

– though they are near.  The Boot

strides on.  The man is moot.

Your Crown is Everwhirr – mesh-lace

of spy-veil, ambling the source...

a poverty of materials

in a land of burials

& sunshine (Italy, of course).

Klimt limns the anguish in your eyes.

Through vales of Solomon

or Sheba, all the broken

kingdoms, poppy-fields (Grandpappy’s

ripe Epiphany).  Pain circulates

through straitened means

somehow – corny Earth-scenes

beyond our ken (Thanksgiving plates).

8.17.15

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907)

It's an odd path I traveled to election day. I don't believe in military solutions to human problems. I don't believe in one nation imposing its will by force on others. I think there is a disconnect, as well as a relation, between American wealth and power, on the one hand, and the world's poverty & social oppression, on the other, which no amount of imposed political ideals, in themselves, can ever ameliorate. Only social justice and an effort to address grievances and basic economic problems can do that. I believe there is a fundamental contradiction in the notion that a few nations, armed to the teeth, can police the other nations, with respect to weapons of mass destruction : only further & universal disarmament will bring real security in that regard.

All that having been said, however... I hold another set of views, perhaps contradicting myself in the process. I think there is a global terrorist network & movement, dedicated to a mix of tyrannical politics and Islamic-fundamentalist expansionism ("the Caliphate"). I think for about the last half century, the Middle-Eastern Arab nations have chosen the path of authoritarianism and violence; and while the colonial powers of the West bear much responsibility for this outcome, the primary responsibility lies with the choices of the Arab governments themselves. I think that the events of 9/11 left the US government no choice but to deal with the problem of global mass terror in a systematic way, and I think the Bush policy of confronting state sponsors of terror, as well as the terrorist networks themselves, made sense. I think the nature & practices of the Saddam Hussein regime fit the category of state sponsors of terror. I think Saddam brought his downfall down on his own head, when he thought he could respond to US demands with belligerence and stalling. I think Iraq and the Middle East will be better off with the Saddam mafia out of power, and an elected government. I think the response of the anti-Bush peace movement and the European governments was blinkered by a kind of self-righteous and naive attitude of appeasement, in an untenable and unjust situation, in which Saddam manipulated the sanctions system to benefit himself & punish his own people.

Much of my progress to this position came about as a kind of dialectical protest against the attitudes and propaganda of the politicized "poet-networks".

We know the substance of the scandal : because of the injustice, corruption & militarism of the world political economy, that "tree of life" is watered with the blood & tears of the poor & oppressed. "Wisdom cries out in the streets" : even on the editorial page of the NY Times (see full-page editorial of Sunday, on the effect on the world's poorest farmers of agricultural subsidies in the rich nations).

But does this mean we must respond by pledging allegiance to some political faction, and then dilute & corrupt literary values in petty partisan checkers games - red/black, "mainstream/innovative", "quietude/post-avant"? Far from it. Poets will search simultaneously for the center of humane values, and for the spiritual and technical resources of the masterpieces in our language, which both emanate from and reflect that center (whether in terms of praise or rebuke, lyricism or satire, vision or jeremiad).