Lanthanum 10.13

13

O April’s love-travails!  You led me blind

by whisper-trellis, through the vine-nigh,

vine-high night.  To trace a flicker-shadow

of blue phosphorus (a zig-zag jay).  Inward.

The lens-curve lining of this mini-retina

is as rose coracle, or limpid vesica.  A rude

mandorla (me) filled with scraps of yankanoodle

sails – my papery mis-steps, cul-de-sac accidia-

reports.  Yet from such booty of dearth

you lift me into azure, shade... sheltered

by sentinels of cedar, cypress (cloistered,

grave).  This limestone river-cave – earth-

lapping light-waves leapt from its jaws.  Frieze

bent like a rushing spirit-arc – a waterfall

of overflowing laughter.  Ponte Vecchio guild-

hall, binding the flume of mangled histories...

I cannot build it myself.  Yet heaven is integral.

Yearning, limping one, by the Livingstone-tree,

eternal menorah, you harbor me within feathery

ellipse – so I may not stumble, though I crawl.

& the inward lining of my patchwork, jumble-

sale soul rethreads itself – this heirloom J-

square Coatlicue-shroud (serpentine Jonah).

A Pontifex Maximus smaller than Tom Thumb

or Pushkin’s button spins upon its pinpoint eye

– where Hagia Sophia rides on a bumblebee

toward the North Pole; where Sacajawea

folds up yon aurora-tepee of stars (hey-yo)...

    4.24.12

Lanthanum 10.12

12

That lone pigeon or mourning dove I saw today
soar like a chip of shale overhead, near India
Point – tail shaped like a paintbrush (Charlie
Burchfield, or maybe Corot) stroked highway

& tenements, bridge, with color. Pigeon-
pigment, rare indigo blue (from rainbow-
throat). Out of whale-scum, offal (phew!)
– urn-pot residue (Hell-rot to Empyrean)...

& so, dark Phoebus, wisdom is justified
in all her children. The full scale croons
in that arc of clear air. Freedom’s pontoon-
bridge, perihelion-balloon – A-frame filigreed

in gold. Up from low hum of redemption-
brow, a kingly Sheba-curve, full of milk
& hard questions. Memphis garbage-strike
groan-crown, toward equilibrium... O Zion-

Jubilee! – all through earth, & blue-gray
sea. & for me? Only a pokey mosey
down Dove St., where we used to be. &
are, J-bird... a pair of cleated arms (spooky).

This, O seraphic weld of bread & wine...
apex-draft up lofty sweep (of stealthy
steel). Rescue for tramping misery
to recognition of a molten trine :

bees’ hula-hoop of union-domes, melodious
facet o’ sun-filed Rocky Face. Peters-
burg’s nocturne-glow (radiant perimeter’s
tremulous Point.). Rust-trestle. Us.

4.19.12

Lanthanum 10.11

11

What, then, be this weird whispered word?
A one-note Churley, unhorsed – housed hidden
in lone-Okie corral? What secret gradient in
Hen’s 57-sauce – him ‘sippy recipe? Not absurd

so to inquire (for the sake of the choir, even).
Like a smoldering branch (willow, cottonwood)
dowsed in Jordan-water... from childhood
y’broodish Uther-Usher dragged his penned-

in pen... if only to seed & behold his own
flowering booktree. Dawn, Jonah whale-road
swoop-fled – fell asleep in olive grove (snored,
ivy knave). Ever the prod-gal seediness was,

is, sown. Not to be saved, either – burnt
lumber, embers, vacant lottery – except
within immeasurable charity – infinite
& feisty magnanimity (emerald welder’s

mint). Where we look to. Across the standing-
wavy grain, in an evening bronze (bellissima)
of aquamarine – alchemical grail-gleam o’
laughy-whaweh. Tough trough cresting,

stiffening to clear spring agate-whorl (your aqua
firma – diamond). From yon vortex-pinnace
of steep crow’s nest – walnut in his chest,
blazing doubloon – waved octahedral sunlight,

everywhere the same (Quito equality)!
Rose warmth of fluttery there-not-there...
close by. Draw near. Through ye man-door...
do re mi fa so – là (unison). O taste & see.

4.17.12

Lanthanum 10.10

10

While Hobo was sleeping, like Frankie the tramp –
like the rest of us, with our cramped little dreams
in the garden of our lives (didn’t amount, it seems,
to mulch) – his soul was training her reading lamp

– planted aloft, in crow’s-nest made of birch-bark
(hidden in a pine). & so he played the shadow
of its abiding milk-train light. Hear that horn blow
now, silver, serene (silverine) across the sylvan

river-dark! The float moves upstream, serpentine,
while you doze... honey-melded servant-of-servants
on fleecy ship-sway (Sheba, Sheba). From Memphis
trance to St. Lou needle’s-eye (mandorla-medallion).

& as I sprawled there with Hobo, like a wastrel
in a weed-patch, I looked up... traced the path
that lantern traversed (arch over earth-borne
wrath). As if one soul stepped back from Hell

as from an empty well – stood upright at last
like diamond out of crystal cave – & sketched
an octahedron for the six directions (circumflex
of windy symmetry). To be an anchor – ballast,

balance (scaled to weight us). & all my heart’s
bewildered memories, remorseful hope
raveled upon that upright star-pole – sloped
to Bukovina, Karelia (vertical text of finish-start).

Prone upon earth, like Frank the tramp (spread-
eagled bounder) she lifted me (that Sheba-soul)
& all my dead with me (JB in the snow... HC
in the delta... Juliet at the gate). Into sun-shed.

4.16.12

OE Improv

something for holiday weekend

from near the end of long poem Forth of July. (For some reason Blogger doesn't allow for spacings within lines, between words... so you'll just have to guess where they are, or read the original - see link below.)

8

With dove in one hand and flower
in the other she is Spring she
lifted him from Sea of Galilee
to the top of Mount Moriah

where he danced a sun-dial
in circles a sparrow or
goldfinch singing Time Now
Here from my hands All fly free

*

And the weavers wove a barge
of reeds to float to the delta
where a child of a Sheba
and slave bore the scourge

of the lash into the litter
where the line met lightning
and blood met water tightening
a sandstone gall (pennyroyal bitter)

*

The linen like clouds
molded to the face
congeals a last
thunderstorm rolls

drums and trumpets
light hoofbeats girlish
Scythians mold each wish
from twigs the mordant sets

*

Sunrise by the garden tomb
enters as through oarlocks
of a slave's galley she knocks
lightly and the gloom

dissolves and the stone grows
lighter and the Man of
Sorrows' eyes open (La
nuech vai el jorns ve he says)

4.24.2000



(entire poem here, in pdf. format : Forth of July )

Lanthanum 10.9

9

Skipping its T-Rex rope of entropy, inanimate
matter loops toward equilibrium. A steady date
of stasis (nether word for...). As the late
(always) poet put it : stone waits (immaculate

coagulate) like pudding for the fire.
We’ve been here before. Rahab, Ethiopia...
we were born here (among burnt rocks,
ephemera). Bring aqua firma for the hired

fellaheen! From where? From Hula Mountain
(yon Hawaii-mint island). Pacific grapefruit
gratias, fearless, unbreakable... specific
gravitas-hilaritas of All-My-Springs

(Itasca-fount). Mid-day sunshine beams
through disintegrated hexagons (April
adrift) – like mini-Hagia-Sophia dwelling-
wells, translucent hovercraft-triremes...

(fond shadow bending toward the lens).
One pink-gray eye looks up from dusty piles
of boots, at horizon’s edge : rough hobo-style
sketches her mollusk musculature (painful

conditional, vocational arc). &, groaning
so, stone leaps into groinèd arch – diamond
scrapes ice from still-born, chilly Neverland –
what was salted away, slowly waltzing, turns...

In the miracle of a lowly portal, hoary gates
are lifted eyebrows : your labyrinthine matrix
of forgotten streets melds into honeycomb-helix.
This man was born there (Golden Law Estates).

4.5.12

Palm Sunday night chords

Lanthanum 10.8

8
Man was put on this earth for one purpose : to make civilization
– Joseph Brodsky

So this newborn spring curls from sleep, a moss-
green fiddlehead along the Ms. Riv. A wrinkled
dry Rip (his bones waxed old from dammed-
up roaring). Shaken awake amid squalid chaos –

ramshackle shacks, contraptions, conniptions...
Shady contrail (pine-needle Cézanne). Lingering,
elderly, nearby, Shoshanna (naiad-Diana, fluting
in Renoir petal-shower). O dappled conceptions!

Slanting (double-time) across fishing-grounds,
bass-line salmon arrays. A regnant monarch
butterfly, aimless & amiable (Melchizedek’s
wine-flowy picnic basket – milkweedy lost-&-

found) goes drifting by (through evening arroyo).
With the specific gravity of a lightweight meteor
homing, homing, oh my gal (gringo dem Russkies
O). To a high pine mound of black limestone –

meet Bethel meetin’-place (Ojib’s midé dream-
spot). Secret mental elevation, or lateral L
near as the whorl in Homer’s fingertip (well,
well). Your own heart’s raveling Cyrillic dhowry-

anthem (Sheba-Natasha). Seed-grain, Scythian
tattoo-scar, Ypsilanti-refrain... wild dusty haylo-
fado (out of iron bedsprings nord o’Duluth).
Such be the serpentine bronze signals chosen

to meld like honey-vein in rock. A solidarity
of fern-things first : that we live in a place
emphatically our own (& that this emphasis
is as calm palm on child’s hot brow). Hilarity.

3.21.12

Lanthanum 10.7

7

So spring comes in, comes in moist morning glow
across this gawky adolescent chaos - a girlish,
coltish land of cluttered yards. In baby-lambish
lambent air, that temple-dome on Morris Avenue

smiles toward the young sun her honey-gold reply,
& Henry is quietened with flighty V-swarms of half-
memories. Phantom birchlands of Karelia (Nabokov
tamarack mnemonics) summon a Kievan panoply

of iron bells. Upon their tidal drone he would lift up
Byzantium in both hands, and, kneeling, offer Ilion
to impress Empress (haloed in sheen-cape of a trillion
eyebrows’ dolphin-leaps). From rudimentary cliff-top

he would lean his shade across a continent,
raise his Juliet-Eurydice from harbor-grave –
two ghosts re-muscled in one clamshell wave
(one pearl-encumbered comber). Affectionate

fundament of every wedding is, this tout-monde
pre-imprinted printemps (haunted brood-nest
rook-a-coo)... just so the template-test
of each vocation is, an infant meekness (curving

round). Mercy & truth are met together;
righteousness & peace have kissed each other;
truth shall spring out of the earth... mother of
each sunburnt thorn, high-hearted counselor –

Hagia Sophia of the blood-soaked cottonwood.
How scarlet veins of mute servants filter through
vast fields of birth-pangs (pain-pinioned, labor-crew
planet)! Walk me toward your equinox, ochre redbird.

3.20.12

How to Read a Bit o'Balderdash

America & world, a-roar with a disintegrating mosquito swarm of conflicting pointers, alerts, trumpet-blasts... read this! Look at that! Listen up!

How many billions of poets are there, now? At least 6-7 billion, according to the official 7,000 poetry supervisors. Pay attention!

What am I supposed to do? Keep writing gibberish. It's a long-term, serious project, very much worth your time & careful research - Gobbledy-Gook Enterprises (GGE).

What follows : a few shallow remarks meant as helpful hints to the most recent episode of Lanthanum (see Lanthanum 10.6, below).

The poem was written on St. Patrick's Day, hence is "occasional". Differing from much other Lanthanum in featuring silly Irish brogue in my recital.

(In case you are new here, I've been in the groove of an unusual (for me) literary haybaling process : I write the poem & then immediately recite the poem, & send it out to YouTube et al. It is really hot off the frying pan into the social media.)

St. P : patron saint of Ireland. Bringer of Christianity to Eire. That is the traditional understanding, anyway. As I understand it, a saint's day is a kind of birthday, name day.... they're all related.

The poems in Lanthanum are all related too, so there is some accretion, some sedimentation of echo-meanings & feedback-loops.

Lanthanum, over the last few years & chapters, has been circling around, gyring down closer & closer, the Gateway Arch Monument in St. Louis (there we go, another saint). It's a tuning fork, a mandala, a symbol... an amalgam (steel alloy) of many different things. An arty, imaginary idea of a kind of focal point, joining America (US) to earlier things & future things. That's the idea, anyway.

But let's look at this episode. The "poet-speaker" Henry, or "King Hen", is musing about saints & saint's days. Meanwhile there is an undercurrent of cryptic allusions & meanings gathering. In the 2nd stanza, "hid in his live-oak mist" etc. begins to point secretly to 2 different "once-&-future kings" : Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Charles II of England, whose birthday (May 29) is celebrated in England as "Oak Tree Day" or Restoration Day - recalling the drama, during the English Civil War,
of Charles hiding in an oak tree from pursuing Roundheads. Now May 29th happens to be the poet's (Henry's) birthday too, as well as of that other Camelot-figure, JFK. It also happens to be Rhode Island Statehood Day.

Our speaker moves along into stanza 3, recalling that Emperor Henry, promoted to "doorkeep". This is referring to St. Henry (II), whose "day" in the Catholic church used to be July 15th, which happens to be the day, in 1099, that the crusaders captured Jerusalem and reached the Holy Sepulchre. The "doorkeep" is a reference (one of many) to the Psalms - the line which runs something like "I would rather be a doorkeeper in the House of the Lord than one of these mighty princes".

But then Henry (poet) shifts his glance to another St. Henry : "the martyr - on the Finnish line". This is a different Henry - the patron saint of Finland. His day is January 19th ("juneteenth") - a birthday he shares with Martin Luther King - MLK, the "Milky Way" of stanza 3 - major symbolic figure throughout Lanthanum. So Henry is finding a "silver thread" from various saints through to the meanings of Lanthanum : since the Gateway Arch is in some ways a Finnish accomplishment (cf. its architect, Saarinen).

Thus in this "amiable tabernacle" (another paraphrase of the Psalmist), Hen might "touch a key, perhaps". This phrase a direct steal from Hart Crane's poem The Bridge (another America monument poem) - from the section called "The River" - in praise of tramps, hobos - whom Crane suggests "touch a key" : are in touch with the tacit, feminine, American earth (in contrast to the American world of worldliness & power).

In the 1st line of the 4th stanza we come across the phrase "bonny advent" : punning-Joycean reference to another St. - St. Bonaventura - whose saint's day is also July 15th.

Thus the poet-hobo Hen, in his dreaming tabernacle (seeing through rose-tinted "Rhody-glasses") is beginning to imagine a sort of visionary America centered on the St. Louis arch, "affirming ascent" (Crane's "spiritual gates"). Its substance is a sort of Irish "lightsome glee" inspired by the thought that the entire cosmos, the universe of reality & experience - is manifested out of nothing through some kind of benign-wise-loving creative-mysterioso Whatnot : so that "the stars shout together for joy".

& then (stanzas 5-6) the poet imagines lying himself down at that "milky entrance" - stretching out his whole length, as in the Robt. Frost poem - on the earth; strumming his "harp". & he becomes a kind of giant there : like Paul Bunyan or Babe his blue ox. With a "heart like Hobo" (Hobo is compared to Falstaff in earlier episodes) and a "mine deep as Prince Hal" (another once & future king). From Providence - where the vision begins - to San Francisco, at the Golden Gate (another structure which plays a big role - Orphic-Eurydice tending - in H.'s oeuvre). "Through the needle-eye" of the Gateway Arch. ("Omega-MO" is a complex pun which will likely see further development in future episodes, better left unsaid here.).

So we have an east-west line, where the hobo-poet stretches from RI to California. Then in the last stanza we have a perpendicular south-north line (from LA delta to l'Etoile du Nord ("star of the north" - Minnesota). The body of Hen-poet, lying across America, sketches a cross-shape. There is a sketch of an emblem here in the final stanza which has cropped up many times in Lanthanum in various ways ; a sort of graffiti figure of a stick-man shaded by a curving arch or wing. It could be a sepulchre (a cross marked on a grave); it could be a person standing under an arch or portal.

But here in this stanza, the symbolic emblem flips over ("like Lazarus"). The giant lying in the earth stands up. Finnegans Wake, might be. & becomes an outline of another symbolic emblem : the figure of a stick-man on the cross-beams of a large anchor, with his feet on the curving base of the anchor. This happens to be the official emblem of the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island (a crucifixion on an anchor) : since RI's state motto is "Hope" and its state symbol, an anchor. So the poem circles back to Rhode Island, where it began (with those "saints", Roger Williams & William Blackstone).

Hopefully my strenuous unpacking here will encourage a few readers to explore the undertones in other parts of this giant piece of balderdash now underway (Lanthanum, work in progress).

p.s. & bear in mind, the western edge of this 4-leaf clover - San Francisco - is named after yet another saint - Francis, of Assisi : the greatest "hobo" of them all.

old tune in key of D

Lanthanum 10.6

6

A cool St. Pat’s day, cloudy-gray – from mourning
to gaiety, sackcloth to sun-shield... good day
to read Joyce & be glad thereof, I say, sez
old King Hen, mit peacepipe in mitt – harpening

away, hid in his live-oak mist (like the bunny-
hop charlie-horse once-&-future he wuz). Saints’
alive, he mumbles – saints’ days, saints’ days...
there was that Emperor Henry, promoted to doorkeep...

& that other, the martyr – on the Finnish line
with the Milky Way, one January (juneteenth) –
silver-gray hairline, secret thread, methinks...
& musing, ambling into amiable tabernacle, Hen

might touch a key, perhaps. Some bonny advent
come wheeling like St. Elmo’s fire over quaternio-
clover earth, sprung-wound... some old green Eire
through Rhody-glasses, sure, affirming ascent –

aye, lightsome glee, when the stars shout together
for joy, at emerald Danae’s immaculate &
milky entrance! & he will lie down then with his
delicate harp, & strum... I say he will stretch far

& wide, like Bunyan (or his Babe), with a heart
like a Hobo, a mine deep as Prince Hal, he will –
Providence to San Francisco, through the needle-
eye (Omega, MO) – from basement chord out

of delta swamps, upstream (ahh... l’Etoile du Nord) :
& that shield of dove-grey tuning-fork (pronged
in the tumulus) will... flip! (like Lazarus) – O, almond
of anchor-smile! Hoisting sail (blue-grim grinrood).

3.17.12

Lanthanum 10.5

5

In Frisco, cornered by a sunlit wall, a tramp
erupted utterance... mush streaming
from the cornet of’s mouth. Wholesome-
boomy Hal spake : Get thee behind me, scamp!

When Luna least thanks a wisp a’will, minced Hobo
right back Adam. Noli me tangere, kerfluffled
Hen. Nolo contendere, that punk rebuffed.
A draw. Put up thy pup, rabid boho.

Robo t’you (thus th’insouciant bum, beneath
his breath) – we needle each udder, blubber.
S’all milk to me. S’ain’t finn yet, brooder –
jailbird – j’martyr Memphis’d me Hyatt be’eth,

bee-fur I J-teenth! So we mutt-scrumble trough-
boskets of this nonesince-amulet (whupped &
wisked) before the chanticleers... before air
mops honeydew from sunlift, double yew-

inscribed (hengraved). His tipsy-cupsy crust-
warp walks thick plonks of a legal case, yawl – !
Pretty dingy, if y’ask me, plunks Peter Pull
the silo-manx (fezzy catamaroon). If y’mast,

replied the prince (omni-puss’d). Meanwhile
plankton swimmy’d t’freedom (drawn by light-
mote, ship-shape frame) – sketched an infinite
Gödel-scaffold (aflame). Resonance-turnstile,

tensile mappemunde. One pianissimo octave-
span, from Westerly porch to parked car
on fry-pan... through noodle-eye. By river,
bound. Beneath North Star (Finn’s architrave).

3.16.12

Lanthanum 10.4

4

Hobo shakes his shaky Shrovetide palm
with a handful of doubled (iced). Dicey, this
wistful one; not congregate with the mighty.
Yet his heart greatly rejoiceth (Bum

Smiles Thru Tears). Your sadness (flighty-
voluminous)... much like these little gnats
weaving brief light-show shawl (Psyche-
parasol) by trunk of tremendous, defunct, once-

&-future mighty oak. Be aware, idiot-gods
of marching, of your ideas... be wary that
nevertheless, thru volleys of mockery, night
may befall, leftenant (in autumn... harvest-

odes, funereal, grimpen). That oak a craggy cliff
lifting bracken-alms toward sun’s cloud-muffled
azure (tall remnant of marigold). Tuft
of milkweed memory, its cloud released (gift

of dead bees). O vagrant monarch, wandering
batman-baton! Under the volcano
of your unbelief... coraggio, amigo! Sow
your seedling myrrh, amnesiac Madaleña...

bully, Dionysiac! Arch like the nut you are,
Maggie Mick o’Magnesia – these numbers
do not lie! Wailing Miners Strike! (umber
vein... violet bread, wine). Them bearers

ford a rude saw-theater (hands’ operations)
– one dust-encumbered ailing Railman splits
the night (with Queen of Spades, nitwits!). O
most-artefactual Atlantis Rose – congratulations!

3.15.12

Come Thou fount of every blessing

Lanthanum 10.3

3

Hobo, in the delta (near Florida) wandered
beside levees of the sea. Pocatapetl
fumed in bright ether, somnolent. Little
Maggie McGee kept an eye on him (remembered).

How he sketched things he barely heard, saw.
Like that funnel-cloud of Okeanos (angry
flipside of a smile) – that Feininger
photogravure, Stella-vortex (Stella!) – hot

n’tot’s wormhole, quicksand-burning (Africa).
Poor baby in a crib of delta gamblers
(chance wobbles on waves, where wagers
mince). Green envy's iceberg-throne (back, back).

The conscience-stricken ne’er-do-well bears
premonitions of returning (rose-golden ore-
liquorice of honeyed limestone)... & if he
does, he will be welcomed there. He shares

their scrivened waiting – lento, Lenten
(compassion-harbor, patient-solidarity)
of understanding all compact (charity’s
emblem, seal-wide, spindrift)... done.

I will enquire regarding the plain path
to the pavilion (your sacrifice of joy).
Your house. Your tabernacle (oh boy,
swallow-shadow) – your gate of wrath.

Behold, a small green whirr, over rock
in secret thunder-spot : where
Cherokee crossroad (fern theater)
aligns a flame (hummingbird hummock).

3.14.12

Lanthanum 10.2

2

It was 11:32, not far from midnight.
Drowsy Hobo nodded, weary... heard a whisper
nigh. Give ear, sleepwalking shepherd; here.
He stumbles forward, blessed with sight

through stubby fingers. Gaze on that bloom
afloat o’er rhizomatic limestone, there
(between the cherubim) – its violet flare.
Hobo squints... his fuzzed vision (broken zoom

lens) wavers... notes the luminous periphery
(a halo round the moon). Then, like magnifying
glass on August grass – a flame! Whizz-flying
toward him – face to face! He turns away...

Who dwelleth in the man-door, there?
In the man-door there, who dwells? the bird-
voice warbled, crooned. Soft grey-wing soared...
The sudden overwhelming sweetness of your

omnipresence, everywhere : the center
of centers is dispersed like seeds of fire.
& like a silver keyboard of sea-waves, or
molten hive through mandala-perimeter

(Argus-eyed Hagia Sophia) this water-
whorl (tender hurricane of tears) led
Hobo on forsaken track, through Land
of the Dead... toward sound of laughter!

The mystery lingers near the sunlit stone.
Limestone Evening Land... whirl-mound.
Kurgan of conscience-riven bards. Fond
spires... Homer-come-home (wrung clean).

3.13.12

Lanthanum 10.1

1
Heaven is integral. – O. Mandelstam

Slouched across St. Louee misery-pallet, Hobo
clammed his eyelids... glimpsed a grey-eyed,
gold-filamental sister-bird (spark-flared
in mordant gilt). Mosaic Regina (Sheba-baa

of shepherd kings). & given that Man
might just be a just man (how long?) – pregnant
on ecumenical cliffside with all-human covenant –
so Hobo, humble bumble-poet, might just scan

his premonition into line; things yet unseen
by man nor beast, unsaid – how to enunciate
this annunciation, van der Weyden? Implicate
with slippery clay-signals, the tacit dove-croon

of belated lambkid world, impending,
peaceable – 50 cycloid-states of a gentle
Jubilee. Global pearl (yoked, ornamental,
pendant) : nestled aye in 10-fingered palm

of shady urning (oak, willow, tamarack...
a milky cottonwood, pining). & to behold
there (in feminine Psyche-mirror) untold
unfoldments, from shroudy clouds, Micmac...

For we know the higgledy-piggledy history-
tapestry already : bayou of battle-axes, dented
helms, lead, bronze... an endlessly-reiterated
fool’d of cloth of gilt. Yet this magnetic sliver-

mystery – parable-density of clamped-on
unknown (Private Ewe?) – begins to drone
from primordial Cahokia-lump... & rise (halo-
zone)... mossy spacegerm-collage in river-cavern

(over-&-underwoven). & as the gate of dreams
is a reality-porthole... so this granary-grail of
loafy clamurmuring might lift the whole whorled
rose window into place (sighing up berm-streams).

3.11.12

Lanthanum 9.24

24
Lift up your heads, O ye gates;
and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors

Providence, ye forest of whispering hands.
Compassionate mutter-potter generations’
unknown grey purring multitudinous dove-
downy town (integrity of heartfelt hopelands).

At the eastern cliffside, under an arch
of Westerly granite, eyeing the interior,
facing the labyrinth... RW. Our double-
you, double-ewe. Cézanne might touch

yon roughened fatherly profile with horsehair
warmth of color, bare outcrop of vivid green;
who glimpsed a hopeful artichoke-yet-unseen.
Those who’d impose belief by force have never

known my companionable Lord... in the end
their faith’s in tyranny itself (lost to a God
of shepherds & of lambs). Thy rod, & thy
staff, they comfort me (not destroy : defend)

affectionate friend. & as chloride + sodium
blend into salt of earth – as +&- interfuse &
waltz in each golden atom – as those pillars
(Jachin, Boaz) stand (portals of Jerusalem,

brothers) so th’twin tablets of your Coke-in-
still’d Law unite (at ladder-foot of universal
scale). Nature’s donated golden rule of civil
commonweal (simply : fair, kind & true) folk

(Turk, Greek & Jew) can follow, understand;
& if they climb yet further, might take hold
of that steel cruciflex-anchor (as he foretold) –
bells’ pain-carved gate. Heights’ helping hand.

3.6.12

Lanthanum 9.23

23

In a cabin cradled by snow & tamaracks, sore-
troubled Blackstone communed with his heart
in the night. Traced a fine curve eastward
(grey grainy graphite) from l’étoile du nord

into faint pale green-violet pre-dawn light
(opalescent, sweet). Unknown path, ellipse
of surf-steps... aslant a black inscrutable sea.
Out of blind fogs, a lens-canoe – its bowsprit

like a fiddlehead – frond of solemn fern-barge
in procession (distant funeral, in Colchis).
Suddenly WB beheld (swaddled in azure mist
over womb-dream) a limpid silhouette emerge.

Prisoner, exile – tongueless, handless. Dragged
through penumbral valley toward his doom.
Yet stood there (pregnant salt) so calm!
His frame a phosphorus glee-beam – ragged,

magnificent – thus this penetrating spirit
(meek monk Maximus) rose (knot-bound)
into Blackstone’s sea-scoured horizon – found!
Almond nuptial memoir-ring (moss-green circlet

of rust) hidden in neglected dovecote pockets,
old wild graybeard shepherds’ folds. Still water-
droplets, radiating through irenic granaries
(remote, deep wells). Sheepish prophets

rest secure there, in forested chorale-corral –
bathed in unfathomable réunionyes, who cherishes
frail rightness of each lambkin... O magnanimous
acknowledgment – Joy-Cognizance – O playpen Pal!

3.3.12

Lanthanum 9.22

22

This choleric scholar sticks unto bridgework
of our Commonweal like wax, like gum
the caustic bulls of Boston grumble – loony-
bin’s too goo for ‘um (Blackstone)! some smirk.

All surround me, stare... riding my sweatball
out of town. Salt cleaving to my mouth...
my hapless boneyard, shockloss (gone south,
m’darlin’). Only green lantern of yon soul

am left alone (concertina’d quail – colluding
in concrete St. Paul?). Believe we must leave
the killing out, when all is done, croaks Steve
th’admirable stevedore (prologue for broody-

turtledove’s 6-flagon’d falcon-eye). Moonshine
his horse’s name : who left the dell of a blow-
stump squeal imprinted in Medea-snow
(Medusa-cur). Mingled labdanum w’fine

snift of myrrh, to enhaunt her nautical J-
chamois (dune-croon’d, fiddling coxcomb
runnymedever with gilt guile-odium... some
fie-mint, pap-crush’t, papoose marais-

enfant). His candle was mortal. Lightweight.
Seedy, clearly (not long for this rude road,
by Joad). So Blackstone, Wm. & Wms. (beaded
Thisbe twins, eaglets) fled : felt through the salty

law (égalité) : unto the end. As did the Psalmist
(poor Jay Burrytroy) whose pastel mural-church
(in lambent milieu of Romania) rinses from ash
of books – Bukovina. & Mendelssohn. A misty
*
glissando... lissomeek sheepswhorlsack’s unshorn
Seekonk-continuum (goldbread dark almond oui).
Where ewe-kids frolics Yvonne’s fado fodder-sky
& (eva-hopeful) wonders... so’rs o’ star is bairn’d.

3.2.12

Lanthanum 9.21

21

Gleam on, great halo’d moon (in Hobo’s dream).
Gneiss angle, mica (garnet promotions). Horn
the dark red wine (trombone, Louis). Borne
‘pon multidirectional nuptial smile – eld step-dame,

waning (winsome smith). Beached over leeward
delta, sauntering... planted Pocahontas-canoe.
Parallactic pair of parlous turtles – whose
fin-smooch welds one plummet-sword

octet (Ravlin bluejay... midsummer halcyon).
& that face in N’Orleans moon leans north-
ward, upstream... toward frail martyr-mirth
of’n odd country longbeard (even Henryman).

O wheeling west now, Virginia... ben-Lenten
cruiser. Poor shepherd’s irritable strain
sheer Oz cruxifinnicky-fiction, in th’rain
(as live ammo wells up... tears foundation).

Hobo-pantomime... torch-limb yearning
toward miniature myrrhbox, at censer
of an ear. Where four horses canter
sof-sof boomerangs (purr-purring

char-choir). Hobo files alley frankincense
in portable mirror (Madeleine’s) – saves
daylight goop like bit o’honey (waves
a-tumble, bumblebee). Hence,

knave. Seine once more into sown
bran-grain, cast-along river-ice (grand
brain). Slow, slow, lazy Russian. Spend,
expend your dream, Oblomov (glass-blown).

3.1.12

Lanthanum 9.20

20

So Hobo slips back into sleep, as of old –
where he’s at home (in midst of the earth).
Axes & hammers have ceased their wrath
against wooden parentheses... now hold

only one limpid terrace’s clear air. Morning’s
milky smoke lay bridled there, in its oaktree
tabernacle; the habitations of cruelty
slept like Rome; the turtledove’s moaning

sheltered thy servant’s quivery leaf-shield
(enfolded, plunging salience... lips’ lyre-
lair... foam-shell). At cusp of the year,
when John-John leapt in the wheatfield

of his trove-tomb : at the Jubilee (that
Sabbath-crown – that end-of-Mayan, 52-
pickup, jade-coral hoop-game). O I.O.U.
of every wombat womb-man... O magnet

fiat, implicate – each etched, emboldened
van der Weyden infant, limned – frescoed
afresh, today! Beneath a concrete cloud
of solid dark, the bubble-level (liquid

pearl) suspends its calm, magnanimous balance;
between that sunray in the portal-eye
& crypt of Minnehaha-Paradise (ebony-
spanned ivory 88s) there is a river-entrance...

you’ve been there, Hobo; you swam
with the 28 young braves, under the sun;
the 29th (like overhanging lichen), doubling...
finished (the day). She loved; you are, I am.

2.29.12

Lanthanum 9.19

19

In shady Galilee of a burnt-out Lent
& far from his Mississippi home, Hobo
catches, barely... the slender tremor (low
coign) of his repentance. His recovery tent.

Only an inkling... slight tendering of air.
Through shuddering snakeskin screen –
scaled pattern of dogwood leaves (green
gone rusty). A nest, a tabernacle... lair

of late winter sun. Whose coming-forth
as bridegroom, racing hearth to hearth
is cherished there, in her byre of earth...
in sunset-land (east, west, south, north).

At the antipodes (remotest heights & depth).
And it was like hearing a keen through a pillar
of glass – an orphan cry, looped in a mirror
swerving, like a wing, out to its azimuth

(a still grey glint). Then steep descending
streak through grassland (flashing silver-
gold) plummets into river’s undertow
where (on a bank) his pals are gathering

& smoke (for their wispy signals, lifting,
gone). Our W, he blabs to someone...
JB, J-tree... she plants a wild, sown
key in me, he moans. Soon, son. Swiftly,

arose. Toward yon high room, & the great
Thanksgiving feast – calling all lumberjacks,
winos, sadsacks from Hackensack... Maximus
& Walt shall shofar tout; Madeleine to celebrate.

2.28.12

Lanthanum 9.18

18

Within moist mollusc-husk of February pre-spring
on Prospect St. (outside the French House)
the little witch-hazel behind the wall lets loose
improvisations of gold leaf – her pliant blazoning

pent by chill wind. Early diviner, bent like Hobo
just tipping the keys (in Mendelssohn, maybe).
Leafpile mandorlas of wide gold laid siege to Heidi
there – blonde matrix & epitome (little sorrow-

tree, foretold). Tends thus his balance-beam,
Hobo, upon his shoulder... retrograde flame’s
importunate command, transposing that skim’s
taut-plaited graft. Hurt knight’s lamb-dream

across straitened chafening tightrope (aimless,
airborne). So the arc of arcs curves back
to the crackling hearth of Blackstone’s
own Quauhnahuac (yon implicate rubellipse,

myrrhrose). Limns the sunburst labyrinth
of Chartres, where Hobo inches (inch by inch...),
obswerves the hilarious limp of her firstborn. Cinch,
Blaise. The light’s manifest (emerald absinthe,

Vincent). & all this nonsense for a pin-
pricked star! Scythia-gold (Sheba-forsythia)
above mown grass; a handful of corn will flow
in brooks from the mountaintops (amen, Martin).

Blessed be his redemption-name. Because Love
is unstanchable fire’s (whirl-fabricladding, star-
enflashioning, volcán-swaheeling) sheer choir
y’Hawaii. Moltenscarred heart (hearth-stove).

2.25.12

Lanthanum 9.17

17

Just now, the quiet churchbell plumbed b-flat
across the street. Ash Wednesday evening,
mild as April; watercolor air; soft brooding
drone. Yet thoughts turn round, like Lot

back to that January bridge – the frozen salt
of ice-trapped years (yours, Henry-man) –
the drift-down, say, of one white hexagon
into your palm (taut fiery snow-mote)

...before you go. Into that Resurrection
Cemetery, south of St. Paul... your narrow-
leaf slate silo, camper; your flinty sled, below
Siberian snow-surf (32,000 flakes, fraction

rings of permafrost stenographers). You are
just that far gone, eld Irishman. & yet
your lines declineth too, toward pleasant
faces... I mean the twin cities of Natasha’s

eyes : those agate portals, fusing labyrinth
of threadbare lips – faring with you (by harp
& psaltery) – hoisting you from earthdepth
once again! In limpid eyespan (Arimathea)...

Her tiny snowgrain, set like fire in hearth
a lemon-crumb, a-tingle on your tongue
framed by a train-horn’s rusty iron lung
worn silver now, gone resonant... inclineth

thine ear now, little ant, to green proverb
lifting its brow like tendril of a rainbow-
wing – skyward, through rain & snow
climbing, ellipse (unleavened herb).

2.22.12

Lanthanum 9.16

16

Mardi Gras. Ash Wednesday eve. & if
I sketch RW (or double-U) striding there
through Westerly portal, the whiz-whisper
trumpet of pursed lips his gift

for all – O happy equilibrium of
semaphore-claw, high pining air (all-
human hills). Soon my shifty scribble
shimmers in bleak graphite mote-gleam

(Venus Beats All, lead #2) – takes on
manners of ‘nother (eyebright) hand;
hurrosgamos gathers momentum (land-
ho!) – I seize a ladder up to heaven –

footfall-pyramid of Hobo, Blackstone,
Maximus (hard to explain!). A leopard-
spiral toward universal ensign-standard...
clear coral triangle, minuscule madeleine

of speechcrumb qubitspark – circumzenter
navvy-worm (blue SF-sphere above gate-
prong). & for such hymn she make date
crow last, & verily (her spanner-cantor).

Only a dram of octave-dream, from La-
Soo land up to l'Etoile du Nord. By way
of a crust of snow-crunched pain – eye-
burnt Magdalen, sharp Siena-saint (aha-

delight!) who ran all the way (make haste,
my God!) through the leaden garden gate...
toward you. Maximus designed his ancient
intricate epithalamium (beyond those wasted

poppy-fields) in the moonlit night seasons
of stony Trebizond. Blackstone listened...
squandered coaldust turned to diamond.
Ask JB (Cora Clay... her flotations).

2.21.12

Lanthanum 9.15

15
i.m. M.A.G.

Sunset, walking home up Hope tonight –
a kind of smelter’s glow out of Van Gogh.
A glassblown alloy spun round that rose-
gold eye – sapphire, emerald, set in a tight

brown casket (earthshade). Evening mirror
from a brow just north of Angell Street.
Slim susurrus over the mansion (Italianate,
clad in dark wine) where oak leaves linger –

& you would pine for your conjectured J (vale,
valentine). Imago... my Psyche. So we project
an extended forecast, in familial yokel dialect –
just as you were your brother’s summer double

in that Twin Cities’ dovecote (over the wrinkling
winking river). A part of song (appoggiatura,
grace note) paired with his major delta D –
sprightly, bittersweet, solitaire (a twinkling

clarinet, Octavia). We carry the gilt icon
too close for care : such compatible leanings
as dreams are multicolored coatings, filling
hollers with excess 8th-notes (Pygmalion’s

pig-latin). Hunky dory was the children’s ark
until the last dog bark – a curial star, a rose
of Charon. Then we mourn our double (her ruse
our loss). Under that April horn a’plenty (mark

the date, Sylvester) – by tentative frail tents
of Providence, yearlings of clay. Our moon,
cast in an antique shell (death-mask... pontoon...
fish-fly). Granddad’s bronze bugle. Frankincense.

2.14.12

Lanthanum 9.14

14
i.m. John H. ("Jack") Birss

After much falsework – skittering expenses
in a waste of swaying bucks – Marwan (cinnamon
cat with greenfire eyes) will arch his tendons
through the cunning rug. All’s in play (fearless)

at last. While Diego hunches up the cloudy steps
with shifting temblor on his back – an al fresco
infancy. Fat babies, mild-eyed povero...
Guadalupe-sombrero... so homeliest precepts

prove most beautiful (what’s mine is yours).
But not from nowhere, their swift circular –
great was the public company self-anchored
there, on hinge pipe beam, deadmen, girders

2047 feet from shore to shore (saddled
with sacrificial sections of weakened steel).
It was 28 young braves, lifting centripetal
lightbeams – a pendant, bending self-addled

streams toward soldered reunion (unseen
yet feathered silver, with a yellow crown).
& a 29th bather in ark of oak – unknown
& apostolic turtledove’s ecumenical grain –

her sea-salt shanty’s banked in a riverbed.
Come with me then, down to the water’s edge
where shells glissade from willow-branches
& drafty lyres are granaries (seven-tiered

with light). Where fathers yodel in Mendelssohn
& a 5th of Sibelius, in stately waltz, swings low
her catenary iron ribs. Where birchbark rows
into aurora borealis... (harp-wrung Magdalen).

2.7.12

Essays in Critical Flame

New review essay floats Ben Mazer and John Beer on the sea of Ashbery and TS Eliot :
Jerusalem & Albion; or, Maze & Barleycorn

This is the 2nd essay of mine there. Also wrote one about Gabriel Gudding a while back :
Reading Gabriel Gudding

The epic drive

Knowledge, taken in the abstract - say, by the vulnerable ephebe just starting out in college - displays a frightening visage : abyssal, disorienting, nightmarish. Knowledge, in its authorized, authoritative forms, is demanding (all those martinet-professors, those requirements, those deadlines & examinations), impersonal... fundamentally inscrutable. Say our tenderfoot student is curious about History. The question is, where to begin? If all "facts"are equal... & if the historians, each with their particular perspective and expertise, number in the thousands upon thousands... Indeed, there is a specific demon of angst which persecutes the undergraduate - whose malicious intent is to induce a painful, extremely self-conscious (to the point of paranoia) sense of being lost . What do I know, in the midst of all this formidable universe of chilly and alienated learning? How can I know anything? How can I trust my own feeble capacity to find meaning, to understand?

It is just here (as has often been pointed out) that the arts attempt a rescue mission. Art is synthesis, not analysis; its aim is not to detach elements of experience by means of abstraction in order to re-align them into codes of information, hierarchies of data. Art does not truck with the supposed "objectivity" of formalized knowledge; rather, Art produces holistic representations of experience - images which we need not learn, because we already recognize them. We do not "acquire" these representations - we immediately identify with them. And in these identifications our inward sense of personal understanding is encouraged, fortified, strengthened, and above all, expanded. (Perhaps the paradigmatic expression of this commonality of experience is John Donne's famous passage from Meditation 17 : "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.")

Is this the happy end of story, then? Art comes to the rescue, trouncing adolescent despair? Well, yes, perhaps. But for the artist the picture may be more complex. How, say, in poetry, are these holistic representations - these charmed and charming narratives, capable of evoking sympathetic understanding and identification - to be successfully created? The endless debates within the various guilds of poets over issues of subjectivity/objectivity, personality/impersonality, individuality/commonality, point toward unresolved difficulties, internal contradictions. How does the poet achieve a balance between self-indulgent, anecdotal subjectivity on the one hand, and a bloodless, abstract objectivity on the other? How few are the poems which succeed in integrating these polarities - in presenting "concrete universals": those characteristic particulars which are nevertheless capable of global relevance.

Works of the past called "great" are just these poems which have achieved a kind of wholeness and universality. The Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare... these are some of the familiar benchmarks - narratives which fuse representative, characteristic individuals, with a shared history - Pound's "tale of the tribe" - the many and the one.

We could call this the "epic" drive in poetry : the struggle to present multiplicity in the form of holistic order. Northrop Frye described this totalizing impulse as the defining characteristic of the epic mode. The works which achieve such encyclopedic synthesis become foundational texts, paradigmatic narratives of peoples and cultures. They construct a kind of aegis or rooftop of mutual understanding - or, to use another image, a sort of network of vital pathways, which encourage individuals to emerge from isolation into the ethos of a shared tradition.

The path toward such epic achievements involves the most intense struggle : because no imagery of wholeness will be accepted as authentic unless it has been earned. It would be impossible for an audience to assent to epic pretensions, if the work itself did not display an indwelling awareness, a comprehension, of actual, lived experience in its heights and depths. The achievement of an epic narrative is thus a kind of celebratory moment - when individual artistic making is matched with the real existence of the whole society.

- to be continued, maybe... -

Lanthanum 9.13

13
for Chris Kraemer

That bridge in your old photo, Chris (beehive
of hexagonal girders, poised in a mirror-
agon of contrastive weight – taut Piranesi-
pattern)... a quick sliver of dove-

wings flits through those ribs. Flotsam
of memory asway below, sheathed
in snakeskin of crusted limestone (teeth,
bone, shells)... only the river seethes, I Am

& only Time will bind these liquidaceous scars
in one eddying canyon-volume : synthesis
or wave-continuum : the hand-or-eye’s
own natural rest note (a fulcrum-focus).

At Prospect Terrace, the statue of young Roger
steps a stilled foot into the bow of his canoe.
Silence marks his brow there too, at prow
of Providence (lips close upon their origin).

What might ye behold there, by glinting granite
glance – through whisper-facets of the river?
On rungs of welded iron, raindrops shiver
in jointed deltoids, whose spinal height

arcs up to Union (forged from a million
bolts of eyebright)... reaches their hands
(mirrored, multiplex) into those wounds
(ineluctable, irreducible – your own). &

shadows of a Piranesi-body (dove-borne,
Pentecostal) rise from the rails of
sunken Soo Line (sun-thorn, whale-
horn)... eyelash of Beatrice-Magdalen.

1.24.12

HG Books in pdf. format

Here's a new way to find a lot of my poetry - free pdf. versions, linked at the Brown University Library catalog. (On each page, just go to "click on the following"....)

Chapel Hill
Dove Street
Forth of July
In RI
Island Road
Lanthanum
Rest Note
Stubborn Grew
Way Stations
The Well Is Always There

Lanthanum 9.12

12
for Karen Donovan (who noticed them)

Here’s a photo – a flock of ducks in the river
swathed in steam-shimmer, lithe silver & gold.
The day itself was overcast, crepuscular; an old
sepia print of Providence (unknown engraver).

Those ducks for certain make a joyful noise
though for us it’s only a tacit Jubilee. &
snow was just a sketch, a promissory
morning sprinkle : 7 wavy scimitars

of moon-flakes, traipsing their descent
to elemental winter ground. It was a sign
for manna from the summer sun – the Son
of Man (intuitive angel of untold ascent,

centripetal within each ice-bound tear)
flutes in the market as predicted – yet
that handish cloud overhead is implicate
with wing-tip folds; yon leafy paramour

Jessie O’Balm’s forming up up there
a demonstration (maybe very gentle rain
later today). Sleep on it, Berryman; let
splay of almond palm undo the nightmare

(this is my prayer). You had an answer in
your own, when rondure of an unkempt heart
spun back upon her yearning path (O startling
Ind). The sprite who knelt beside you there

came dropping slow (like Chesley by shoreline,
shielding struts with ingrained, unaccountable
care). Benign, compounded with the fallible...
infallible & secret element (a sign, cosine).

1.17.12

Lanthanum 9.11

11
for Allen Grossman

Once, on a planet where earth & sky are partners
(emerald & sapphire) emerged an unknown pharaoh
cleft in a dreary mountain... quiet shadow
swimming into sun. He was met with sneers

row upon row, with hosts of angry errors. Then
he began to sing : sweetly mortal, this one,
humble & low as a dusty pigeon : crossgrain
against the chilly currency of that thieve’s den

(for lo, it was a land of bilk & money).
Against Memphis silt his melody set sail
upstream – steel compass shepherding a frail
canoe, whose prow & wake bear one bright V

toward heartfelt matrix (ruby, diamond).
His chant was not unheard-of in that land,
not strange : just passionate echo of grand-
ma’s hymn, & preacher’s reprimand :

a sense of rightness, stubbornly evoked
(tempered to the time at hand). His weapons
two arms crossed upon his breast – someone’s
stern angel, binding warmongers (Wovoka-

avatar). Just shadow of a gray shadow,
or slip of pebbles in a tidal wash : inkling
of forgotten plenitude, laughter’s foundling.
Lost land where river shallows press the bow

toward shore... among warbling lips of
silenced wings – that rosy treasure
chest, where blue & green, & black &
white, I & Thou, & earth & sky are one.

1.16.12

poem published in Providence Journal on 1.13.12

I started reading Tomas Tranströmer's poetry after he won the Nobel Prize - & liked it a lot. The Providence paper printed a slightly garbled version of it on the op-ed page yesterday. Here's the corrected version :

STARS IN THE EARTH

homage to Tomas Tranströmer

The quiet Swede goes for an evening walk.
It’s growing dark already, cold.
Far off, a silent bivouac of trees, asleep
beneath snow-blankets. The gray sea, whimpering.

Overhead, tiny train-lights of stars
skim past the dark station, toward unmapped regions.
His feet slush through old shelves of ice. He feels
the planet sleepwalk – muttering, dreaming, sailing on.

On a gray-green brow, a lonely farm opens one eye.
A star has made its nest on earth. And now
more lights... a constellation swims into the forest.
He’ll christen it “the Hearth” when he gets home.

Lanthanum 9.10

10

The earth, a flaking Roman ampitheatre,
doddering old ham... waiting (by that river
in Vienne) to cradle One who comes, deliver
Him - Emanu-el, the One-with-us (now, here) –

while amid Mayan ruins of Piedras Negras
students pencilling their scribble-diaries
mimic the very pliant sediment they prize
from plaza, limestone crypt, acropolis –

intent on disinterment : one petrified root
of the Archaic One. That buried king, or
child – lurker in the villages, oppressed
oppressor – fatherless, beneath the boot

of evil-doing thugs. Tacit one, who waits &
waits there, in the dump... that groundsman-
gardener (asleep or dead) upon whom Magdalen
trains her indomitable emerald eye (understand

what Iris lurks beneath such blurred-out Violet).
O mudpie innocents, ephebe-gravediggers, I
would join you in your soggy trenches – misery
of the world is quenched in labor so inviolate –

& in the spousal sarabande of Mayan time
inch toward an ur-outcrop of waterfalls :
grave yet lightweight pumice-composite (all’s
figures, Horatio) streaked with lanthanum-

streams of limestone. Where a bass-chorus
swims in droning schools : a fluent solidarity
of Wills (Roger, Blackstone)... & nostra pace
e’en la sua voluntade. IN RI, chanted... for us.

1.10.12

Lanthanum 9.9

9

It was the faintest whisper of the lightest breeze
you felt not heard, the most ineffable lightness
breathing across the river’s curve, at night;
near St. Louis, under the wingèd shroud of trees.

Stillness; quiet; only a creak of cottonwoods
as the bow slips downstream. & you lie back
along ribs & spine... & trace another track
remote, milky (buffalo, or thunderbirds).

A pair of spare steel calipers lean into sky.
A lightweight tripod, anchored from above,
almost; made of open air, its alcove
seems to shepherd weightlessness (a mile-

high smile). You lean against the gunwale,
press your ear into Karelian birch; the veins
thread tiny rivers, seamless as woven spans
of Inca stone; you enter the black-hole tunnel.

& it is so arranged, we never leave
the tender circle of those tight-swathed hills
A light wind-vortex lifts her glittering vessel
(diamond now) on a sigh of joy (heave-

ho!) – a choir of humming fingertips
in unison (their pregnant sails seamless as
woven Incan shroud). Hiawatha-longhouse
of loving fellowship – red-willow slips

of smoke & singing ghosts... the pure air
of diamond-heart, at center of the six
directions. All bound in Magdalen’s hex-
agon : reunion or reconnaissance (ours

be her beatific ninefold choir).

1.9.12

Lanthanum 9.8

8

Low sun, gold-creamery December light
mark the end of another year on earth.
& what is Man? Mindful? His worth
a little under-angelic (more than ant,

anyway) – tendered (legally) amid the regal
eggshell of an Humpty-Dumpty sin. Remind him,
homunculus, his microcosmic status – sign him
up for the Y & wherefore – before the urnful

vigil & last rites, so he may right his wrongs
beneath a shared seesaw (yon looming doomy
tombtree). He aim a little whorl – whee-zoomy
Higgs bos’un. Particle of puny-verse (songs

have sung thus before, friends) whose dignity
is but a tear in her em-passionate upwelling eye
– one diamond octahedron adamantine guy’s high-
wired disCERNement (solomonseal pipmass) she

will lift (with Rog-whim) through the double hoop
of Eviemine Allpebbles. The rose of her hopeful
encompassment d’étoiled a sundance inside steel
of risen dust on every side – chicken-coop

or Henry-O-meter of the last buried man slept
off cottonblood (Sioux peacepup-kaleidoscope)
to lift prong against grain, & shape
flow of paradisal waterfalls (promise kept

in limestone palimpsest). Scratched with rod
of iron through rain of epluribus omnitears,
blab of tout-monde baobab (all ears) –
shaggy Maggie Sophia (minitransmogriffin-eyed)

at the limpid garden gate. It was in her mind
to finally do & say it, after seeing him dead-or-
alive to the very end of the pier, & the year –
& so she did, like piñata or katydid. Near 28 Pine.

12.30.11

Friday Thoughts on What the Heck

For poets & readers raised on modern-postmodernism, the sovereign autonomy of art is a foundational tenet. So I would hardly be surprised if some people viewed my poetry, & my :"theoretical" writings, with suspicion : a dangerous mix of incommensurate categories, a sloshing-together of art & religion, a shackling of free imagination with dogmas of theology...

This might have something to do with the somewhat narrow, squinched contemporary sense of what a poet is, & what is a poet's proper social role. For us, today, it seems to be either/or : either one is a detached, thumbs-twiddling artiste, exuding free & playful & harmless arty baubles : or one is engaged - convinced, angry & convicted about the crisis du jour, the world situation - full of passionate intensity, ready to man the ramparts on behalf of a slogan greater than ourselves.

What's lacking for the moment, perhaps, is a confidence (across culture at large) in effective speech as a form of social action. By effective here I don't mean solely political, but rather meaningful discourse in a more general sense (social, cultural). The fact is we live in an unprecedented Babel-explosion of varying, contradictory & rivalous tweets & chirpings (including those philosophical trends which deny any purposive connection between language, meaning, & action whatsoever). So the idea of a poet, and poetry, actually contributing something of substance to more general public discourse - in poetry - seems to have grown steadily more absurd and impossible, since those (19th-cent.) days when Matthew Arnold began to voice qualms about the situation. We are far gone from the Victorian Poet-Orator.

Again, I'm not referring to the engaged poet - the populist - the voice of the streets. This kind of poetry is enjoying a great resurgence, actually : from the Occupy encampments to Kremlin Square to Tahrir Square, the rapping-tweeting poet-singer is the heroine & hero of the day. And it is certainly "effective speech", and to be admired & praised. But what I'm thinking of is a form of discourse perhaps quieter, simpler and more basic : the kind of philosophical or theological musing/reasoning which is world-shaping : foundational in terms of humankind's most basic worldview and orientation with regard to life's meaning & purposes. I mean the visionary storytelling represented by Biblical prophets, the Psalmist, Homer, Dante, Blake... many others. For example, Hesiod and the pre-Socratics shared an interest in enunciating "first and last things" : theogonies of origin, ultimate verbal formulae. This is a very ancient and primary social role taken on by poet and philosopher alike.

I wouldn't try to pole-vault myself up among that exalted company of visionary propounders. But what I can say is that I'm drawn to a sketchy outline of this mode of poetry, this concept of a poet's social role. I look to the special faculties and resources and potentialities within the specific craft and modes of poetic making - its rhythmic/harmonic/conceptual/referential density - as powers which create the conditions for adequate verbal equivalents for the real and possible nature of things : an adequate or accurate model or mirror of the way things might be...

And just how might such things be? Let's say that poetry might be culturally - humanly - foundational if - and this is a big if! - if reality as a whole is ultimately founded and grounded in ecstasy, wonder and joy. In the joy of creation.

I think it was Aristotle who described God, the Prime Mover, as "the thought that thinks itself." It occurred to me today that this might also describe one of the avenues for reflection on the structure of human being, human nature. That is, perhaps we can imagine human nature as essentially reflective - as the consciousness which considers its origin. Today I have the sense that this is one way to describe - to body forth, characterize, depict - our human situation with respect to consciousness per se. The dominion of human thought and action on the planet earth (imperfect, still wrongful & destructive, not yet hopeless) is a miniature analogue, a proportionate ratio, to the everliving Consciousness existing in creative dominion over the universe, reality, as a whole. When one recognizes this Consciousness as infinite love and goodness & joy, one begins to grasp the import and purpose of the message of Jesus, his "good news". When Jesus says he offers the keys to "eternal life" he means exactly that joyful recognition of an undying creative Being which suffuses the entire cosmos. This "eternal life" is the real Holy Grail : the source of spiritual fortitude, hope and joy in the face of every earthly sorrow and pain.

So if in my poetry I attempt to stand with Blake & Hopkins & Dante in sketching out (singing) a version of this most basic ontological concept of reality - of its meaning & purpose - of first & last things - well, this is the rational confidence underlying my little craft. (See, in this regard, contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga on the "normative" quality of belief in God. According to Plantinga, faith in God cannot be proven - but it doesn't need to be, in order to be accepted as rational. One can legitimately believe something to be true, without proof, as long as it has not been proven to be false : just as I believe I am going to leave work for home soon, although there's no way to prove that to be true.)

& my faith in the joyful-creative substance of things has consequences for society. If we are all children of God, then we ought to love our neighbor as ourselves. Ask Black Elk about this.

(p.s. just so you know : I don't believe it's Friday yet. I'm pretty sure it's Thursday.)

p.p.s. But I also hold that poetry is good in itself, whether it poses problems or asks questions or provides answers or simply delights & entertains. Poetry has its own proper glow. Yet also I'm saying it's that glow which allows it to carry these other burdens too.

Thought for the day

It seems to me that a basic dimension of religious faith is entirely personal and individual. It has to do with the psyche and personality, and with one's own individual stance toward spiritual things : with what you and I actually do : how we think, how we act, how we proceed. Our personal way in life.

Thus there are severe limits on what can meaningfully be said about faith and religion in a general way : abstractions, theoretical constructs, ideology, criticism, scholarship, journalism, public debates and polemics, & so on. Faith always involves a personal dimension : an individual orientation & practice (with others) - a private history of repentance, let's say - which is resistant to theoretical abstractions & descriptive conveniences.

This situation makes me think of the contrarian, paradoxical quality (or non-statements) connected with Zen Buddhism (not that I know anything, really, about Zen Buddhism). Or the warnings, in the Gospels, about prayer & fasting. I'm thinking of Jesus' comments about the "tower of Siloam" incident. A big tower falls, killing a lot of innocent bystanders. Jesus says, "unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." The warning is to urge us to be wakeful, to "gird up our loins", to be aware, to be prepared & ready. (The parable of the "wise & foolish virgins" is similar.) Jesus also repeatedly warns against hypocrisy, against substituting empty words for actual commitment. "Beware the leaven of the Pharisees" : ie. avoid the temptations offered by seductive theories or fashionable paraphrases of the actual ethical content of your faith. This is a "leaven" (a fatty substitute) you do not actually need to add to the unleavened bread of heaven.

An early passage in Stubborn Grew :

21

It was only a moment coming round.
Bowled over, on the Terrace.
And then she got mad, got gone–
and he eloped with his pen–

witch! Falcon Ace!–
of which he was deeply fond.
Some said he drowned.
Someone–a siren cantatrice–

mare of the night, see–
might rob his rich rhyme
of all reason. . . sometime.
What will be, will be.

Repentance is all.

Advent Message

I don't have the strength to blog like I used to. I'm working out every morning, doing jumping jacks & so on, to try & get my mojo back. Jump along with me, dear reader.

The year is drawing to a close, Christmas is coming, Advent is here... am sketching out a few stray memories of the poetry & Lanthanum-writing experience in 2011... what it all means...

One high point was reading (re-reading?) Gemstone of Paradise, by G.R. Murphy. This is a remarkable book. The author explores Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval romance, Parzival, & attempts to discover why Wolfram, unlike other narrators, insisted on describing the Holy Grail as a "stone". The inquiry leads deep into Wolfram's humane & spiritual vision - a very ecumenical vision, which presents the grail as emanating from the stone Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus was buried, as transmuted into the elegant, & portable, stone eucharistic altars - miniature holy sepulchres - inlaid with precious stones and carved with designs representing the 4 rivers of Paradise, etc. Wolfram's eucharistic version of the grail represented the universality, the "portability", of the Holy Spirit & divine Love - which breaks down barriers, draws enemies back into familial harmony (we are all children of God). In Parzival, grail-searchers, Crusaders, Muslim "infidels", all participate in a comedy of errors & mistaken identity, as they discover themselves, in the end, to be brothers (actual blood relations).

Of course, most of the books I read are things I stumble upon in my search for grounds & inspiration for this ornery poem (Lanthanum), which I've been struggling with for some years now. A poem is also a kind of symbolic object, hopefully harmonic (a sort of music box). & we write in the shadow of history & memory. Part of the long argument (sometimes explicit, mostly implicit, I guess) in this & other poems of mine involves a kind of response to other poets who "included history" in various ways - Pound, Crane, Eliot... History for me has this theological or spiritual dimension : there is this (dove-shaped) shadow of the presence of Jesus... the strange light of the empty sepulchre... light through stone... the testimony of other minds - centrally, for me, the elusive (partially-erased?) Mary Magdalen... (it is her primary witness, of Christ as a living gardener, standing by the tomb, I'm thinking about)...

It's all a faintly absurd hobbyhorse, I'm sure, to the sceptical - but we can only bear witness to what we've experienced, & let people scratch where they may itch. I've been lifted out of my own tomb more than once - & that memory is, for me, like an immovable Rock.

So this was one high point this year. But I find I'm proving inadequate to the task of relating what's happened, happens. Writing a poem is partly a matter of waiting for the impulse, the hunch, the intuition - & it's also partly a construction project. What I feel I've been experiencing somewhat this year is a kind of correlation or harmonization of different symbols or aspects of reality. Happens to the craziest & sanest amongst us! What I'm talking about is a kind of overlay or fitting-together of disparate symbolic elements. For example : this concept of the paradisal grail-sepulchre, and the spiritual "gate" represented by the Gateway Arch monument in St. Louis (built just across the river from the primordial "grave-mound" of Cahokia). This notion of an object full of spiritual "mana" & power, a matrix, a center, and the idea of a mandala. The puns uniting mandala, mandorla, Mandelstam, "almond branch". The mandala & the rose windows of cathedrals, like the one in Chartres (sponsored by & built during the reign of St. Louis). The atomic abbreviation for the element lanthanum - and the abbreviation for the state of Louisiana (La). An obscure "painted church" located in the woodlands of Romania, near Bukovina (birthplace of Mandelstam-translator & kindred spirit, Paul Celan) - with a fresco of a "Tree of Jesse" (say, an almond) in which the branches are ornamented with an ecumenical collection of poets, prophets, saints, apostles, philosophers...

I'm rambling a bit now, but I want to combine these references with something architectural.... a humane architectonic, as in the theory of the Russian Acmeists (Akme... Kamen (stone)). A sort of poetics of analogies or equivalences... by way of which mankind & the cosmos - nature, reality, universe - are brought into a vital harmony. A vision of proportion : logos, ratio : through which we begin to sense & recognize, & participate in, the primal joy of universal Creation. What is this primal proportion? The kinship - the familial bond - of God & Person (God's imago). "We are all God's children" runs the timeworn phrase - familiar, yet true. This is the invisible crystalline framework of the spiritual Power of Love itself. Love is this loving relation, by which we have all been touched throughout our lives, whether we notice it or not : & the "good news" is that this love of which we have had an inkling & a brief taste, has its cosmic & universal & metaphysical & vital ground in reality itself - the whole reality, the cosmic One. This is why Wolfram calls the woman who "keeps" the Grail by the name of Repanse de Joie, or "overflowing joy" - this cosmic creative ecstasy of eternal Beginning & Being, the cup of which we have all had a little sip, a premonition.

So in the poem Lanthanum I've also wanted to ground everything in what's personal & real to me, my own place, my own memories, my own country.... & thinking of the unaccountable dream I had of the Gateway Arch monument - I began imagining it in a kind of "figure & ground" reversal. In other words, I had the odd dream of the Arch, which began to filter into the poem, as figure on a ground; but then I began to sense the Arch-symbol as a kind of matrix, or magnet, or center of a mandala or force-field, exerting a sort of metamorphosis on the surrounding "land" which it celebrated - so that, in other words, the actual Arch began to generate notions of a "dream America" : a future land, a regenerated & healed nation...

When you start taking on such vast challenges in a poem, you inevitably come up against your incapacities. To even think of a possible "spirit of America" nowadays : it sounds hopeless! But maybe it's not. & this brings me to the most recent of this year's spadework/explorations. For me, any "re-encounter" with America brings to mind the original settlers - the Native Americans, the Indians. As I mused away at the poem, I imagined sloughing off my own 'Euro" origins... coming into a relation with those others who were here first, & all the terrible & wild history of that encounter. I had always thought of the poem Lanthanum, & of the Gateway Arch, as a sort of synthesis-project of New World & Old, of Hart Crane & TS Eliot, of contemporary & medieval : now I started thinking that the mandorla, the canoe, the vesica formed by the intersection of those 2 circles had to include Native America as one pole, one center of a union. I began re-reading Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe... & then I happened upon some studies & a biography of Black Elk. I was surprised to discover that not only was Black Elk a very great spiritual teacher in his Lakota world, but that he also, in turn, crossed over to the other circle in my imaginary mandala. He converted to Catholicism, and became a catechist & lay teacher at Pine Ridge. I'm still busy reading in these sources : but in a way this discovery encouraged me to keep going in this direction with the poem. America - along with every other locality on earth - is a sort of "colony" of a more universal humane civilization : & this is part of the deep project of poetry, music, & all the arts. We are not meant to forsake our cultural origins on behalf of some merely intellectual or shallow ideological formulae; rather, the universal & the particular are set in a stance of fruitful synthesis - a wedding of opposites. (This is one of the deep meanings of Incarnation, as the Orthodox monk Maximus the Confessor so eloquently explained : the whole cosmos beautifully participates in the harmonic Union of God & Man.)

Finally, one of the funniest things I realized recently was that this imaginative immersal, this diving back into Indian-Land, this "going native" (Roger Williams' & William Blackstone's task)... was not new. I realized : I've been here before. The even longer poem of the late 90s, the vast Forth of July, is essentially another such plunge into the physical & spiritual "center" of America - with me, the poet-narrator, led along by my nose by that trickster-figure out of NW Coast Indian lore, old Bluejay...

I suppose this is a very representative Blog Post : verbose, vague, rambling, confusing... but I'm trying to sum up some of the octahedral facets of the diamond sutra of the Lakota ceremony of the six directions in the sacred hoop of the people on the windy grasslands where I come from & where I go back to longingly in my daydreams....

Lanthanum 9.7

7

Winter dark drawing on, Blackstone lingers late
beside his companionable willow-leaf of flame. O
Rock, afloat there, higher than I am... & became
his own salty psaltery. Pine-bough (compassionate

in heartbeat’s quiet). Look you, if the ratio
of loving river-flow between a father & a son
is bright, clean, perfect token – mumble-icon (or
lips’ manger) for a cosmic oratorio – say,

welling up eternally with overflowing & maternal
harborings – yea, spousal rapture! – why,
then, we have reason to be glad alway
& every which way, aye! sez I (the watchful

hermit, smilingly). Sudden attunement
startled up his spine – high notes of nether-
cloudy zither-strings, like Degas feathering
a pastel La-La Land beneath the bent Arc

de Triomphe of an octahedral cathedral
(somewhere north of N’Orleans). Its gray
pigeon-nave (adrift, heavy) anchors a-weigh
right here, forthright, upstream : a sundial

planted on sunburnt clay, or airy diamond’s
undisintegrated flare – adamant prow-brow, set
to blaze through water out of limestone night.
Rose from old St. Louis graveyard (someone’s

woeful man-measure) like pink dawn-eye
or rubicund mandorla – dust-cloud gardener
held in huntress-glance. Magdalen myrrh-
box, cask of emerald foresight. Hey-ya-weh...

12.13.11