the Ides of March in its idea

DOUBLE-BIND

That brilliant peacock-feathered eagle

Joachim fingerpainted

on parchment (ancient

plummet out of Calabrian ingle-

cave) figured the Holy Ghost –

monarch of the air,

white-haired regal raptor

rapt to avenge every Tuscan boast.

I marvel at the prestidigitation

of the priestly mind –

the Akeda, a double-bind,

knotting its pivotal vocation

under the shadow of those gilded wings...

that mountebank YHWH

in his coyote way

the widerruf of pyramidal things.

Folktales & myths were a defense.

Mechanism of the nurse

to lullaby the curse

& soothe the children in their tents...

they builded better than they knew.

The king is dead, long

live the king.  Bong

sounds the gong – old Caesar’s through.

Absolute control is crumbling.

Even now, the axe

is laid to the root... don’t

ask.  Meek Joachim is mumbling.

3.15.18

elephant fig tree

TWISTY CALUMET

The grey matter beneath the gray dome

over the elephant’s

great brow.  Intelligent

murmur through muted horn, become

flute-sound of turtledove – a rose-

gray granite labyrinth

in miniature (by mouth

of elephant-gate) whose lid will close

this casket blossoming with images.

A concordance of old & new,

the synagogue-ecclesia

of you & me (through corny stages

of a mystery play).  Tall gnomon

of a totem pole (Raven

shadow in the grim ravine,

the wooden idol in its barren

cul-de-sac) points toward the sun.

It is Cautantowwit,

testing your trickster-wit,

lifting his twisty calumet (smoke, son).

Ineffable infinity of Manitou

embodied now – made

manifest in mode

of neighbor Nazarene, addressing you.

Come into my garden, urges he;

the Magdalen has found me,

so shall thee –

her almond eye’s polarity

    *

seeps Providential clarity

as clear as spring rain,

clear as tears.  Enter

my garden, friend – you’ll see.

My Providence was like a field

where Hobo limped through

wildflowers, bumbled into

common day – let childhood yield

to manhood, womanhood – O bright

ripe liberty to keep

sweet civil peace (a steep

ascension to the morning light).

The message of the good grey elephant

is like an invitation,

then – to taste Creation

as a gift of vine & wheat... sent

from grey clouds like rain, or as

a green palm spokes its wheel

with light.  Let it reveal

itself – ultramarine, topaz,

gold, diamond.  In articulate shade

of elephant fig tree

cresting azure Sydney,

reckon the pattern starlight made –

an octahedral Southern Cross

lifts through your heart

transporting human light

to everlasting dwelling-place.

6.22.17

Hermione's return

MAYPOLE CALCULUS

The park bench by the Father of Waters

is Hobo Henry’s throne.

Where he comes to his own

like Leontes (late to his daughter’s

recovery, Hermione’s return).

That sidewinding father

plays hide-&-seek – with another

voice, another fleece.  Like someone

you met once, on the road to Emmaus

or St. Petersburg – sly

Queequeg, tricksy Bluejay...

warbling red Robin in burnoose

of raven-ink.  His tattoo labyrinth

the cave he trails from –

a smoky-flutey hum

folding the whole into a ninth

symphonic inning (end-beginning).

This personal boomerang

widens your gyre, bright Milky-

Zed – like a shadow slowly shrinking

toward your noon.  Come back again.

Global res publica

out of Exodus.  A prairie

equal sign, Mississippian –

grass salience across the river (Monk’s

Mound) still reminder

we were slaves once, here

(Dred Scott & Gateway Arch plunk

                     *

side by side).  Slaves kept by others,

& slaves to ourselves.

Whose arrogance resolves

into a Minotaur of rival brothers

(orange vs. black – harsh prison stripes

mirrored across scarce

monarchs, dense cedars).

Vlad in Kiev?  One of them types.

Or Nabokov, in camouflage.

A Frisco safety net

might bolt this Nut

who stretches out her flamande bridge

into an arch, over the Nile –

osprey transfigurement

of J to fundament

(her spirit flaming into smile).

This late romance, Leontes-Hobo –

some Pygmalion’s design –

lifted La Paix from Brooklyn

mud, with Liberté (moss-emerald glow).

Her incarnation of a crocus rose

& spun gold gyroscopes,

kalimba-periscopes –

around a Maypole calculus

of loving fingerprints, & penny-clues.

The Earth, in shadow of

one flighty Jonah-dove...

your arc of fellowship (King of the Blues).

5.1.17

 

with malice toward none, with charity for all

BIRCH-BEE

                  i.m. MLK

We walk together on a zigzag path

tracing the death of kings

miming crow’s wings

of trickster history – wrath

bursting yellow-orange (balloon

for Apollinaire,

strange signal-flare

scripted for carrier pigeon)

like scars of Mars across an unknown

martyr-soldat (Eeyore-

Verman, smoked as of yore

in mustard-bowl of Bosch-demon)...

Glassed like a pair of broken bifocals

the earth’s blind O

& heaven’s diving zero

mesh in the crosshairs (personals

coulombe).  Shepherd’s last calendar

(yours, mine, ours).

Beyond blank stares

of slate, in Arctic Cimetière –

beneath Jonah’s anchor, tattooed

by Minotaur... one homing

turtledove draws OMO

in red chalk.  Graphite étude

of pensive Milky Way... orant

abysmal honey-beard’s

raven-rose word

lifting light birch-bee ark (aslant).

1.15.17

breath of future time

ROSE ISLE

Providence must be frozen now –

near as cold as here.

There, in a corner

of RISD Museum, on the brow

of a painted rise – a late-medieval

child-world.  Horses

& men, innocent & coarse

in their gaudy armor, their carnival

smiles... all in a day’s work,

limns the rustic Master

of the Providence Disaster

(Crucifixion, id est).  The wolf-pack

crowds up a drowsy, lamb-shy

Messiah-King.  His large

eyes scan the callous surge

ringing those toxic letters – IN RI.

We learn dissonance from what blocks

our way.  The enemy

in the script – mythology

played to strength – flows through the locks

like Trickster (shifty for defense).

Jonah swims with the fish.

Jason or Gilgamesh –

the babe in the river-basket – immense

human soul-wheel spun from sloppy

river-clay, to stand

for Mama’s Best (hand

circumnavigating Ocean Sea

                 *
            *          *
                  *

like sunken Galileo Galilee).

Enameled figure, lambent

on his Southern Cross.  Bent

course, awaiting Arimathee.

Merely a muttered word you must

absorb, digest, like that

moist crumb from Josaphat

(bottom of the well of Cain’s mistrust).

Cain is unable to redeem himself.

The Minotaur blockades

all Ariadne’s braids.

Only a feather from Fiore’s shelf –

Joachim’s rapt ghost – might wave

a breath of future time

across Earth’s clumping rhyme

& waft her grey eye through its architrave.

The wooden limbs of Roger Williams,

still petrified atop

his cliff.  Scars crop

our hope – Man’s malice rims

the years with lime – yet still

the copper peristyle

of liberty’s Rose Isle

shines in its matrix (Man’s good will).

1.4.17 

tricksters in the cricket cities

PATCHWORK SHEPHERD

The river sweeps by the bent cottonwoods

toward autumn.  Time

& history resolve to rim

their force into a wave, a wheel.  The goods

bob & drift downstream, with the detritus –

the tomb of Alighieri

& the other desperadi

all the tricksters in the cricket cities (Paris,

Petersburg, St. Paul) fiddling their gusli

merge into a chord

like an infant beechwood

or broken font in Florence – one little tree

of plumb transfigurement, beneath

the arms of a patchwork shepherd

(Sant’ Apollinaire).  One almond

word melds stars into a wreath

to crown that brow (who is Liberty) –

she mutters... You who incite

fools to violence, who delight

in murder & grief, know not Me;

you who terrorize your spouse, & oppress

your neighbor, know not Me;

the blind man can see

what you cannot see, the deaf woman hears

what you cannot hear, the 4-year-old child

knows Me better than you.

So the little tree (a beech, a yew)

marked X the spot (where Psyche smiled).

8.30.16

Arriving at work this morning I look at the poetry blogs, & see Kasey Mohammad's has this:

"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."

I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .

They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.

Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?

Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)

In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).

In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.

These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.

These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.

These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.