Your Persian paradise

LOST PHOTO

Spotty grackles swarm the dogwood,

chatty starlings nibbling

scarlet berries, quibbling

around each drooping leaf (old

ruddy father).  They traipse a happy

nonsense o’er the remnant

garden.  Sir Thomas Browne,

strum softly til I end my Rhody

nap (it won’t be long).  Your Persian

paradise (precisely drawn)

will do for Gödel, Dante –

not so simple to sketch that Abyssinian

abyss, encircling the human plow

through history.  Your soul

is touched by lost photo

whose courteous artist limns her now –

an April child glimpsed through November

shades (All Souls, Grandpa).

One unicorn grace, selah.

O woe to me, that scarred the moon (her

face still gleams from autumn grass).

A soft Franciscan Rimini

rhymes in the memory

of your basilica (on ne passe pas).

Dear evening Matilda, 1-3-2...

(Beethoven, fowled & quartered –

decussation – weathered

sprite).  All shall be well, hums Manitou.

10.5.15

laundry line, old lilac, light Brownian diamond

Rhody backyard I must leave ere long

Life's unwritten history

BRUEGEL SCENE

Summer loses weight, becomes

translucent at the end.

Sunlight slants graveward

with a farewell glance, & autumn’s

trumpet-call is barely audible

amid hilarious

alarums in the circuits

of the starlings (swarming, risible).

& so you wonder where you are

on earth.  John Berryman’s

in jasper, John’s in grey;

Man’s in a graveyard green (so far

from here).  Splat in a corner

one cloud-turtle (from

Iona) lifts her drum-

shell from the sea – almost another

comber, very salt & watery.

I’ll join the starling circus,

friends – I’ll whistle us

to Minneapolis, SE of Rimini.

That raven’s in the Bruegel scene.

His glance is like one

wintry oeuil upon

her apron – by the deep tureen,

at dawn, in the spare refectory;

feathered in soft silence

on a wall of remembrance.

What’s up, Dad?  Unwritten history.

9.21.15

September 21