just beyond my window

John Gould (U.S. Navy) with root beer, Minneapolis, ca. 1946

DEEP BREATH

September crickets in the darkness

just beyond my window

harping seasonal sorrow

elegize their summer quickness.

Cassini in her pure remoteness

plunges through the rings

of Saturn.  Airy things

(that fiery opera house in Venice,

flammatory lance of Beatrice)

coalesce toward autumn,

build a nest of flame

for rangy Thunderbird (eagle-Bice).

& is it only Ouroboros?

Boreas, recycling?

The ancient iron swing

Granddad assembled (90 years

ago) still creaks its aching 2-

note plaint (see-saw,

curse-us)... as though

the Iron Age were never through.

Someone must bear it all (above

rusty Titanic murk).

My father squared his cirque

on his last day.  His eye on Love,

one grip in mine, his other hand

traced a clear circle

over that whirl-debacle

with one thin finger... with one bound

                  *

beating the bounds of that vast realm

where Jesus & Black Elk

go roamin’ (with Melchizedek).

& if a 6 turn out to be 9... at the helm

6-wingèd seraphim feather the font

of Holy Wisdom.  Little well

of do-well... purling from hell

of trompe-desire, of chaine-ressentiment;

Alighieri’s checkmated yearning

tree-hum-yuled to heart’s

lightness... O sullen art’s

deep-harrowed aim – O desperate learning!

When men fall into Minotaur’s embrace

& Ariadne’s thread

snaps at the nail-head

one slight Rabbi-hair, O Falcon-Ace

might lift you from the corral waste

into fellowship

of Primavera soul-skip;

where lovely Manto-lips taste

intelligible everlasting bliss –

a porpoise laughs at death

& with one deep breath

huffs cobwebs off God’s gold telos :

that gardener of souls at dawn

lifting a toiling Job-

of-all-work by his nob...

Rachel out-sailing Ahab... Queequeg’s fin.

9.14.17

I've been doing some shuttling myself today.

6

 
A monarch ambled aimlessly toward Mexico.
Lost in the corn, he knew where he was going.
Knowledge fed humility; he was a gentle king.
There is a cypress where all monarchs go.

 
The cricket schemes a quainter camouflage.
His ordinary droning screed pretends
it cannot penetrate the summer blinds,
short-circuiting the season's slow demise.

 
But we hear differently, upon our swing.
Its iron triangles are Archimedean;
paired parallels ascend into a green
and absent-minded Paradise (creaking).

                  
                 *

 
A swing rocks back and forth, reflectively,
summoning evening summers out of night
and day.  Its governance is just (slight
scraping of the hinges, anyway); see

 
how the old saws of the legal hacks (Coke,
Blackstone) frame up sturdy guarantees
of civil equity : see how proud trees
bend branches to a sigh's brush-stroke.

 
The bookish founders of our liberties
reflecting in their libraries (on Rome,
on London), brooked a necessary home-
truth : let the flower lead the bees.

                         
                                     7.4.06

& so, with this odd couple (#18 and 19), the first part of Rest Note is (draftily) complete. Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will amalgamate #11-19 over at Alephoebooks, & continue with the parallel philological forensic frenzy.

19

 
The rain keeps raining, softly, toward July.
And we were born in rain, and we may die
in rain; this is our rain (mutter of sighs
and tears).  So grumbled Jonah, at the sky.

 
The contrite heart is as a broken swing;
its rickety creaking is a cricket-sound
in lonesome summer.  The iron wound
of spring, uncoiled... you hear it conjuring,

 
cajoling (questioning).  And so set forth
upon July, a pilgrimage of chums - hobos -
toward the source (one lazy Russian O
revolves... some undulating Volga-moth).

 
Suddenly (across red velvet veldt)
an Abyssinian abbess comes to call.
Her abecedarius (of questionable
providence) gesticulate, and felt.

 
The mud-flats of the Amazon form an inverted V.
Teddy could hardly bear it (jagged with rage,
you are half a swingset - mean with extreme
persiflage).  And it was hard to see.

 
Only the treetops fingered royal blue.
There, a jay of the jungle translated :
stale shovels can't bury her; checkmated
tyros swing like hoarse cicada glue.

 
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity,
suborned the rain. Clear at the source,
a subtler sort of V, victorious;
the rest, a snoring Jubilee (Z... Z).

12


 
I heard some crickets planted here and there
in a wayside meadow.  Lying on my back
in the shade of an iron pier, where tracks
of the Soo Line leapt a moody river.


 
You might recall, too.  I start to remember
something familiar (half-gone memory)
whenever I notice the crickets' skree, skree.
It penetrates, easily, adamant layers


 
of daydreams (vague, swollen, viscous, slow).
So time attempts a mask of gravity,
unsheathes its blade : mirrored peripety
(grave) revolving to a tune the crickets know.

                                               
                 *


 
The echo of the railroad's ruthlessness
blends like thunder into thirsty plains.
An overarching, regal blue remains -
an edict in the heart (its hollowness).


 
Relinquish them (the pride, the contumely)
the way a peevish king divests his crown.
Yon imperturbable (unplumbed, unknown)
shuffles the weights, invents a remedy.


 
And the wind trestles the urgent stream.
And the formidable iron swingset
restates its formula, in triplicate :
back, forth, back, forth (life, dream).

I've offered many illustrations from Forth of July, many variations in scale & pitch, over time, here on this blog. This one's from toward the end of the poem, in a minor key.

         3


  
 
         I lost the purple thread
 that led to the heaven-stone
 (curled around a cup of golden
 mead... but not like lead:

  
         like honey, heavy honey,
 buoyant, thick and sweet
 forever).  One bright
 bird-voice cried to me:

  
         this lever, Archimedean –
 this little cup of water –
 if you did not offer
 to the least of men

  
         you offered not to Me.
 This lever, a mercy-pivot,
 rocks like a lonely swing at
 dusk... Love was, you see –

  
         and swung the empty swing
 you heard so long ago (one
 summer evening, so
 deep, so slow).  Swing,

  
         little wooden swing...
 my heart rocks too
 when we begin anew:
 Isaac and Abraham, singing...

  
         (and my little dark lady,
 absent one, my little honey-
 tree, my true heart's pivoty-
 stem, swaying so lonely).

                            
                    5.23.2000

- this poem reaches back in response, across about 900 pp. of Forth of July, to one of the opening, initatory sketches of Stubborn Grew:

It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.

Here the focus is on the protagonist/narrator alone, and the sacrificial-suicidal plunge he is about to take (into his long journey-poem). At the finale, though he has still "lost the thread", the mead is not like lead anymore, but has turned, alchemical-fashion, into golden honey; and the focus is not on the suffering of the hero, but on the love itself, which acts as "lever" (of justice) and "mercy-pivot", on the singing which it inspires, and on the "absent one", the "little dark lady", its ever-present goal. We have moved from the "door of the church" (in the poet's hands, as in the children's game), to the substance of its evangelic mission (love itself). The cup (of lead/honey) runneth over.