Hobo was King of Mars

AUTUMN VESTIGE

Observe the canoe, in the dusty garage

in Ferrara, if you can find it,

she said.  A Star of David,

sewn upon spectral autumn vestige

of threadbare overcoat, shines

in the gloom of late October

day.  My hobo-mutter

fritters into golden leaf-combines,

disintegrating fleets of ripeness.

August limbs go plain

beneath afternoon rain;

the tree stands like an empty chalice

ready to be topped with drifting flakes’

archaic frozen stars.

Hobo was King of Mars –

lifted up unto a throne of rakes,

crowned with a pile of leaves; his head

was a planetary pumpkin, &

his magic rattle-wand,

tufted with scorpions, was made

of lead.  The heart shrivels with dread

& melancolia

until the Tauromachia

twirls, milky moon... lifting the Dead

Sea of All Souls’ into a strange orbit

of anti-gravity –

like your gallant oak tree

that lived 600 years upstate

                    *

whose trunk was broader than her height

whose acorns sail

from Hudson to the Nile

& carve a reedy vessel (upright

Osiris in mosey-miroir)

to tack the ark of justice

toward mild Providence –

I hae ne wroth, her murmur

filtered through the Pharaoh-mask;

I am the Shekinah

behind Who-He-Who-She;

I am your Miryam at the matrix,

almond salience, unflagging J.

The stars waltz gently

round the Pole... we

dance beneath them, in a play –

late romance of a shakèd spear

or rustic ferris wheel

where Smolak will repeal

the bearish curse, the hunter’s fear.

Hobo might head back home again

to Basking Ridge, above

the Rio of the Turtledove...

a furrowed nut, a graybeard brain

whose love came surging from the sea –

a tidal wave of hungry

soul (his coulombee).

So turquoise panned gold embassy.

10.17.16

Palimpsest of legends

GRAY THREAD

Out of gray matter of clouds & sea,

matter of Bran or of Bretagne,

slow combers of the brain

surface a fresh conception... see

your own shadow cast by sun

on flesh-tone limestone –

hear the whispering drone

in wave-beats from an unseen iron

spring.  Echoing, the king must die...

as the palimpsest of legends

from which everything depends

layers the storm with its pearl panoply

in coats of gray... & the first murmur

of the galaxies is almost

silence... & the gray ghost

of Jonah wheels one palm-feather

through the circumference of Time...

& a slight gray thread

drawn from Ocean riverbed

dangles in a cat’s-cradle (a smiling

rhyme) – emblem of unbreakable

immortal grasp of Love...

as one sea-breached dove

wings its immaculate cable

from far-flung farfalla world

to world (your only monarch).

O cedar-scented arc!

Almond diamonde – O salty pearl!

5.14.16 

Following the discussion of poetry-&-paraphrase from Jonathan, Kasey et al.

I guess I would question whether this is an either-or thing. Why can't a poem have meanings, which can be extrapolated from the poem, & yet retain its integrity & quiddity or whatever as an artistic end-in-itself? The sum is greater or different than its parts - the meanings are abstracted from the poem after all. But these meanings are also evidence of the poem's generative capacities.

Imagine the geometry of a poem as being like a "vesica" - the lens-like shape formed by the intersection of two circles. The shape has integrity despite the fact that it draws from two different figures, two different directions.

I sometimes think that the power of poems has something to do with the compression of meaning into parable. "Telling it slant" (E. Dickinson). You read a 3-line haiku and you experience the pleasure of a whole array of possible meanings, at once. Riddles work in a similar way.

"Paraphraseable meaning" is such a boring way of putting it. The negative connotations stem from the concept's origin in the New Criticism, which was built on a rejection of overt, politicized, didactic poetries of the 1930s (in this it was in line with much 50's art in the US). "The poem must not mean / but be" & all that crap (Archibald MacLeish).

Poets work in such a variety of ways that there is, obviously, no correct method. Negative capability & the passive reception of imaginative expressions & forms is a huge part of the process. However, to deny the importance of "meaning" - & its symbiotic dualities & energies at work in the poem - seems like the kind of rubric which makes a lot of postmodern poetry pretty vacuous & turgid.