stone for bread, bread for stone

ANCIENT DATE

The soupy heat slouches toward

July.  Flesh sags &

drips, we’re breathing und-

erwater.  Jonah’s gone overboard.

A billion fins of fans rotate,

create more heat.  Hobo

lies flat under a willow.

He daydreams of an ancient date

by Highland Water Tower; the whole town

spread before them, just

beyond the graveyard.  Lost

her name somewhere.  Don’t drown

me in false memories, he begs.

Canova’s statue (broken)

of George Washington

writes its own ave over his crossed legs.

Farewell, Columbia.  Guard well

her statue in the harbor.

Beggar not they neighbor.

Muzzle Nero, tripping up from hell.

That shimmering seine, the veil of Isis

shrouds the face of Henry’s

Clover.  Out of bleakness

of the grave, young spring may rise;

beyond the azure of the Golden Gate

one facet of euphoria –

one artophoria

of stone – revives... brings light to fate.

6.29.18

a baby year

POLAR NIGHT

                               for Chris Kraemer

Begins, a baby year.  Crawls out,

survivor, bearded with ice.

Minnehaha Falls

not (b-flat, sustained).  Hobo is stout

now as Shostakovich – repairs

the floppy mosquito screen

on vacant gazebo.  Seen

more mangy homes, the bum declares.

Remembers that other Epiphany

50 years before...

with Chris the carpenter

in Soho, & Ernst Neizvestny –

three rootless cosmopolitans

christening his studio

with vodka – dla vashego

zdarovya!  Hunched on some Titan’s

crucifix of railroad ties

laid out across the floor.

Moira’s “Mask of Sorrow”

on the eastern wall (king-size

Golgotha-face, Vladivostok).

Troy’s brother Gabe

there, too – my chemo sabe

trying to toot the sunshine back

with his brass headpiece (soldered

to holey, breathy crown).

Fenced about with unknown

renown, we are, Hobo purred –

                     *

doddered.  The thatch be windblown.

The star be nowhere

to be seen.  The Minotaur

harried our return – he was like a stone

blocking all the arteries, squeezing

the flowers.  So we sang Kaddish

for the kids, in plain English –

scrannel our pennywhistles, wheezing

Pipestone smoke... remember now?

Down by Little Crow’s tent.

Where Thunderbird bent

his twisted contrails, laid so low.

St. Paul tied up in a Christmas bow

the whole Fort Snelling crew –

neat.  & they’ll forgive you, too,

Minneapolis – just let them Gypsies go.

Morning Star & Evening Star

are twins, brother & sister.

The planet limps... her

black burn-scars all covered are

in tender hexagoons of fleecy

tinder.  Let us pray.

One black-yellow butterfly

sleeps in gray winter crèche – she

furls her wispy shroud tight, tight.

The Minotaur has dropped

his cup.  It rolls... it stopped.

One pearl winks out of polar night.

1.3.17

he was no Big Fish

SWEET CORDELIA

Like a Showy Ladyslipper in the woods

unseen by all except

chipmunks (scrabbling adept

through silent clerestories of dead

cedars) Hobo strayed, from Ursus

Major to St. Apollinaire;

he was no Big Fish, barely

a minnow Star du Nord (Jesus

his seine-maître, toiling away

upstream).  America

steamed on, formica-

sleek, pregnant with Labor Day

& White-Tailed Rabbit & Polar Bear

looked on, from cell blocks

melting in the superflux.

The Man of Concrete was no longer there

(he’d cried himself to sleep).  Henry

by a berried Berryman

stood by, his Resurrection

Plot cartooned in St. Paul snow (flaky);

apathetic Oblomov, at the gazebo

spied Olga in the distance –

wading through native plants

like sweet Cordelia coming to rescue

jet-bagged Lear.  Earth dangled

from one silver hair,

suspended over the bear-

cave (striped with blood, star-bangled).

9.7.16

"Pinecone", by Marcia McEachron

... thus, the poem as art-work. the art-work as entity, organism, a specific thing with its quiddity, etc.

What gives the poem as artwork its particular form? beginnings & endings... narrative a subset of dramatic form? (identification, crisis, denouement...)

underlying this focus on the poem as "sculpture" is a formal shape. perhaps it's the form of drama (unfolding plot-flower, flowerpot). or perhaps my obsession with this is just a symptom of the librarian's disease : to see everything in terms of closure between the covers of a book. summa everythingumologica.

that's what I want, though : the drama in the book. the Great American Hovel.

Going back to remarks of a few days ago...

Sculpting the mask - molding it out of materia poetica - the timbre & range of the voice, the character & intellectual focus of the speaker.

& tying this into the vague notions of sculpture per se presented yestahday.

The poet as the salience of a locality in time & space. A sculptural bump.

As such, only the "verbal representative" of what Everyman & Everywoman yis.

The human person - and analogously, poetic speech - as geological salience. (Mandelstam was fascinated with some such notion. On "salience", see Mandelstam the Reader, by Nancy Pollak.)

To envision the human being as mute. As sculpture. Why? Because I'm thinking of this sort of in Whitman's sense of the poet's identification with "dumb humanity".

But not with the bardic or patronizing meaning of giving a voice to the voiceless. No. Rather to conceive of the "dumb human person" as sufficient unto him- or herself. Why? Because a person's deeds are their true speech. The devotion of ordinary "dumb" (mute) persons to ordinary acts of unselfish charity throughout their lives.

"Piety", in the old sense.

I am wandering dumbly far afield, a stony salience in the furrow.

sculpture celebrates permanence, persistence (by pleasing, surprising, confronting).

the courageous art.

a sculpture doesn't dazzle, magnify, seduce, inform, etc. Instead, it stands there with you.

sculpture is the art of muscle. what is explicit in dance is implicit in every sculpture.

that mangle of steel has a person inside it.

the sculptor is the opposite of the bomber (Conrad's "pest among men" - cf. Secret Agent).

"to be builders, not destroyers" [Cantos?]

The Former formertive fortress-thoughts, & the Latta on sculpture.

solidity & many-sidedness. approachable-impregnable. more than the sum of its rip-offs.

sculpture is serious. the expense of sweat & the weight and roundness, the fact that it's just going to sit there.

though there is plenty of lightness & humor in sculpture nowadays.

not that I know much about it.

in sculpture the design is its own armature and gravity is built into the equilibrium. what you see is design itself, and you feel its weight. (& the materials, their sheen or depth.)

a sculpture ornaments or crowns a place. it is built to last.

it marks a happy contingency, at the insection of objective & subjective.

sculpture is just an extension of landscape, a salience. ridges, rocks, trees - even meadows are sculpted.