Bonnefoy, la traduction du jour

Here's another fling at translating Yves Bonnefoy... the poem is "L'Éternité du feu", from the sequence Le chant de sauvegarde.  (see original below)

ETERNITY OF FIRE

Phoenix says to the fire, which is fate

And bright landscape throwing its shadows,

I am one who awaits you, says he,

I come to lose myself in your grave land.

He regards the fire.  How it comes,

How it plants itself in the gloomy soul,

And how dawn breaks at windows – how

Fire goes mute, falling to sleep deeper than fire.

He feeds on silence.  He hopes

Each fold of an eternal silence,

As it descends on him like sand,

Will aggravate his immortality.

down to St. Lou

SLATE PANOPLY

Henry’s Chair is in the woods,

beside the Rio del Espiritu

Santo.  Hobo to you,

mayhap – lost in his darker moods;

drawing a diagram in river-sand

of Ursiana’s barer pillars,

moss-bound Giuliana’s

pines (forlorn Ravenna swampland).

Emblems of spiritual epilepsy,

moon friar.  Lame lone wolf

Dante, crying for a proof

of integral radiance (nay, nay

sobs hunchback Leopardi).

Hiawatha whistles there –

follow the tripping Hare

Whirlaway to Itasca – see?

The spring.  Mammoth drone of stream.

Down to St. Lou,

where airs axle true –

bloodveined grey sponge, clay dream...

tuning-fork in the river road.

Wheel, innocent rabbi,

through your Galilee

of primary colors – lift the load

from Henry’s sloping shoulders.  Bend

a prism to Columbia,

slate panoply of Jonah-sky –

who lights the harbor at grave’s end.

9.15.16

Henry's Chair

something not rotten

BENT WOOD

Two lean ancient red pines

standing blue-green beside

Grandpa’s old house, abide

fanfares of trumpet-vines

(pure orange bugling).  Something

not rotten in the state

of Norway, loco Hamlet –

needles for constant farthering,

an evergreen encounter with the Pole.

A fado rudder for America...

mercurial Columbia

glows with her dusky song, high, whole –

hidden in clouds of starry Eire

that slake eddies of fear

into limey atmosphere

like elfin emeralds from the mire.

These curves along Rhode Island Way!

Hieratical Byzantium

leans down beside a tomb

hunched in Ravenna tamaracks – Dante

& Roger shaking hands (the ghost

of Beatrice will not bow

before the imperial scow,

nor heed the plutocratic boast

of idle punts).  Just a bivalve ark

(tender ellipse of fatherhood)

redeems the bent wood

Caesar to seahorse – shark to lark.

9.14.16

bebop robin

OKIE NOOK

Sophie’s sunny little birthday balloon

with the starry polka-dots

is losing air now – that’s

how it is with balloons.  Under octagon

of the gazebo roof, like a spiderweb

in golden brown.  The Sacred

Wood was reconfigured –

scarred & scored rough oak nub

rounded to slight chaste coracle.

Apollo’s memory of Daphne

wells near Mississippi

into gnarled pillars (maze or miracle?);

one bebop robin solos from 

an Okie nook, wears

pork-pie hat... & there’s

a poppy (rich red-purple plum)

unfolding down his chest – an origami

floating city, cordial

with accordions, with all

things orbital (inverted harmony,

fresco to Viennese).  An island rose

out of infinite green,

balanced on submarine

turtledove blimps (of caritas);

the loping soul of liberty

sprang from Goodwill

her dancing shoes – & (still

traipsing) turns opal Star of the Sea.

9.13.16

Pines in Atlantis-land

STANDING ROCK

In the powerhouse of Providence

lame little Eddie Poe

must play the game hero –

like a minnow tar, fire-pitted mensch

against Mini-Mini-Tick Leviathan,

his haunt of fearful gravity.

His force is a depravity

of animal instinct – Heraclitean

axis of control – apes’ pecking order,

magnified by policy

(raison d’état, you see).

O too-familiar monster, O – our

puzzle-master, oiled in wrestle-hold,

whose flags flap overhead

above each engineered 

corpse-shed (floods memories untold).

The silver dime, Elsie – your Grecian

Artemis – will not

suffice; this Ariadne-knot

must be released, for peace to reign

the dam must burst; an equilibrium

of equity must level out

the bruised minefield.  Bright

misery in wells of eyes... come,

Maggie Shekinah, come Galilean

Buffalo Gal (Eureka-

Psyche)... Standing Rock

pines in Atlantis-land – rise up again.

9.9.16

emerald, magenta, rust

DIVINING ROD

These heavy green butternuts

fall to the green grass

from the milky axis

of the Po-tree – go thump & burst

(each one a miniature globe

of moist black earth).

Thus Hobo mused, at berth

among the river fronds, robed

in emerald, magenta, rust.

One such blade his wand,

divining rod – her land

releasing signs out of the dust;

smoke-signals, signed, co-signed

into a circle (arcing back

to the beginning of the track).

Jade footsteps from a cloudy mind,

a raincloud out of futurepast;

merging, centripetal –

heaven is integral –

a raven knife, a pinecone mast

(that rotates on a maze of grass

within a vapid place

of sterile office space).

Flowers are immortal – pass

then, with Hobo, through the Gate!

Arc-welded acorn

crown for children –

rainbow-faceted checkmate

                 *

that beats Goliath with a tiny mite!

A baby meteor,

a coal of holy fire –

wholeness at heart, golden moonlight!

Her orb gleams like a seal, a coin –

meek penny versus

dolorous minions,

or muted acorn humming down

brass trumpets of disputing despots.

It is the dolphin-seal

of Ocean State, an Israel

incarnate in the rose bee-glade.  What’s

hidden in the earth, a promise

limping with Natasha –

with immovable Nadezhda,

still in Voronezh – liberty, justice;

a rainbow equilibrium, that harbors

simple shining Gates –

St. Frisco’s nail-bites

lifting iron weights, up to palm-arbors

evergreen!  That glory be hidden

like a key, or like a rudder

in the wave – to shudder

into light upon the crest... thy pardon

for this history, White Rose!

Row to the Keys, Hobo –

Eureka by the Po,

our watering hole – look whose Face glows!

9.8.16 

he was no Big Fish

SWEET CORDELIA

Like a Showy Ladyslipper in the woods

unseen by all except

chipmunks (scrabbling adept

through silent clerestories of dead

cedars) Hobo strayed, from Ursus

Major to St. Apollinaire;

he was no Big Fish, barely

a minnow Star du Nord (Jesus

his seine-maître, toiling away

upstream).  America

steamed on, formica-

sleek, pregnant with Labor Day

& White-Tailed Rabbit & Polar Bear

looked on, from cell blocks

melting in the superflux.

The Man of Concrete was no longer there

(he’d cried himself to sleep).  Henry

by a berried Berryman

stood by, his Resurrection

Plot cartooned in St. Paul snow (flaky);

apathetic Oblomov, at the gazebo

spied Olga in the distance –

wading through native plants

like sweet Cordelia coming to rescue

jet-bagged Lear.  Earth dangled

from one silver hair,

suspended over the bear-

cave (striped with blood, star-bangled).

9.7.16

"Pinecone", by Marcia McEachron

Quatrain by Yves Bonnefoy

Another stab at translation.  This is an untitled poem from Yves Bonnefoy's sequence "Le chant de sauvegarde" :


If the bird were torn into pebbles, you said,
He would be, aloft in his dawn sky, our shore.
But he, shipwrecked from harmonious vault,
Already sank weeping to the clay of the dead.

Rock Candy Neva-Neva trail

LIMESTONE PROFILE

The little white cabbage moth

& the dragonfly, following

Hobo down his bumbling

Rock Candy Neva-Neva path

beside the river.  Past the bridge

nearly finished, almost

restored... some ghost

dance out of Petersburg (knowledge

from chaste vision – redemption

blooming like a morning

glory – everything trembling

at the dawn of time – the Galilean

tacking in the wind across the lake

zigzagging like a monarch

slanting orange-black

over sumac, milkweed – to be forsaken

& his cup to take)...  So the dream of a girl

is the grail of a dream, when

startled Magdalen

beholds him (where fern-worlds unfurl).

Like a fiddlehead figurehead, a nettle

Beatrice, the dream ramifies;

what was there always

unveils, the whole sweet kernel-coracle –

as Hobo finds his bearings in the smile

of a limestone Ursus profile,

in the lofty Milky Whale

of a firefly Jonah (rainbow trail).

9.6.16

Late summer cricket

remote highways

DANCING BEAR

The multifarious facets of this vine

are emerald-veined, to catch

the sun – each tendril-latch

anchors cucumber to mosquito screen.

Shade-ravines along remote highways

or melancholy tamaracks

up north... waltz parallax

on Ocean Road (revolving maze).

Hobo, drowsing at Camp Who-He-

Who-She-Wah, slipped

down a culvert, overstepped.

His gravity condensed to mercury –

a silver thread of frozen fire;

sum of all his non-

action, his diffident un-

charity (dead fisheye in the mire).

As if the shining labyrinth,

Ariadne’s fever-chart,

led inward (part

angel, part beast).  One leaden plinth,

one stony-crumb foundation (churled).

One personal scar

of sorrow, raveled far

down Rua Tonimminotaur.  Pearled

diamond from Tsyan-Shizi, or

Marienbad – her glance

a glint, a last-chance-

ghost, a smile (for dancing bear).

9.2.16

Bonnefoy summer

Have been slowly reading and enjoying poems by the late Yves Bonnefoy.  Here's a rough translation of one of them, from the collection Hier régnant désert :

A VOICE

Nettle, O prow of this shore where it crashes,
O frozen upright in the wind,
Show me a sign of presence, O my servant
Robed in scaly black.

O grey pebble,
If it's true that you harbor the color of blood,
Rouse yourself from this blood coursing through you,
Open to me the door of your cry,

So that in you I draw near her
Who is pretending to sleep,
Head closed over you.

"Une Voix" (Yves Bonnefoy)

The Love of Poetry

Ben Lerner's much-bespoken book-length essay, The Hatred of Poetry, is built on a conceptual framework drawn primarily from Plato and one of Lerner's mentors, the late poet Allen Grossman.  Allen Grossman and I, as it happens, attended the same high school in Minnesota (in classes exactly 20 years apart).

Although I admire Grossman's deeply-felt and magisterial writing (he produced a wonderful essay on Hart Crane), I've never taken to his theoretical perspective, his philosophy of poetry.  Nor do I agree with Ben Lerner's recent extrapolation, here, of some of those concepts.

I wrote an piece called "The Love of Poetry" in response.  It's not a review.  I try to mimic Lerner's anecdotal, autobiographical style in order to draw different conclusions.  The essay was published today by the online journal DISPATCHES, and you can find it here.

thy brother calls thee

CATENARY TED

The cosmos hangs from a thread, a

lifeline.  Yes, Flem

was with us, up at Verm –

helped Dad, me & Jim (brother)

dig the cabin foundation.  Flem’s

father was MN State

Epidemiologist;

Flem died of AIDS.  There are these themes,

signs... the padre of Hart Crane,

manufacturing Life-Savers...

Abraham with scimitar

squeakin’ by with a warning... O Cain,

thy brother calls thee from the ground.

Hobo sleeps by the river;

his thyrsus nods, a glimmer

of August grass.  Mullein, dock... diamond

pine-cone (piñata by the Po).  The tree,

the tall cedar of life,

Malcolm!  She’s your wife,

you know.  Nehushtana of Liberty.

Evergreen, year-round.  The shadow

owl knows (lives there) –

Spinoza cave-winds tear

up the forgery of terror (low

blow put into Vladimir Kiev-doom).

I’m singin’ with the stars,

Flem, Jim – after the wars.

Mr. Catenary Ted bojangles home.

8.31.16

tricksters in the cricket cities

PATCHWORK SHEPHERD

The river sweeps by the bent cottonwoods

toward autumn.  Time

& history resolve to rim

their force into a wave, a wheel.  The goods

bob & drift downstream, with the detritus –

the tomb of Alighieri

& the other desperadi

all the tricksters in the cricket cities (Paris,

Petersburg, St. Paul) fiddling their gusli

merge into a chord

like an infant beechwood

or broken font in Florence – one little tree

of plumb transfigurement, beneath

the arms of a patchwork shepherd

(Sant’ Apollinaire).  One almond

word melds stars into a wreath

to crown that brow (who is Liberty) –

she mutters... You who incite

fools to violence, who delight

in murder & grief, know not Me;

you who terrorize your spouse, & oppress

your neighbor, know not Me;

the blind man can see

what you cannot see, the deaf woman hears

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

knows Me better than you.

So the little tree (a beech, a yew)

marked X the spot (where Psyche smiled).

8.30.16

Maximus at Colchis

OUR SCENE

Late August light & humid air

through the antique slats

of gazebo, & mosquito

nets.  Ariel’s almost not there,

booky Prospero.  Miranda’s

playing chess, with Gene

& Giacomo – our scene

closes on island claritas

& calm.  Full fathom five, the song

takes hold... the anchor

swims into obscurer

depths.  Remote bronze sea-bells bong.

Those are pearls that were his eyes

treasure-chest of Solomon

impregnable soul of W-man

(– Maggie’s, Martin’s, JFK’s)

Black Elk’s airy diamond

Roger’s pole star

Edward Coke’s (Sir)

liberties & rights, crowned

offshore, in the harbor now.

Maximus at Colchis

wore the golden fleece

of his theoria : articulate prow

or figurehead, the cosmic union

unconfused – not-

separated-knot

of Christos-Nazir (breaching dolphin).

8.29.16

Le Pont Mirabeau

BLUE PLANES

Autumn already in the air.  The lace

net lifts slightly in the window

breeze.  Down the road

a train thunders steadily across

the iron bridge.  Eads, in St. Louis

same river in St. Paul

ebullient waterfall

descends into incessant sluice-

ways.  At Fond du Lac, Guillaume

will wave his pipe   the smoke

floats in blue planes   OK.

Autumnal, your pellucid tomb.

Under a beautiful water-mirror

flows the safety net.

My waif on the parapet,

my Juliet... little evergreen spear

crowning a rangy monarch span –

my songe, my sign, my Seine.

Cloverleaf Corn Maiden

twirls her blue-green mist of pine

on heron-foot again   Sophia

skips through the basilica

like Liberté-Columbia

her grey eyes scan geomatria

here twin circles merge, twin shores

align omega points

&   Maggie Galilee anoints

her Galileo with the milk of stars

8.26.16

Today is the birthday of poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Princess K of the Milky Way

MORNING CAVE

Late August.  Royal touch of autumn.

Comfortable king

of tenderness, bring

me down to your brown river once again.

The cottonwoods are silver-green

but turning gold.  A monarch

speeds black-orange – sparks

up the path, to vanishment (unseen

morpho-sprint).  My chunk of lumber

floats off too.  Fine meteor

pumice, sanded to pearl –

gray weathered pebble, unknown soldier...

The State Fair’s starting up today.

Princess K of the Milky

Way will crownèd be.

Black milk of bitter history

we sipped... fed roots of almond tree.

Cryptic redemption

on knife’s edge... Raven

remembers (Hazel, breathing free).

The King of Milk is by the riverside.

He washes memories

like Papa’s hand – a breeze

murmuring, Everything’s OK.  I sighed.

A child is comforted.  The Earth

will be.  Like Magdalen

or Beatrice – when the sun

colors a morning cave (in Nazareth).

8.25.16

light gleams in Colchis

ANCIENT KEY

                                No estoy yo aqui que soy tu madre?

The spiral molluscs from Precambrian seabed

in the limestone facing by the door

remind me of you; the bent lyre

of the cottonwood by the riverbank led

me back to you too – bent over your clay

wheel, shaping the river-mud

into a smiling imago.  We tread

your maze toward home, thread-spun Ariadne.

That Mexican Last Supper diorama –

chipped clay bread-&-wine feast

you repaired... bones of a beast

lifted from bloodlines, toward a panorama.

Light from a distant prison window

gleams in Colchis.  Maximus

knots three bright strands

beneath a keystone arch – mingled so,

they mark a brow with perfect diamond,

one spark of dancing flame.

Perfection is the frame

of right accomplishment – the ripe almond

of what thou lovest well.  Well-founded

Gateway Arch, the light flows

east to west – what Rhodos grows

for liberty, for justice (lightning-grounded,

here & now).  Crossed in St. Louis

by Rio del Espiritu – & there

one eerie soaring flare

of Raven passing through (southwest)

                    *

inks the last answering quipu

to that sweet hypothesis

of sea-blue Maximus –

the imago, a kind of kindly Manitou-

insignia.  Seal of copper Penny

gleaming from the bottomland;

Columbian wish-well (one hand-

eye palms its moss-green rim... see?).

Southwest, southwest... Cautantowwit,

drawn like a Malcolm, like

a black-orange monarch

through the double dove-doors of that

moonlit mirror, into Mexico –

to touch the orange checkmate

of an azure Golden Gate.

Stubborn, impoverished, soft Frisco

mule!  Lifting the ancient key

of human harmony

again, for you, for me –

netting the breathing sail of safety

there, at last – for Juliet,

for John, for Weldon,

Malcolm, Hart... for everyone

yearning, unreconciled, disconsolate;

& across vast timespace hollows

her winged hands & face

stir courage to embrace –

Grace penetrates the Gates (& Rose).

8.24.16

just east of Providence

LAST WORD

Scavenging Raven found a crust

of broken mirror for

his nest above the river,

in a craggy oak (Blackstone, dust-

laden, winding her copper yarn

just east of Providence).

Po (or Eridanus)

glinted in that shard; a purple crayon

traced a spiral crane-dance there,

pinned to a dove-grey water-

wheel (by hand).  The daughter

of Caesar trolled a welded cluster

of rust-rose keys just below the surface –

keys to the worm-riddled door

of haunted Sant’ Apollinaire

in Classe (where Pharos ghost-sails

teem for Stilicho, Galla Placidia).

At his perch, Cautantowwit

reads smokefires lit

from Paris – On 29th of May

Corn Maiden will pirouette

one Final Show (a Waltz

to End All Wars).  Salt

is good, croaks the haunted vet –

share salt amongst yourselves, &

be at peace.  The night bird

oars southwest – his last word

whistled into silence (prairie-land).

8.23.16

Note : on Aug. 23, 408, the great Byzantine general Stilicho was executed in Ravenna.

antipodean parks

SILVER CHEST

Uncle George the plowman zigzags calmly

weaving his furrows back 

& forth (west of Fond du Lac).

Laboring almost at rest, along his way.

The black soil teems with memories.

Childhood in Mendelssohn,

a helium balloon –

only now the fatal pine shades Miriam’s

plein air Jubilee (specific gravity

of coffin-keel).  Time,

History here touch the rim

of a labyrinth (Fro-Back, so corny)

whose perimeter outlines her face –

smiling, dreaming, lost

in the supple meadow-grass

of Eros flowering to Agape (O Grace).

Spruce Mountain rises straight ahead,

pilgrim – just south of Bonnie

Craigielee.  Matilda will be

waltzing there, in a tamarack shade

not far from the sea; she will take your hand

where kids’ bird-voices

boomerang – where earth rejoices

in equilibrium, & equity.  One command

radiates Franciscan swag of turtledove;

one cloud sheds orange arcs

over antipodean parks

of aboriginal penitence (blue Jonah-love).

8.22.16

painting by Phoebe Gould (about age 10)

for the Samaritans of Skala Sikaminias

ROOSTERS CROW

                                       for the rescuers

A gray light shines through the normal world

a silver-scale dawnlight

like the sea-sound in the right

chord on an oud, like a sail unfurled

on a cedar mast, standing simply free

on a fishing boat, out of Skala

Sikaminias, on Lesbos.  Ah,

sighs the wind, for the drowned refugee –

Oh, keens the seaman, for the ghost

of his son (a scarecrow

helped to shore).  Hard row

now, for Samaritans – for the host

village, gasping by the sea, in the normal

world, in the feathered light

of the mourning dove, so quiet

here (in the soughing wind, in the tall

cedars, in the shy bird’s nest, in the forest

dusk, in the soft

dawnlight, in the gray gull’s loft,

in the normal world).  Plain salt is best.

On a concrete floor, someone traced a star

like an octagon, in a Sapphic

ode – under harsh traffic,

under raving codes, like a graven bar

on a looping ply.  In a rosy key

sailors skim toward home –

from a morning comb,

roosters crow for Lesbos (merrily).

8.18.16

*for more information on sources of this poem, see today's New York Times article

convex grassland cave-complex

PINK TUGBOAT

I retrace my steps again

along the River Road

past Granddad’s solid old

brick fortress.  A trumpet vine

shines orange & green, climbing

a mud-brown corner into

August light.  I’ll go

down to that riverbank now, rhyming

with Nile & Jordan, Voronezh, Po –

a stream that crosses borders,

winding atlatl corridors

so sinuous & serpentine, into

the gray matière, the mutter-mouth...

sea-grotto of an Ocean

State (salt origin

of shanty-song).  From north to south

diagonal, my yellow gyroscope

leans, vaulting on thread

from Gate of the Dead

(whose soft, dense orange-&-azure rope-

ladder lifts up the gravity of stolid

steel & staggered stone)

to Magdalenian

interior... & cartwheels there – Bride

of convex grassland cave-complex –

Cahokia coyote-

gal, whose Galilee

glee-zone (primordial) sketches a hex-

                  *

agon – galactic rumble-stir

of light-warp milky skein

or reign of windy Wayne,

pouring a Who-He? mirror-

ray into the rainbow trine

of spray-tossed clement

Clementine.  Cement

shoes will not keep her in the brine

of Poseidon forever – see her shadow

stride the surface now!

With pink tugboat in tow

paintered to Ariadne’s golden bow

– refracted ball of lambswool, bent

through Roger Williams’ granite

lintel – Dante’s bright

brooder-line.  The Great Commandment

coming down from Manitou

like light... it is

not liable to conquest –

conscience is free, a gift to you

who seek for Me.  A wheeling sword

glinted above a garden;

a ring of apple trees, hidden

in shade of Sant’Apollinaire.  Word

melody   green hummingbird vine

Guillaume’s trompette marine

a secret acorn   Queen

of Royal Oak   (she is a 5   & 29)

8.17.16

Noah's yawl

DANTE SCHOOL

Long ago in Florence, Alighieri

smashed the limestone font

at the Baptistery – Don’t

Panic! – to save a little boy

from drowning.  His prophetic sign,

a riposte for his own exile –

sluiced out with bile

& blood of lawlessness (Italian

style).  The sea rides high, the rain

seems endless.  Human

callousness a given,

leaden sinker-weights anchored in pain

call for a coracle, a basket-woven

safety net (to keep

the child alive, upon

the deep).  Cross-stitch the waves then,

Raven – paint Noah’s yawl afloat

until we memorize the name

that hawsers through this game

of crosshairs (golden, black & white).

Only a shadow over the sea;

an eyelash, lancing

a tiny tear.  So bring

your harp now, Queequeg – free

that pearl-feathered quasi-gull

whose omnipresence bobs

the wavy globe.  Corncobs

& acorns in Polenta (Dante school).

8.16.16

like Don in Key West

milkweed palms

DOUBLE-DECKER

Hobo lounged by the great gray Ocean

River, his old hide detached

a little from his mind,

like Don in Key West, his one-

time winter host (at the Q Motel).

Distanced a little from the

whitecaps, red & blue,

that molder to a stucco frieze of Hell

sometimes.  He remembers wild violets

that peek beneath gray toes

of an elder copper beech, whose

crown shades Providence; those roots

drill deeper than the black & white

of shaky party platforms.

Down beneath worms

mining resentment & indifference, the bite

of greedy centipedes, the slugs

cold as a winter street

in Minneapolis, whose neat

chewing fattens themselves alone (bugs

do not think about their neighbors).

Whose murmurous gray arms

have framed the milkweed farms

of metaphysical Hope, that anchors

Roger Williams’ canoe –

Love’s almond chariot

that smiling Faith built

out of flocks of can-do

monarch wings, green palms

circumferencing the gray

scallops of yesterday –

twin limestone radials (emblems

of spousal harmony, e pluribus

unum).  Whose tap sinks toward

the center of the gourd,

the hearth Love stokes, wells tears...

& where a voice from her grey mirror

sang in Hobo’s ear –

Behold the Platonic Year

revolve at last, aboard my double-decker

Greyhound!  When the game of suits

& spades & royal clubs

gives way to hearts purple

& ruddy diamonds – twin 52s

orbit an orange origami octagon,

one Chinese lantern, standing

in the night garden – bring

Hobo to the table, then!  It’s done!

He pondered pumpkin murmurings,

& mooned there, by the muddy

banks.  The breeze of poetry...

only a feeling (sighed).  Our burdenings

borne by that humble muse, whose trust

in some deep loving cloud

grey Manitou’s abode

will wave back (Noah’s buoyant crust).

8.15.16

Hoboland

let her skip

DAKOTA HEXAGON

This quiet August day toward

the cusp of autumn.  Green

vine-light in the cavern

where Henry hides his raven-word.

That empty chair in Dante’s sky-

deep rose, for all the hoped-

for prophets, emperors...

& here’s Sophia’s little throne (my

dancing-master’s rosy resting-

spot).  Let her skip

fearless across the ship

of state, her toy basilica, questing;

the Greyhound of the Lord, her

vengeance, comes to this –

gray clouds of Providence

replete with rain; a pregnant mother

radiant with clearing day; the shades

of persecution blown away

by ocarinas (clay-

shell turtledoves, dolphin parades).

Ineffable golden Hephaestus-net...

veil of corn fleece over

a West Branch face.  Her

sister in D.C. (Adams duet) –

icon of Miriam & Magdalen,

Dakota hexagon

implicit in the sun

of Washington... cartwheels, Columbian.

8.13.16