across languages & worlds

CEDAR HANDS

O calm August river, weaving

under your ceiling of gray

fluff!  I’d like to say

you are a figure for Edith, rocking,

singing Sophie to sleep, somewhere

above Ethiopian night.

I’d like to formulate

a lamp in a window, out there

on a foggy lump in Narragansett Bay –

Rose Island Light, maybe –

what stands for certainty

in the midst of rocky sea, the sway

of tide.  They’re almost finished now

with the bridge repair.

Her double eyebrows bear

their concrete filigree, & show

twin circles in the river’s glass.

Their delicate embrace

a fractal carapace

for curving lips of one round lass –

a sea-green pebble, calipered

by radiant massive Einstein

armature.  So shine,

my lighthouse pine – like shy brown bird

or Great Blue Heron – one sharp eye

across the moving waters!

Agape holds stars

in loving stillness – rhyming sky

                      *

with earth.  It is an ur-rhyme, personal –

a Neva-petroglyph,

an anchored spider-skiff,

chaste common akme (Eeyore-humble);

like moony pleb with sunny Phoebus,

roaming Apollinaire

with domed Apollinaris,

Love is that hearth-melding force

that fuses Unity & Liberty –

soul freedom is the spark

of arcs.  I found a monarch,

lonely, in the donkey straw you see

down by the iron river (pausing,

perhaps, between White

House & Soldier’s Rest).

We bowed to one another, browsing

sheared grass, cordially.

The song began like this –

a dream made manifest,

Railsplitter... prodigal Boy...

held in grey threads of dog days’

dawnlight.  Soft rainbow

pigeon croon – low

throaty turtledove song-maze –

dream-songe across the meadowlands

of languages & worlds

farfalla-far – she whirls

& jags... floats into cedar hands.

8.12.16

Franklin Ave. Bridge

Greyhound to Galilee

SWEET CHARIOT

You rode the midnight Greyhound

through American backwaters.

Past hobo squatters

inside their high lonesome vault (profound

infinite firefly field).  No one

forgets their bent magnetic

North, your epileptic

adolescence (endlessness).  The sun,

the moon, the Pope, the Emperor...

some bright Hiawatha rider,

beaming father-figure –

Federigo in Jerusalem, hugging an Emir...

History slides by on billboards,

Burma-Shave proverbs.

The Greyhound hums, curves

down Vanishing Road – the Lord’s

a baby buffalo.  Around the track

the sprinters skim – a blear

of fog machines, the air

nine tenebrae.  One shady (humpback)

tesseract glides into Galilee –

Gödel infinity

or Miriam smile (she

saw her tall cousin suggest a V);

the mirror of authority

in heaven & on earth

wells supernatural mirth –

sweet chariot of Lady Liberty.

8.11.16

Pin dat, Pindar !

CIRCLET COMB

                                         to Flavia Saraiva

So light she could dance in the palm of your hand

diminutive Flavinha

16 yrs old (4’4”)

spins round a square in Rio-land

revolving figure out of Faery   circling

like Geraldine Fitzgerald

with redhead emerald

circlet comb   encompassing

a globe    within her seashell shallop

green mandala made

of hands  rosy mermaid

(see Phoebe’s sapient dewdrop

on linen frame   for navigation)

one palm in the hurricane

eye   Persephone

shows leaf again   becomes whole nation

wheeling   in the Great Bear dance

around an oak tree   acorns

reigning like   Golgotha crowns

skullcaps & elf beanies   the romance

of Mnemosyne   again, again

the early history

of Buffalo   or Rimini

Ravenn   or Petersburg   Pipestone

or Voronezh   or Minneapolis,

even   along a spiral

fiddlehead   springs tall

her heavy lightness   like   an Okie kiss

8.10.16 

Palm print by Grace Tagliabue & Phoebe Gould

Henry's Blunderworld

Back in 1993, Langdon Hammer published a book titled Hart Crane and Allen Tate : Janus-Faced Modernism.  As I have absented myself from the groves of academe, and from my job as an underling in the beautiful Brown University Library, I can no longer zip down to the stacks & grab any book using fingertip osmosis.  Like ol' Ez in his Pisan cage, here in Minneapolis I must rely on slippery Mnemosyne.  Yet as I bethought myself of certain poetic problematics, cruxi & conundrumistai, this book quietly surfaced from the Henry Blunderworld.

Janus-faced... how?  On one panel, there you have Hart Crane - the troubled gifted genius, the gay man in a land of homophobiopoetics, the impossible character, the Nietzschean-suicidal narcissist egomaniac, the artist, the graceful creator.  On another panel, you have the Salieri (as opposed to the Mozart) component (in Nadezhda Mandelstam's incisive paradigm, with respect to Pushkin, Mandelstam, et al.).  The craftspeople; the literary actuaries; the devotees, the acolytes, the Pharisees, the priests, the gatekeepers, the bouncers.... Allen Tate representing the highest order of compositional learning.  He will mimic the Great Poets by sheer force of pedantry (that giant forehead!) and guile (he sounds like Crane at his most sane).

This is unfair; this is irresponsible.  Allen Tate was a scholar of "the scholar's art" (though Wally Stevens, who coined the phrase, might consider Tate one of those academic "bought men").

Hey - everybody does the best they can.

It's just that Hammer's iron bonk or slice might illustrate a divide we ought to recognize.  Not between raw & cooked or Beat & Formalist or real & conceptual or whatever latest epiphenom floats with the campus curds - but rather something to do with poetry's original communion with its audience, its historical moment.

I have a theory about poetry which is extremely simple : poetry is the summit or bloom of a particular culture's sign-system.

Signs are sacred - they are gestures, pointing everyone toward what encircles, embraces, uplifts, defines.  Yet every culture is obsessed with its own mortality, its own weakness... and Time is the scythe reaping all our faulty sign-systems.  The poet represents and enunciates these ambivalent poles, these magnetic valences.

This representation is a mode of theater.  An enactment - unpredictable, evolving, adapting to particular circumstances.  Ovid sending letters to Caesar from his remote (& final) exile on the Black Sea became a model for both Pushkin in the 19th century and Mandelstam in the 20th : a model corresponding to actual existential personal and political circumstances.  Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote popular plays in a renovated medieval genre in order to... huh?  Speak truth to power?  How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea? (Sonnet 65).  Maybe.  The form adapted to the motive.  & little Tuscan epileptic Alighieri... don't get me started.

& who am I, what am I doing, paddling here in my noxious blogorrhea?

I'd like to overturn the Leaning Towers of official literary certification, along with the squirming anthills of generic rebellion.  I am bored with officialdom.  I am done with Academic Poetics.  I am fed up with Popular Poetics.  The noise is killing me.  Poetry is subtle, like the tender fur on a butterfly wing.  If you manipulate wing, wing becomes useless - Butterfly goes back to her musty thread-womb.

The poet has to have all the skills & training & smarts & gifts... but nobody can teach these.  Experience teaches them; the character of the poet brings them out of the ineffable treasure-house, and polishes, sharpens, aims.

The shaman swims through the fatal air.  Raven writes in flame on the tyrant's wall... in water (on the port side of the Ark).

Solominka in the black gunshine

HENRY’S COULOMBE

Muggy August, month of Emperors

& seizures.  Hobo Henry

lies in Sharon’s Ferry

under the sluggish limestone (worms,

mollusckies, protozoa).  He’s

coming back to Tuscany,

the Bore (some prophesy).

Huffy, bossy Henry holds the keys,

he thunk.  Amid a bole of oaktrees,

under his acorn crown –

like that green Corny Maiden,

one of Igor’s fresh catastrophes

(in Paris, 1913).  High sign

of times – the pharmakon,

the scapegoat, Chosen One –

The barking Kingly Queen

of Carnival, her last crowd scene

(crowing).  Guillaume was there,

too – orphic Apollinaire,

sighing for Minka in the black gunshine

of Dallas.  Jenny, we hardly knew ye –

your sea-cloud camouflage

a fluttery montage

of yellow-black, afloat toward Iona...

America in Henry’s coulombe, now.

The bird croons at the gates

where Francis celebrates

Pacific pipestone... sea-grey Manitou.

8.9.16

steady seasonal work

LITTLE STORIES

                                       Jim Northrup, 1943-2016

The dead cottonwood leans its broken fork

like a Y-brace against

the live cottonwood.  Who’s

helping whom?  The river’s work

is steady, seasonal... flows

nearby.  Past Fort Snelling

like a hurt knee – swelling

strong west branch waters,

Dakota memory.  The boarding school

in Pipestone, pushing English

like a Ghost Dance wish

across calumet plains.  Clouds pool

like smoke under their limitless

blue dome.  The little stories

join hands – morning glories

vining indigo blooms... a sky-caress

out of heavy red clay.  She will go

with you to the Happy Land

her canoe made of almond

joy heartbeats, in waves.  I know

where I’m going... just a change of address.

The flower of a smile

blooms out of dust – the trial

just a test of loving (wilderness).

You’ll find the carnation in a sailor’s

chest, the rose in a worn

lapel.  So being born

will ride the swell, through locks, through doors.

8.8.16

*for more information about Jim Northrup, see today's NY Times obituary

implicate my speech

IRMA’S FLING

Sly Raven implicates my speech

with folded shade.  A bright

dove spangles dew-light

drifting the stream.  On the beach

by Mississippi, one yellow-black ensign

of cottonwood, one limestone

arrowhead.  An unknown

bird hums wings into a grey spine-

feather matrix – hovers droning

like yellow gyroscope

(totem for sun).  Hope

is the thing... the Word spins honing

like a drill toward a red diamond,

flaking hieroglyphs

& copper cypress skiffs

for one crossroad encounter (bond

of your voice, speaking soft to me,

from vise of mine).  Zone

of Mendelssohn tombstone –

of flint, cracked open for humanity –

to pour through like sprung torrent

& never cease flowing,

as when a raven crowing

from an empty cave (craven, abhorrent)

signals a seed flung by a planet’s wing –

smiles through the sea-gate

like Peacock Angel – fate

spannered by a checkmate (Irma’s Fling).

8.2.16

My mother & the Longfellows

Just an afterthought to previous post : I share a bit of family lore regarding the Longfellows.

The poet Henry W. Longfellow was no stranger to sorrow and tragedy.  His line "into each life some rain must fall" is an understatement in his case (he was widowed twice; his first wife Mary died after a miscarriage; his second, Frances, after burns suffered in a freak accident).

Longfellow was endeared to his six children; his old classic The Children's Hour christens one of them "laughing Allegra".

Allegra eventually married and had children of her own.  One of her daughters married a doctor from Texas, and they settled in a house on the River Road, in Minneapolis, next door to my grandparents - where my mother Mary Ravlin grew up, with her brother and sisters.  My mother became friends with their children (Allegra's grandchildren).  She relates the story that once, when Allegra was visiting her family in Minneapolis, their furnace backed up and filled the house with smoke.  The Longfellows migrated next door until the problem was fixed and the house aired out; Allegra spent the night at my grandparents'.

A few years later, the Longfellows invited my mother (who was about 12 at the time) to accompany them on a vacation to Maine.  They took the train from Minneapolis, and eventually reached the Longfellow home in Portland (now a museum).  There the Longfellows brought out some little glasses of sherry, and my mother had her first taste of alcohol - which she took with great trepidation, since both her parents were absolute Iowa teetotalers.

The Longfellow House (Portland, Maine)

On the shores of Gitche Gumee

Am reading a remarkable new biography of Dante Alighieri, by Marco Santagata, translated by Richard Dixon (Harvard UP, 2016).  Alongside Longfellow's remarkably reader-friendly translation of the Divina Commedia.

Where I live now is Longfellow territory : Minnesota.  In fact I live in a duplex adjacent to the Longfellow section of Minneapolis.  This is the land of Minnehaha Falls, Lake Nokomis, the Hiawatha rail line...  Henry L's Song of Hiawatha was inspired & underwritten by the Ojibwa legends recorded by his scholar-explorer friend Henry Schoolcraft (discoverer of the source of the Mississippi).  I can hear my late father even now - Minnesota Scout-camper-canoeist that he was - reciting (slightly tongue-in-cheek) tidbits of Hiawatha and Evangeline...

Santagata's Dante is a preternaturally-gifted young poeta (Einstein-like), trapped in a political combination of Inferno and South Boston.  His yearning for the authority of Empire makes (partial, recherche) sense in a parochial spacetime imprisoned by warlords, feuds, vengeance, murder, and every other circle of Hell.  These circles were closed.  Dante was like a drowning man struggling to the surface.  His appeal to Beatrice and Mary was a cry for a spiritual lifesaver - and a rescue from personal/political catastrophe.

But don't let me suggest that what we have here is a version of the mind-body problem.  Dante was more than an alienated intellectual.  He was a lot like Whitman, too.  He asserted Love at the center of reality, at the matrix of the cosmos - and found a way to synthesize all the different departments of Philosophia within the very human desire to love and be loved.  This was the gift of his mentors (Brunetti, Cavalcanti, Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle... Virgil) - but a gift he transfigured into blazing bardic fireworks (Whitman's descants on Emerson provide a parallel).

I find it interesting that during his agitated exilic (& hungry) wanderings around Tuscany & environs, Dante gravitated toward anywhere with a good library.  That early Renaissance hunger for knowledge chimes with what Mandelstam calls the Italians' (Dante, Ariosto) enormous appetite & gusto for speech, rhyme, poetry...  Mandelstam, out there in Voronezh & Vladivostok, carrying his frangled, tattered copy of the Divine Comedy around, always, wherever Stalin decided to send him...

The library was my refuge too.  I spent 30 years in the bowels of the Rock (Rockefeller Library, Brown University) - after Ronald Reagan brought an end to my 5-yr VISTA volunteer career (circa 1980).  I didn't want to be an organizer anymore; I needed to write.  But I didn't want to go back to school (I graduated from Brown - finally - in 1977).  For a brief ridiculous desperate time I worked as a "professional resume writer"...

I thought of poetry as something simple & direct - beyond academia, beneath academia; beyond politics, beneath politics; beyond po-biz, beneath po-biz.  I started a group called the Poetry Mission for that reason (stealing poetry off campus).  We sponsored events in an art gallery, organized some talks, published an anthology for Edwin Honig's birthday... but this was long ago (early 1990s).  Others have been down this path.

The library.  On the campus.  Yes.  I went back there, into my shell - and stayed for 30 years.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the dome of the Rhode Island State House, under which I spent much of my 5 years as a VISTA volunteer :


"The Rhode Island State House is composed of 327,000 cubic feet (9,300 m³) of white Georgia marble, 15 million bricks, and 1,309 short tons (1,188 t) of iron floor beams.^[2]

The dome of the State House is the fourth-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world, after St. Peter's Basilica, the Taj Mahal, and the Minnesota State Capitol.^[2][3] On top of the dome is a gold-covered bronze statue of the Independent Man, originally named "Hope". The statue, weighing more than 500 pounds (230 kg), is 11 feet (3.4 m) tall and stands 278 feet (85 m) above the ground. The Independent Man represents freedom and independence and alludes to the independent spirit which led Roger Williams to settle and establish Providence and later Rhode Island."

"Hope."

This post is a throwback to the HG Poetics of old - that Minnehaha of endless gab-gab... how did I manage it?  As TS Eliot says somewhere, "Humility is endless."  I worked, managed.  Now, strangely, I'm home again.  Florence was my paternal grandmother's name - the Goulds lived about 2 blocks from where I'm writing this, in another shady apt by the river.  Florence was born on the the 4th of July, 1900... granddaughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain...

each poem starts fresh

TROMPETTE MARINE

Soft breeze moves the cucumber leaves

climbing the fine mesh.

Each poem starts fresh

upon a labyrinth the wind conceives

the way Dante struggled like a goat

to rise above the black-

white chessboard (epileptic

knight, squirming from Hell’s dank moat

toward one firefly-mote of light).

O civil wars of cousin

wolves!  Striving in frozen

latitudes of predatory fright-

might, ice-blue treason – all

spite-pirates of the broken

sheep of state – forsaken-

&-forsaking sacrifice!  Ravel

me then, Ariadne, in your primordial

& woolen salience

of J... into the silence

of a pregnant Jubilee, where Piero’s wall

glows in the morning light (& swells

a womb within a cave).

Search the high nave

of the Milky Way – Francesca dwells

up there (with Jenny Littletree) – among

the Shaker Indians, Quakers –

meek paisans, peacemakers –

fused by trompette marine of song.

8.1.16

Lightweight "The Weight"

ineffable mosaic sky

CLOUD-FEATHERS

The air so brilliant & clear today

beside the Bronze Age river.

The railroad bridge hovers

over its reflection – a light play

of diagonals, like water-spiders

on a pond, or cloud-feathers

above the Jordan, tethered

to a steadfast figure (Jasper’s

orant mariner, circumferencing

gray sea with shady palm).

That chanting shepherd, calm

beneath an indigo wheel of blazing

stars... one cheerful face beaming

from the medallion

in Classe (Apollinarian)

under darkened wooden ceiling

of abandoned ship, beached in pine-

swamp, at Ravenna’s edge.

Mere icons of a human pledge

so simple, local, omni-Byzantine –

ineffable mosaic sky

where Love bends waves

to lift us from our graves

into a metamorphosis   kind Aye

above halo of tears   you streak

with serpentine arches

agios   agios   agios

one river-rainbow   in an eagle’s beak

7.29.16

as in a game of hide-&-seek

PINE ARK

Piero the geometer

graphed the perfect dome

(that marvelous human home

& winking sea of gray matter)

beneath the curvature of San Francesco

in Arezzo – a flock of swans

of radiant intelligence

about their Queen, before the portico

(Temple of Solomon).  He’s hidden

as in a game of hide-&-seek

the wooden matrix (meek

logbox from Tree of Life).  When

Helena comes to Jerusalem

she’ll draw it out again –

sliver from a lion’s

paw, grim rib from Adam’s

galley mast.  Constantine dreams

his tiny golden honey-cross.

Mary’s Pneuma-moss

wells in the quiet kitchen... gleams.

Sweet psyche-legends circulate

around a forgotten rock

in Magdala.  The flock

is scatter-gathered... salty fate

& jittery salts plank-walk the yellow-

black monarchs of love.

Their cedar treasure-trove

is one pine ark (Jonah chi-rho).

7.28.16

Weldon finds his shoes

O FLOWER

                                   For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing

This evening light over the sink

& clutter of Mom’s pots

dish soap, what-nots

stillness of an eye that doesn’t blink

pupil of an unseen commonwealth

Lincoln-logos of a realm

Time cannot overwhelm

where Walter nurses back to health

Hart’s broken farfalla-tower

& Weldon finds his shoes

again   & Berryman his

balance on that bridge   O Flower

Joy   Out of these winter fields

where Bruegel-raven   zig-

zags   over leafless twigs   &

Guillaume’s pink turban   slowly   heals

Your graven images of gravity,

Henry   my autumn fall

1132   a burial

at sea   the perspicacity

of buoyant Jonah   one grey gull 

white-feathered underneath

lights on a wave   breathe,

Dove   lift down from empty skull

my ashen diamond   the snow skims

sparkling   under the sun

& from bright gatherings one

Flamant beams   whose warmth redeems

7.27.16

through clouds like whales

SOUL SCOUT

                              i.m. Fr. Jacques Hamel

You breathe a mist over stained glass,

like a cloud over Mirror Lake,

by the trolley road to Blake

(in Mendelssohn).  Rouen, alas.

In Chartres nave, one dark gray

thread still navigates

J-whorl, on golden agate –

Ariadne’s Way (sealed crypt to Day).

Her catenary smile will make

a lazy loop through Space

in Time; her carapace

a turtleshell – sweet curve you take

through clouds like whales, Jonah –

to find an old mercy-go-

round anew.  Like Jessie O.

on racy waterwheeler, sunray-

rain-bowed – Lady Liberty

an echo of Cahokia,

a salience of Royal Oak

(lips’ kayak lifting word to be).

Deep breath, Path P, Rhodos.

Out of a barbed-wire

cat’s-cradle (rust pyre

of Minotaur-empire) you rose –

winded with old George, the breadwinner,

& Maggie, of the veritas

caput – where Brandywine flows

into 4 Pine River (soul scout’s honor).

7.26.16

"Can you enter the great acorn of light?"

BLACK DIAMOND

This heart-shaped leaf from cottonwood

dark green & silver-gray

may float down other rivers – say

the Don, by Voronezh... or Eridanos,

through Ravenna (north of Hades)... &

each windblown plum sails

off a shakedy limb, whose spiral

roots corkscrew (like S.S. Normandie

propeller) down into a labyrinthine

seine of mounded knots...

a weedy sea-change (plot

of plots).  Black Diamond is crystalline –

common as salt; an octochoron,

regular, complex;

cubic prismatic Rex

or tesseractic honeycomb (acorn

beanie, maybe).  From her, La Paix

like some Hermione

dances to life again – see

there!  Her coracle – l’Éternité!

My raven-tesserae form nature morte.

Venn diagram for Orpheus

bent to his Beatrice-dust

in Adriatic backwater – ‘til brought

up short, like Slocum, John (Shaker

Indian of Puget Sound)

or like Black Elk, who found

her sun-spun gyroscope (stung-sweet Makar).

7.22.16

her smile shall win

GAZEBO SKEIN

Sultry evening in the Twin Cities.

The earth.  My mother’s kiln

stoked like Jersey landfill

with Dante’s willful souls – at ease

like oil on fire.  My moss-green vines

climb the gazebo skein.

Oblomov lived in vain

& died, sweet gentleman.  My light declines.

Oblomov dreamt a febrile dream,

icon of idle summer

grace.  Her lips murmur

& tickle his ear – Awake, Sunbeam...

Dante, shaken, shudders with Love

& epileptic ecstasy;

parallactic Ocean Sea

& shadowy Argo up above,

Emperor Henry on chariot-throne

of Rhodian charity.

A band of silver-grey

light-thread knots chords – the drone

of universal B-flat (Kingdom Come

with trombones, clarinet

& flute) – At Last.  FIAT.

Oblomov lifts his balding dome,

his heavy lashes... orange twin

pillars hold one Ariadne-

loop.  Pacific naiad?

Juliet?  La Paix?  Her smile shall win.

7.21.16

your fluent kingdom

NEW LESSON

Old river the color of rusted iron

you beckon me back before

shell-shocked histoire

humaine (long nightmare drill).  When

we were as flint people in limestone

hideaways, under

the glare of Viper-Vulture

in his ice-eyrie.  The repetition

of trauma exudes a pearl-shell

palimpsest (le Roi

est mort, vive le Roi) –

one slight Gennesaret wave-swell

is laved to Pietà massif, circled by Rome,

lapped by typhoons (of bursting

tears).  We are thirsting,

River, for that fluent kingdom

where Ebionite & Nazarene,

snake-handler & Sioux

shaman – every blue

highway mutt, sadsack has-been –

every humiliated woman, each

weakling sissy-boy

undone by bully

chants of dominance – might teach

a new lesson.  How once that marble

lifted into cloud...

one dove-grey noeud

vitale (breathing AMOR into dead fable).

7.19.16 

casket from Samarkand

GREAT RECKONING

Crusaders racing to the Tomb,

an historical pinpoint

in 1099.  Where He went

at 33 (a little room

for some great reckoning).  Daggers

in the eye turn every way –

shark swordfish play

for nightmare realms, & beggars

follow San Francisco up a narrow

fuse (to blessedness).

Stigmata (foolish meekness,

humble mulishness).  A wheelbarrow

carries mild infant Majesty

into his palmy kingdom,

spiky Jerusalem

(sea-rose of sandy history,

Rome’s  crabapple).  The viney mind

demands firm scaffold,

grid to climb, hold

fast – casket from Samarkand,

mercurial chasm, golden

kaleidoscope... meanwhile

one half-moon wafer-smile

of blinding white sail’s sudden

eminence rides on gray wave –

the plummet of an eagle

etches his grave seal,

marking 1132 (full fathom five).

7.15.16

Dartmoor pixie cross

Lament for Philando Castile

shadow of a shadow

SILVER THREAD

A raven stitches broken arcs

over Lebanon cedars,

through layers of cinders

on sands of Galilee.  These marks

print tracks, embed the shadow

of a shadow (of

a shadow).  Whose love

cooled into bottled borders, crow-

foot scars?  Etched into sealed eyelids

the guardians of sleep

administer fear, & reap

nightmare (endless cycle in the Cyclades).

I have no wrath, hums the writhing

wheel of flame – my smile

will melt stalactite guile

until their funny bones come lurching

from the humus... rows of soldiers

thrown from stone, their hearts

wrung into speaking parts.

Her modulation wove its sutures

out of the basalt lid of night.  The ocean

gathers all its woe into

moist glance of pain... you

hear her sigh.  Love’s Jonah-sign

one silver thread – gray clouds,

gray sea, gray gull, gray

dove... & every way

her wing turns (lifting raven-moods).

7.14.16

make it new

OLD SALT

Herman riveted to crow’s-nest,

Dante wearing out

his shoes... Weldon, forgot

by Golden Gate, & Berryman, a crust

of snow beside the limestone bank.

Moon rose from sea

with magnanimity,

night’s passionate gravity... & sank

these antithetical children of the sun

beneath immeasurable Ocean-

wave.  Matrix of one

twinkling eye... stuttered translation

from sharks’ dogma to Cutty Sark

sped rondure-eloquence –

an Ocean River sense,

human inheritance (almond birthmark).

The old salt bears his Southern Cross 

as shark-tooth earring,

tattooed heart.  The singing

shrouds (sea-urge, wave-moss)

remind him of Jonah, lost infant

of the crew – of Jasper,

& Francesca too – Ariel

in Ravenna pines (al fresco fundament).

Make all things new.  An emerald gong

plumbs planetary tides –

sun-shimmer plies

Gennesaret to Tuscan hills (all-human song).

7.13.16

Euxine seagull arcs

FISHING BOATS

The old watercolor over the mantle

in my mother’s house – the twin

gray fishing boats, the brown

warehouse, the whitewashed walls.  Gentle

Gloucester, Massachusetts (Grace

Ravlin pinxit – Grandpa’s

cousin, from Kaneville, Illinois).

Soft clouds, the upright crosspieces

of lank lanyards (still sea-green

harbor, granite walk).

Thinking of another work –

lone lady at Mount Vernon, culling

flowers for George Washington.

And of another Maximus –

not Gloucester’s famous

philosophe, but Maximus, blue unicorn

who sketched with Euxine seagull arcs

on stumps (his amputated

medium) one delicate

& sibylline solution.  Sparks

fly upward from the hearth of Love

– fly outward, penetrate

wolf-packs of gulag-state.

This heart simmers like kiln-hot stove

or croon of turtledove, hidden...

violet in tall field grass,

cricket near an underpass.

Willow by slow river (Magdalen).

7.11.16

Grace Ravlin, Gloucester Harbor (ca. 1928)

Henry Hankovitch on the ol' geetar

experimental Restoration Play

RAVEN-SPELT

Cedar shade of Galilee,

Aesculapian shepherd

staff of serpent-

skin, shed (leafing royalty

in vernal memory).  Magdala

Stone of good deeds done

O spouse of rustic sun

& witness won... lowly Messiah

come & gone (& come again).

Time flowers on the lips

& salty fate slips

into diamond lantern (homespun

dream of overflowing glee) – a shout

of joy from a windblown seed

of newness sown (whorled

Jubilee) – canoe-galleon, afloat

round Milky Road (unquenchable

Eternity) – that lights

gold Magna Carta rights

welded in smiling crucible

of Manitou.  So on this day

Canonicus & Charles II

framed (raven-spelt) new

Charter, for primordial Way –

experimental Restoration Play

within green cedar

fane – firm oaken chair

of planetary cheer (our Ripening Day).

7.8.16

Roger Williams Memorial, Prospect Terrace, Providence

* Note : on this day in 1663, King Charles II of England signed the charter creating the new colony of Rhode Island.  Written, and sponsored (in London) by Roger Williams and Thomas Clarke, the charter pioneered a new form of government, founded on principles of religious toleration and popular sovereignty.

granite made of air

MOSAIC INTERIOR

Hobo sets his sights on Ocean Sky

the cloud-boats drifting

stately, aquamarine

high-masted spinnakers go by

The rusty syntax of the railroad bridge –

necklace for a queen

Romano-Byzantine.

Galla Placidia, maybe... blown to the edge

of warlord chaos, courtier intrigue;

guarding son & heir

with the pale gold hair

(who will not see the Soo Line zigzag

into the forest, north of here).

The mosaic interior

night-blue with stars –

her mausoleum, like an eggshell ear.

Sea-light filters through pinholes

of gold.  The grey matière

a granite made of air

hides pigeons, ring-dove souls

within its manifold (octahedral

catacomb).  Even

Hobo finds his kin again;

the smile of cousin Jeanne will roll

a tensile thread out of the maze

of time & circumstance –

her light ghost dance

where mountains bloom (sheep graze).

7.7.16

the palm, the fiery gates

PRAIRIE ROUNDELAY

American robin on my fence

I sense you are a friend

& neighbor – here to lend

your orange breast, for salience –

swell-sign of aerial fellowship

in gravid cave-adventure

(blue waves of chicory

pacing old roads, from Boston slip

to San Francisco).  How your edgy

yodeling interrogates

our grubby, wormy hates –

sclerotic, squamous tragedy

of shriveled hearts, rancid hypocrisy!

You diagram with song

a madrigal so strong,

so many voices in emergency

merge into blueprint buoyancy –

manifest (garnet clay

prairie roundelay)

a ship-shape evening constancy.

Mute gesture from crow’s-nest G-ray!

Memory, beyond time

salts a Boethian rhyme-

beat... in quella Roma onde

Cristo è Romano.  Staunch ruddy

steersman indicates

the palm, the fiery gates,

Pacific O... – Eternity! is all his study.

6.7.16

Map of Rhode Island, 1780

wolf spider bite

I used to play a "tarantella" on the piano... I forget the composer (Mrs. Elledge, my piano teacher 45 years ago, would know).  I grew up in the Mendelssohn neighborhood of Edina, MN (named such by its early settlers, musicians with the Minnesota Symphony).  The tarantella has very ancient roots - it was originally an ecstatic, Dionysian dance meant to drive out the effects of a "tarantula" (actually, European black widow) spider bite.

WILD WEED

The monuments tremble in the mind

like shuddering leaves... the dun-

grey flesh of Russian

olive shoots (wild weed you find

along grey highways).  Clouds

resemble ships passing

(or sheep).  An everlasting

turtledove of new beginnings crowds

grey folds to elegant mosaic –

peacock splendor, rainbow

tarantella.  Help me now,

Ancient of Days – the mortal ache

of this wolf spider bite is like a prod

in the bull-dance arena.

I must rotate – ah,

Pocahontas handstand! – God

reward your goldfinch serenade!

Thunder & lightning speed

yon seraphim-steed

across acorn crucible (blade

pillaring smoke & fire upon hill

at Glastonbury, or

Golgotha).  Now you are

whittled down to walnut mind-rill...

pirouette... red veins of iron

rivet into diamond.

Bran-matière.  Pond-

ripple osprey, ranging (arak-golden).

7.5.16

Painting by Michael Gould (Elmer's glue & acrylic)

Geoffrey Hill, Yves Bonnefoy, Elie Wiesel

SMALL EMERALD ELEGY

                      Geoffrey Hill, Yves Bonnefoy, Elie Wiesel

Light at dusk across the grass

salted with white crosses,

poppies... graph of losses

rounding up the Somme.  Mass

for the mass of young men gone.

On Cemetery Ridge

the plowmen made a bridge

of bone, unbreakable – and won

the day.  Coraggio, amigos.

Somnolent River

Time will shiver silver

when the last full measure flows

from infant veins, against the grain

of human servitude –

that dominant X (rude

chi-rho, nailed up in the brain).

In the barranca (by the monarchs’

den) the battered Consul

penetrated to the well

of Golgotha.  His mind sparks

like the last firefly of evening meadows...

a small emerald octagon,

or 4-leaf clover – moon

over Eire, over the raging shadows

of the nations.  Clue vero, Ariadne-

yarn.  A catenary

arc, or smile – an airy

rack of clouds, threading the Neva R.

7.2.16

George Bellows, Rain on the River (RI School of Design Museum of Art)