on Holy Saturday

RIVER-TOY

On Holy Saturday, the Great Sabbath

when Jesus murmured, It is finished

& in his grave (like Jonah’s fish)

rested… as in an Ocean River bath…

When 12-yr-old Henry grandly admired

his glue-stiff model (Old Ironsides)

alight with joy, & tired pride…

– as just now Sophie dashed across the yard

to him, 50 years later – to display

the paper flower boat (sky-

blue, & Clizia-giallo) she

runs off to let fly, down the Mississippi…

her tender river-toy… her revery, her rest.

& while Henry gyred – wacky

as Coney Island in Waconia –

like Hermann Gödel, in his final nest

of parenthetical limit (righteous exactitude

of unknowing) – across the path

from Sarah’s parents (math

of relativity – some spousal quark beatitude)…

Where the world ends, & begins again;

at Swan Point, where her mother lies

who died the day his father’s eyes

first opened.  Amid the Great Congregation

of synagogue & church (pain-bearing world)

one pearl-eye opens at the prow

of raven-beak Argo.  Mark thou

how contrapuntal matrices of love enfold.

4.11.20

disenchantment of the sacred wood

 SECOND CHILDHOOD

This is that ancient harvest night.

Hobo curls deep into his nest

of old leaves, with his ghost

of a motherland... everything all right.

The Middle Ages were a second childhood

for homesick gentlemen, broken

by the gears of modern men –

the disenchantment of the sacred wood.

That light-filled limestone in the towns

offered to Mary Theotokos...

or the tart fervor of François

Villon!  Guild banners, pennants, clergy gowns

blazed with a commonality belied

by profiles of sad Synagoga,

goad for theological amnesia.

Her crown askew, her flock must hide.

Mum Quaker Hobo snores now

in a pile of aspen leaves.

Canada poplar sheaves,

he mumbles, to a sunflower (somehow).

She’s Pando in Italian, he dreams.

Largest clone colony

below the surface... maybe

the universe.  A raven-glance beams

at prow of her canoe, slips by.

Your motherland is endless,

someone whispers.  So this mass

of dead leaves limns one breathing aye.

                                                            10.31.19

goldenrod honeybee

LAMBENT FLUTE

This bumblebee on goldenrod,

hunting the crossroad

at close of summer.  Old

Hobo character – camouflaged

in yellow-black (almost).  Henry’s

obsession with absence.

I’d go the distance

into infinite cornfields, he says.

The river subculture, the dream

of floating back home.

Churnagogue palindrome

or unknown womb... clay baptism.

The cottonwood leaves seem to flow

like golden honey, then –

in Taurida, on the autumn

wind.  Like little heart-ships, so

they swim.  Out of the tight-knit shawl,

out of the everlasting

fire.  None shall be coming

to the Father except by Son, y’all –

by way of Mother.  That absolute

Somebody – a labyrinth

of stars, wherein we are hid

like lightning bugs, or lambent flute

reflections (crane-bone twins).

Flickering far beyond

woodpecker Trebizond,

sleepwalker Knossos – wheeling fins.

8.5.18