quirky rustic poet battles orange Goliath

MEMPHIS FLOOD

It was the winter of our ill-advised

& misconsent.  Embouldered

Julius the Quartered,

housed within his wanton witness,

raged (a savage orange walrus

full of fetid fire) against

that bad news feminist

in flight from Rus (hilarious!) –

while he, with his false staff, embarked

upon a cross rubes’ con

(some matryoshka manikin!)

against Old Ironsides... which worked!

– for temporizing (time... & two times

at a time).  The war was on.

“Where is the server, then?”

barked Julius again, again.  Crimes

filtered down like snow from Kremlin

gremlins.  Stark treason,

trickling out its own raison

d’état, took aim at Mississippian

Columbia.  One fiery wheat grain

in her heart – one star-

quintessence of her

pyramid – opened its eye again;

the child she harbored in her arms

across the Memphis flood

cried – “Human brotherhood!”

– & smiled.  Light pierced the storms.

1.25.20

conversation for kids

LITTLE PEARL

The Hebrews found a verbal replica

for Pharaoh’s pyramids.

Conversation for kids

(& sheep, & goats).  It was Jehovah

came to intervene, to interview.

Some saw an Oedipal

triangle – shadow wall

of mud-baked bricolage (dream stew);

some saw trois anges, craning down

from Paradise – to speak

with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac

(that lightning twin would play the clown).

The pyramids are office towers.

No one will explain

how so much pain

depends on callous fingers (ours).

The just one wears a diamond pin

stuck through the heart –

QUADRANS IN IMO ET

IN SUMMA SUBTILIS (wide-eyed dolphin).

The Middle of the World, he said

& made the sign of six

ways (willow sticks,

or cottonwood).  So truth’s inbred.

Her little pearl of rectitude

is portable – rides

water as a cheek glides

tears.  That’s all (beatitude).

6.28.18

yodeling in Mendelssohn

LITTLE MIRROR

The mind is like a little mirror

& the word is like

a mirror in that lake.

We skated there, one ancient year –

across the icy glass, Heidi.

In Mendelssohn, sweet

neighborhood (complete

Garden of Cyrus now, in memory).

A melody of day-lilies cheers Henry

Hobo (by the Mississippi).

He might be somebody

you know – booked into penitentiary?

Sol.  Solo.  Absent Sheba

browses in another aisle

(archived in old Rhode Isle).

Her ship’s in search of Colchia

lambswool – seamless gold web,

mute mutuality –

griot reality

lofted to laughter (on Mount Horeb).

Square triangles of pyramids

fit into portable log

cabin logarithms, Mag.

Your stone’s a tiny tablet, hid

beside that lake, in Galilee –

a solidarity

sodality, a party

writ on water.  Fountain, artistry.

6.27.18

digging in the dirty green

AYE-AYE

The dirty green of the dollar bill.

Gardener George, earwigged

on one side (with a big

little Mona Lisa smile).

The eye over the pyramid (annuit

coeptis) on the other.

Levitating, mother!

Mammon, touching his limit –

a gilded pharaoh, forced to step

sideways (into the river-

sand).  Busy beaver

out of Illinois might be princeps

round here (nobody knows

til all the votes are counted).

We are all the Lord’s anointed

Preacher-Judge (siege perilous)

leers in the face of b-flat storm –

Cordelia, ascend

your throne, bend

everyone to teeming agape (love’s form).

The government shall be upon

his shoulder (right to left)

until the desolate bereft

& greedy soul relents – a human

Imogen emerges, lowly

& victorious.

Dancing the periplus

of Arg-Noah (144, aye-aye).

12.12.17

in the conning tower

SALT PATTERN

Sophie sketching a choo-choo train

in blue crayon, & a trio

of engines in bright yellow-

black (Union Pacific) planing

across a dented overpass

share the light matrix-

argot of a peacock’s

fan-continuum (sea-surface).

Your eye that opens like a morning

glory forged into fusion

stronger than the sun

this amorous union, splendoring

a plume – your planet, raveled into

one.  Its gyroscopic

spin is geodesic

liftruweight – a feathery canoe

scaled up the hoary Nile to be

fair, kind & true

(peacock’s mosaic view

breathing accordion transparency).

Who then can be my enemy?

Why do the ogres rage

& tinpots ruse to stage

mock war upon me?  Jealousy?

from lambent arboreal North

snow slants softly down

a rose meridian

to blanket aboriginal South

                *

radiant in sibylline East

as tawny dogwood leaf

light welds a choral reef

to Liberty’s gull-dappled West

A shady chess piece in the tower

angles shark advantage

with a flanking edge –

the twisted blade, the bribe’s power;

on prison railroads to the pole

pecking iron grain

by long division

sowing lizard’s teeth (drum roll)

all for a subterfuge of thieves

who plant not (neither

shall they hive)... where

then their homing in the sheaves?

Like a black hole torn through

ice-gilded armor, light

gravity sets right

your kayak’s calm ellipse (true

almond eye, beaming beyond

all scheming pyramids).

Whose birchbark lids

one cosmic hexagon – fond

snowflake angel-star – salt

pattern at the end

of Everychild’s roadbend –

bright rainbow out of Ocean vault.

1.13.17

Palmyra, Palmyra

I heard part of a BBC broadcast on the ISIS rampage in Syria.  A British scholar was asserting that the neoclassical architecture of Washington, DC was modeled in part on the ruins of Palmyra.

That's not where this poem came from, exactly.

A poem is the idiom of an idiot, full of flounders & slurry, signifying (maybe) something.  Ezekiel saw dem wheel's a'glory, way in the middle of the air (Louis Armstrong).  Eugenio Montale waxed lyric about this particular LP.

"Nummulitic" : art historian Adrian Stokes talks about the particular kind of limestone used to build the pyramids - called "Nummulitic".  After the nummulites, small protozoic creatures trapped in Egyptian limestone - from "nummus", or coin, in Latin, because of their disc-like shape.

Somehow we got from Egyptian nummulites to American dollar bills (with the pyramid & the disc) - from money to Mammon - George Washington on the other side.

Long way from the Lincoln penny.

Poetry is a work-in-progress, like the Earth (according to divine Providence).  Ursus here is a sort of image of the State as Beast (USA, RUS, USSR).  But the bears might be redeemed.  "Without vision, the people perish."

WOODEN LOGS

August departure... evening crickets

elegize on wooden

logs.  In Peto’s brownian

study, a sad decade disintegrates

like Queen Zeno’s palm-fronds, in

Palmyra.  One wing-scratched hand

pleads Washington’s jarred band

of masons (keening for Syrian

widows, orphan sons).  Important

information inside.

Your gravy train can’t hide

from Grace, her chaste Nubian portent –

always arriving never quite,

a Paradise for turtle-

dives.  So melt the mortal

Quito coin, our double-down knight

(shy U-bird cycling her parking

lot).  Concentric wheels

of Nummulitic seals...

one bears dawn for Ursus (barking

Mammon flipping tails) – the other

gyrates toward his irate

Beatrice – oceanic

ex, Czech mate (cyclonic mother

coated in cute limestone slime).

One down, one to go

up again, Horatio.

Antique Atlantis corals rime.

8.31.15

Reminiscences of 1865, by John F. Peto (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)