the water-works in New Orleans

CROW-TRACKS

Old Hobo by the river again,

old mule, old Lear, old man.

Ponders the coiled span,

the tension in the plot called Heaven

Versus America.  Indifferent violence,

violent indifference...

What took you into silence,

Julie, at your blossoming – hence

into the shark’s eye of the Bay.

Like an arching jaguar-lunge

of International Orange

claw-marked with irreversible tragedy

your Bridge – hypnotic Taj Mahal

whose lambent shadow hums

of nut-brown kingdoms,

steep ravines for Solomon, Sheba...

The span tracks a continuum

he scans with tentative

crow-tracks.  To live

or die.  From the will’s ultimatum

of despair, your cul-de-sac of self-

slaughter – to the other pole

of faith, serene & whole;

with Stravinsky’s branded Sylph

leaping her epileptic scapegoat pyre

(in Paris, on May 29th)

– O Juliet, my May-month

sister-dove!... my black North Star

       *

– his limping meditation takes him far

upstream, & down.  The dream-

songe, rivery-rêve, beams

her constancy, an equilibrium (wave-mère).

Her source, an Okean of galaxies,

a murmuring Milky Way –

your sempiternal Day

that never dies, your tree of many Jessies...

open your eyes, Hobo, & see!

This kingdom of canoeing

almonds pours – outpacing

Death with fins of Galilee-Ferrari!

Her mickle water-sprite keeps murmuring

like your sibling ghost,

shady elfin host

who climbs from a mandorla, humming

beside you (ahead of you, within you);

& like Latrobe the architect

following his own son to inspect

the water-works in New Orleans, renew

yourself – restore yourself, American! –

in that strange French-Spanish-

Cherokee dreamland.  Swish

go the eucalypus paddles... the plan

of Heaven is a restoration, so –

not slavery, but liberty –

your soul’s birthday.

Love Kingdom’s galaxies begin to glow.

6.24.19

Bachelard, the charming psychologist of daydreams & poetry. An advocate for states of mind that, in their wishful vagueness & wayward useless dislocations, are not highly valued in vigilant hard-working caffeinated America. But he's great at evoking the nexus of reverie/imagination/creativity... eloquent (in spite of the fact that he quotes, as examples, some pretty 2nd-rate & saccharine bits of poems).

Most of Forth of July was written in a kind of productive trance. Sometimes I talk about it in the poem (this part from early in Stubborn Grew)...

Home again from London, I lay near Lucky;
a man on the sofa, nearly lucky, I lay.
A man of clay, eyes open, looking out at the sky.
As though the blurred porch window held the key.

 
Blue arch of sky, a flurry of pussy willows. 
Out of the man of clay the heart goes out 
through the eyes – a circular route, 
elliptical, eccentric. Whatever nobody knows

 
sounds, unspeakable.  Toward the willows; 
toward the bent branches shading a long river, 
somewhere (ingrained in the interior).
A dream of the clay man, motionless, comatose.

 
An image in the glass, or ghostly hum 
draws breath from lakes of immobile eyes. 
A statue, stirring Provençal sighs
from old books (Francesca's boredom), or

 
immobile blue-brown blur captured in a porch 
windowpane.  A supine, motionless man of clay. 
And something quivers in his chest – today,
eternity – a key, scrambling in the latch

 
or Bluejay, whistling, rehearsing in the tree... 
icon filling the frame for a troubled moment 
like lost summer wind, crossing cement
with deep soil... infant memoir of infinity.

 
Closed eyes and speechlessness.
A clipper, sailing over seas of grain. 
Bluejay's fiery Chippewater – a milk train 
way.  Eyes closed, and speechless.

Gaston Bachelard (Poetics of Reverie) : "From poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world, to childhood reverie, there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the greatest landscapes. Our childhood solitudes have given us the primitive immensities."

(Something of this in the vast & rivery-bulbous dream-bridgedom of Forth of July).

The Bachelardian child (hidden unchanging solitary cosmic dreamer) is analogous to the perennial "order" of Melchizedek (mysterious King of Salem, who comes out to greet Abraham with bread & wine as he enters the Promised Land) in the Epistle to the Hebrews. ("For unless ye turn & become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.")

The order of milk & honey (mel). (see Melville's Moby Dick for a whole arcane & ribald symbology along these lines)