Showing posts with label rose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rose. Show all posts

3.28.2020

like a gouache by David Jones



LITTLE GROTTO

Day like a gouache by David Jones.
Diaphanous vision, muted
by sea-wind, raincloud.
Mountain, meadow, rust (earth tones).

The nightmare of the Great War
like sulphur tuning fork
or buried line in Eden Park
commingles its dilemma in a metaphor

like rose in steel dust (Roger’s compass,
pointing NNW).
& Image of the Beast is
emblem for the matrix of that enterprise

encrypted at the center of a corn maze
where Satan & his Minotaur
(ICE-bound, possessed) are
snared (handcuffed in their own cold glaze).

The Man of Lawlessness, like Terrible
Ivan – he makes his own desire
the absolute measure;
he’s lost to caritas (in his own bubble).

Imagine Ghiberti’s golden doors
at the Baptistery in Florence
with angels forced to dance
to the lash of demonic matadors…

imagine Eugenio, alongside Clizia
locked in the library
with Mussolini – her sturdy
sun-glance, over the chessboard… ah,

*

bright wings!  When Everyman & Woman
breathe in the heartland
of their living temple… &
Joachim’s eagle plummets through the Plan

of Ages!  Providential restoration, O
downglide of Holy Ghost!
Multitudinous host
of human happiness – blue emerald glow

of soft & silent cat’s-eye revolutions,
roll!  & be the planetary
hearthland, wide prairie…
deep swell of Thunderbird flute sessions!

Because all the world’s a stage, coach;
the play’s the salty verse
for catching Eddy the Perverse,
who suckles his Corona like a roach

out of the Minotaur’s bleak heart –
rotten as… who can say?
God knows.  Only way
’s to pinwheel back where we start,

Pocahontas – up to the swirling
origin of springs.
A little grotto brings
its whisper of clear water.  Everything

draws near.  Pleroma for Fisher King
(little lad in oak tree)
shines, golden, leafy.  His
mother smiles… rainbows from nothing.

3.28.20

3.18.2020

like an unremarkable cup nest



SLOW CHANT

Brown river, in a transept of browns.
In a gully of mid-March.
She slides by Arch
to Gulf, to be engulfed (drowns).

A scrawny bird scrapes overhead.
Plain sea-gull?  Or
some magpie pio-pio
newsy jailbird finch (last heard

in 1938)?  What about Mudpie Robbins,
the St. Louis Cardinal?
Pitches his meta-material
nested steady state hysteresis (spins

on clumps of slag – chaotic shmush
of paired radii
with reversible pi
slippage).  Camouflage whoosh

like an unremarkable cup nest, filled
with grass & rootlets…
one a them twig safety nets!
Jams into stadium – an emerald,

mobile stable of staple u-particles
crowded along a spectrum
between sand, cotton… some
aleatory compass… (see Hunter King articles).

Over the chained bay waters
rhumb line of pilot-bird.
Oscillating upward
into a faery 4-leaf clover’s

             *

earliest, minuscule sward…
as a Newport plover’s
nimble track veers
o’er sand waves (Ocean bard).

So from the lifeless mineral heart
of Minotaur, a green
sprig, emerald gemstone
springs.  With Nestorian art

(Eugenio’s grin) all the birds of the air
assemble in the palm tree;
a mustard seed (tiny,
fiery) molts to canoe (in her Ferrara lair)

& branches crossways, into quatrefoil; 
the remote & royal midnight
blue of Southern Cross (right
up there) hovers over river-soil,

& the Firebird (that sole Pentecostal
scorching glossolalia
slammed into orb-regalia)
skims from our Mater Dolorosa

biomimetic widow Rose… bent
beneath rose window
(Apollinaire’s slow
chant out of humbuggery, resilient).

So the nesting instinct of the Nazir,
the mother Hen of Rabbi
Rooster-Crow, will sigh
& spring an Easter egg (O Chanticleer).

3.18.20

3.12.2019

it begins w'Thou




ROSE ISLAND

If I had a mind like Aristotle
Augustine or Aquinas
able with calm patience
to unfold the metaphysical

origami of the whole
rose-petalled ensemble
of creation, mon semblable...
– shimmering Ocean River, roll!

Everything hinges on a little tree
– willow or almond,
sycamore, elm –
transmuted into living body;

tall ash, strong oak of poetry
spilling Imago Dei
(with verbal carpentry)
into an Argo-trimmed Horus-eye

of Providence.  It begins w’Thou.
Psyche’s agate lamp
winking through the swamp
of live-oak garlands signals true

(one if by land, two if by sea)
– leads on to victory
over my own frailty –
out of buried man, a new Henry!

Where the rose Venn diagram
of departed lips whispers
through golden calipers
a reconciliation of I am

              *

& ever shall be (simple psalm
adrift over clay towers)
cloisters the eye’s powers
in immaculate seaworthy emblem –

mandorla (your birchbark canoe).
O light of knowledge
from beyond knowledge,
heart’s mystic bridge mirrored below

at River’s edge!  Whose Jonah lifts
dove-light from deeps,
& as a dolphin leaps
beyond Atlantic hieroglyphs

the figure of an infant Son of Man
bobs in her coracle
newborn – primordial
origin, eye of hurricane!

The free conscience, soul liberty
subsists within your peace
which passeth, Golden Fleece –
lamb of the Lammas loaf, mercy

& flame of lambent fellowship;
stone mosaics in Ravenna
& the tomb of Alighieri
radiate the scent... lambs skip

there, in the cradle of our limbs,
beneath the opening flower
of your glance!  O bower
& rose island – spring of river-hymns!

3.12.19