like a transparent crane-bone flute

UPSTART FLARE

Under Siberian pale-blue ice

tiny frozen spirals form.

Where memories swarm

in whirlpools, counter-clockwise –

Hobo spring of vagrant musing.

Follow me down, she

murmurs, toward the sea –

limpid ocean floor of everything.

The coil of wet clay tightens, slowly.

Welterings of catkin passions

merge beneath an old man’s

glaze (welded to an osier orrery).

It is the Mississippi bottomland

of errant, febrile heart.

Hot kiln, or upstart

flinty flare; centripetal lampstand.

The bare simplicity of San Francesco

floats like a transparent

crane-bone flute –

an air set like a feather in the flow,

a bubble in the world of local trials.

Love the Lord your Wakan Tanka

& your neighbor, Raven Caw-

Caw – this call melts all frozen wiles.

So the clay wheel rotates slowly,

turns inexorably north

south east... & forth

to high Pacific gate – lofting her Liberty.

12.20.19

like a phantom of spring

LAMBENT PRESENCE

Slouched on the couch, Hobo is

near the shortest day.

Earth’s winter way,

making her rounds – stoic old Miz.

The river like a froze French drain

her Via Francigena makes

past dirt-bent snakes

of old St. Lou.  Where Jackson

Quick, somehow, came from – pilot

on Yankee hospital ship, 1863 –

late father of Jessie

O. (caught fever, like as not).

Full fathom five, Jessie, thy father.

Like Jenny’s mother, too,

huh?  Little tree (cedar

or yew).  See my ghost dance gather.

The natural round is in the clay

& waiting for that Last Day

each grieving soul will say

O help me turn another way.

This lambent presence in the window

like a phantom of spring.

Persephone, in a ring-

dance, leapt over the fire, so –

lifted by droning hum of living

& dead, out of clay

wheel, through the Gateway –

wave-crest prow, loafer’s Thanksgiving.

12.17.19

only piano in town

CLAY BARN

6-yr-old Sophie curls up in the lap

of grumpy old Grandpa

to listen to Grandma 

read us the story of Jingle Bells.  Slap-

happy Mr. Pierpont, of Medford Mass.

watching 12 skating sliders

skim frozen circles (laughter’s

elves) runs next door to Mrs. Waterman’s

– only piano in town, to test his melody

& the rest is history

she’s ready for bed, isn’t she

Sophie’s growing up fast, Henry

The tall Norway pine at the prow

of the duplex, like a mast

climbing up toward one vast

frosty galaxy, with its Xmas lights in tow

(Grandpa’s dad’s project once, long ago)

they don’t glow anymore

but the duplex lies at anchor

like every ark, Egyptian barge, Ferrara canoe

like every nave, like every churnagogue,

like every Celtic coracle –

round as a 4-leaf miracle

of Columba, or Mayflower Compact (ship’s log

of covenanted sheep’s union);

round as lightswept dome

of Hagia Sophia, or home

sweet home (clay barn, Mississippian)

12.16.19

small icon, a gift of Elena Shvarts, poet of St. Petersburg

come here, baby Minotaur

SEA-SAND

Love is the end & the beginning.

Cave-artists in Sulawesi

drew pigments from red scree

for their wild pigs, dwarf buffalo (zing

go the arrows of the sacred hunters,

therianthropes).  44,000

years in burial mound

(palm-prints on wooden posts for pointers).

Desire in soggy adolescent clay

molts to perversity

or rises to chaste clarity;

smiles of mothers & fathers slay

the stony-hearted Minotaur

with a burl of soft air

(light for the maze-lair).

Love circles back to where you are.

Come here, baby Minotaur,

you’re going to dance with me.

Concrete comes from the sea-

sand; this milk is from a star.

I’myeh spirit helper, Jonah Raven.

Take this clay, spit

into your hand, & roll it,

mold it to your eye.  There’s Ocean-

Ouroboros, glowing in the deep.

That’s Milky Way, that’s

Morning Star... your heart’s

a coracle, Cordelia (wake beyond sleep).

12.12.19

bateaux of old Louisiana

SPEECHLESS GIFT

It was 50 years ago now, Julie.

We were with the sleepers

in a dream, the jumpers

on a fogbound bridge – our odyssey

a sleepwalk of necessity

from day to day.  America

was manifest, a replica

of heaven for the taking – see?

This land was made for you & me.

But you & I sank down

into Pacific depths, my clown,

so young, so sad, so gone.  Ahey

ey yo.  It’s in the bottomland

or on the ocean floor

you’ll find the coral door,

the seashell, Pearl – your eye-in-hand.

Like Joan of A. moored to a smoking pyre

or O. still singing in Leviathan-jaw

bateaux of old Louisiana

meet like rose petals in a western choir.

& the Word-made-light, that sank into the clay

sprang up again, as speechless gift

in the dome where every tongue will lift

& feed upon her painful vine (his dying-day).

Our ghost-dance, Julie – tiptoe in a dream.

JB whispers, Eurydice!

& circuiting the dome with me

hums from Rez graveyard in a Joan A-frame.

12.11.19

train to Boston

FATE-LINES

Hobo follows his instinct to the river.

A serpentine circulation,

labyrinth – heart’s burn.

Romans might haruspicate the liver

of an ox, or note the forays of a raven

like smoke-signals overhead;

Hobo lingers with his own dead

Providence photos – train to Boston

or that old blind man who walks the plank

straight off the cliff (at Prospect

Park).  Ghosts intersect.

Eurydice in San Fran hits a blank

wall of blue salt water.  Prince Henry Hal

uproots the better part of soul

to be the bard imperial –

shelving himself with racks of Fleurs du Mal.

To be refuge for troubled consciences,

Rhode Island was.  & was.

Hobo works with materials

by eye-in-hand (fate-lines, hunches);

commissioned for a wedding-song

of earthen pots (Cahokian)

& Morning Star – where one

Virgo-conjunction plants her Gateway prong

the Rio del Espiritu Santo will merge

St. El with Muddy Waters

& Ravenna’s virgin martyrs

with a N’Orleans fanfare... cosmic splurge.

12.10.19

signum of yearning

DOOM-BELL

The simple poem sets its seal on the day

(signum of yearning, lack

& bronze heartbreak).

It doesn’t create, but confirms, I say –

tacit equipoise of universe,

with roaring hearth

mirroring each heart

in Milky Way (our fiery nurse).

& of that translucent softest koinonia

the poem’s just a line.

Graven tattoo or riverine

El (whorled conscience of Columbia).

So when the Rabbi hums a restoration of all things

we understand what he means

& feel it in our bones –

sunlight in the kitchen supersedes all kings.

Liberty-tyranny-liberty; light-dark-light...

your Florentine chessboard

migrates its word-hoard

to Skye, & beyond (stern Ocean slate).

Your buoy rides the moiling salt

like a lucky pawn

become kingpin again;

Hamlet swings the doom-bell... halt,

who goes there? – solo Ophelia

hoovers up all Denmark

from her West Branch park,

& Evening Star glows like Astraea.

12.9.19

the otherness of the poem

RIVER-VEIN

The turning year brings its anniversaries.

Sunken ships in the harbor.

My fleeting image of an arbor

green on the slope at Golden Gate – Julie’s

last day (her father Jim’s birthday).

Today the sun glistens

as if through Temple linens;

pearl beyond price, merciful Gateway...

The otherness of the poem is merely

the cosine of a conversation,

Cuz.  Light trinity of sun-

moon-star, embedded in clay lips (dearly).

As America is balanced in the scales

by a feather from Byzantium,

so a Pipestone eagle-drum

summons a kingdom borne on wing-sails.

Covenantal arc of steel

at navel of the earth;

gangway to spoke-berth

coralized beyond our iron wheel.

& from a pearl-eye in the mandorla

light beams to every hamlet-

brig across the planet –

melting the blood-red wax of Danelaw

& Washington, pouring dark wine

into each muddy river-vein,

lofting all-human

fellowship again (curving J-spiral sign).

12.7.19

bridges of Hennepin County

PROOF-STONE

So many bridges flung across this river

like stitches on a wound –

their heavy iron-concrete bond

knitting a wintry Twin Cities together.

One thing is welded to another,

like the almond in a Venn

design – Cahokian

canoe of koinonia? – out of mother-

clay, spun wide... like risen bread,

or galaxies of diamond fire.

So lights flash over limestone

mire, through night-black thunderhead.

& Hobo, hunched beside the riverbank

is like the shadow of Henry

as Henry is of lowly

Galilean king (his incognito prank)

– as are we all, in that high diagram

checkering light across a dome

in old Egyptian Byzantium

(proof-stone of perpendicular wisdom).

Like Hagia Sophia with a million eyes...

rimming the twin-bent boughs

of swelling arcs (in Voronezh)

where East & West, mud-rings & skies

are melded in your almond lips’ ellipse

& God & Imago

& world & Churnagogue

are sanctified, sealed with a kiss

of peace (pax, agape – Wakan Tanka);

where Rio del Espiritu Santo

whispers I love you so

& Hobo walks with sister Joan (Columbia).

12.3.19

Byzantium or high Armenia

SPRUNG RITE

Light snow cascades into December dusk.

Each flake a brief memento

of infinity.  Drifting so

far... from a distant world.  Ask

& it shall be given unto you,

intones the snowy-mantled

priest (Byzantium,

or high Armenia).  So the seed grew

amid its granary of full, deep faith.

Here in Minneapolis,

first snow is ceremonious.

A sanctification for the dying earth,

a last light blessing to the forehead

of a fading year.  I think

of Roger, leaning at the brink

of the Terrace... one hand lifted

floating over Providence spread out below

& miming his canoe’s prow –

an equilibrium of high & low,

of holy & mundane (Jonah-Hobo).

& Henry, tilting on the pivot-point

of Berryman’s rail (Washington)

is rescued from oblivion

by a mustard seed of restoration... faint

hexagon of gold sky-fire, transfiguring

the babble of his broken tongue

to chaste vision – sprung

rite from Ravenna (almond wing).

12.1.19

if I walk through this wormhole

LEAN MUSIC

If I walk with Hobo through this wormhole

at the bottom of a zigzag

Mississippi... will I see Cesca Tag

again, when we were young (my soul)?

In Providence?  Et tu, S2?

Picketing the perimeter

of Sagittarius A*,

noting that gravitational tug, you

sense her there, the ghost star...

back of an ecce-crypt

time-vacancy you slipped

through (holeworm, treacherous sailor).

Lean music of the sunflower.

Tall spirit loyal to the sky.

Your gravity a steel gateway,

oar-eye – florescing tacit power.

So this gold Einstein-Rosen bridge

domed by the Milky Way

shines like a lighthouse ray

into a monarch’s heart.  You wedge

there, anxiously, between her wings,

like the child in the blindfold

when a Black Ship sailed...

til tenderly his midnight origami brings

enfoldment to the nth dimension;

Liberty her royal seal

in beeswax, breathing... feel,

Hamlet, soft sunlight’s restoration!

11.19.19

perhaps we are Hagia Sophia

JAPANESE NOTE

Down by Mirror Lakes, in Mendelssohn

Henry collects the silver

trading cards of a younger

self.  Still innocent (the future Hobo-man).

In that Providence springtime,

when we were setting out.

Pure Japanese note

of your own childhood (high chime

of Tokyo folksong).  Your Florentine

round pallor, papery

sheepglow (Butterfly).

Who knew I’d be the priggish Pinkerton

of Rensselaerville epithalamia?

Til that blindfolded boy

waving a Yankee flag (say,

can you see?) – sows stony drama...

Puccini’s on the turntable, at Amiata.

Her spectral Iris-wings

loft LIBERTY (to thee we sing)

unto this microcosm of liublyu stigmata.

Yet, perhaps... we are Hagia Sophia

with a million eyes.

The crucifixion of surprise

curves down, humbled with apatheia

– still time, still time, to turn

from the spent spirit

to that glad esprit

reflecting oui (edging Ravenna urn).

11.18.19

the sense of being right

GREEN EYE

The sense of being right, said Mandelstam

confronted by the Kremlin

goons.  Gumilev’s vision

of sweet radiance (chaste equilibrium

of morning dew).  The restoration

of all things might not be

some dystopic unreality

but a balancing of earth & heaven –

the way a canoe takes wing downstream

like feathery kayak

or golden bubble-track

across the sky (the Ocean River of your dream).

Kennedy, Jack.  A 4-leaf clover

assassinated every day

along with brother Bobby, &

King, Martin Luther (justice-lover).

A green eye floats, engraved over

the pyramid.  I calibrate

the shifting angles of a late

Atlantis – one heartbroken sky-rover

whose tears will magnify an Iris

in transit, like Venus

(from luxuria to lux

aeternam).  She was born for this –

to be the eye-in-hand of muddy clay

transmitting Jonah to Columbia;

to launch a hallelujah

from Monk’s Mound to D.C. (U.S.A.).

11.17.19

mercurial transit of the Martian sun

GRAND MARQUIS

Armistice Day.  For all veterans.

For memory of an end

to hostilities.  Promised Land

or Providence... high limbs of the ones

who came before, palms lifted (orans).

From martyrs of brave speech,

whole truth, let us beseech

ineffable blessing.  Alighieri stands

nigh frozen Sant’Apollinaire

trasumanare in Ravenna.

Where mossy Giuliana

calls me from her potter’s lair

(soft aviator from a sunken realm).

Like that Tim Taylor, seeker

at Pacific depth (1132

ft. down... USS Grayback graven on its helm).

Project Lost 52 – to bring to light

every forsaken sheep-canoe

& let them float anew

somewhere divine (mercurial transit

of the Martian sun).  She’s calling me.

Like salt-grain in the war-engine,

a kernel from the Corn Maiden

of Grant Wood haunts... her Grand Marquis

a black blind spot across that gilded orb,

Ferrari Rio Santo Spiritu –

she snakes toward you (& you)

from her smile-park (topaz to curb).

11.11.19

Apollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Minneapolis (MN)

SNOW WHEEL

A little snow meanders down in Minneapolis

to cold November earth.

Guillaume, prince triste of mirth

was lowered from his balcony in Paris

two days before the Armistice.

Grandpa packed up his guns

one last time, near Verdun.

Spent rulers carpentered their peace.

Sacre du Printemps set the stage.

Russkaia Neva-sacrifice

summons her apotheosis –

leaps for the holocaust of banal rage

mounting to self-consuming poshlost peak.

Apollinaire was there

that night (under the sulfur-

flare, the guttering of Belle Epoque).

Grandpa field-marshaled the parades

on Armistice Day.  Lafayette,

we are here... the old print

over the dinner table (Revolutionary shades

trippin’ la gigue française, at Mt. Vernon).

My ghosts are here now,

in November snow.

The Rio fleuves inexorably on

down to St. Louee, New Orleans.

Jeanne spins with Jessie

to their Stagger Lee...

my snow wheel hums, Rose (oriens).

11.10.19

I dream a general restoration

CONTRA-DANCE

The early ice on the Mississippi

forms a maze of frozen

eddies, a chaos of cotton-

wood leaves on glass, all dark & ripply.

Somber November drawing on

toward JB’s Janus-mouth.

Slight man, moth-

light, leaf-blown from iron span.

I dream a general Restoration

cousin, cuz.  Because

our love that never was

lies crypted in a deeper congregation

of earthworms... Earth-life...

this pumpkin-celebration

where each seed is someone

like a minuscule canoe (collective

buoyancy, anchored in agape).

Not that Cyclops-utopia

ice-locked with Satana

– imperador del doloroso regno, nay!

Rather a contra-dance of Earth

& Sky, a balancing

of stillness with evolving –

clay vase molded into mirth

by humble presence of the king

(of servant-kings).  A single

molecule of brine (NaCl)

is tabernacle bread & wine (of everything)

                            *

& you will meet her in the ordinary courtyard

of the everyday (she’s Everywoman-

Everyman).  This is a vision

of figure & ground.  She’s walking toward

you, now... like Roger Williams, stepping through

twin pillars on the Terrace...

Providence, a place

of mercy & discretion (fair & true).

I cannot put it into words, this waltz

of swirling time & high

eternity.  It is the sky

spanning the sea.  It is the salt

in everything; it is the molten dove

dive-bombing into clay

who joins you in a sway

of hurtling dancers (Milky Way

a-sarabanding, up above).  I cannot

put it into words.

The brutal violence

(stone-hearted ignorance) surds in a knot

of self-destruction, planetary waste

& You must turn & repent

cries San Francesco, bent

upon his imitatio Christi (feet laced

with scars).  It is the Via Francigena.

You will walk back to the river

sped with such a pulse... her

springing from the graveyard (Magdalena).

11.7.19

essential graphene histrionics

AUTUMN NIGHT

My biographical Brown Decades tumbled

rapidly by, in Providence.

How simply the silence

of these beseeching trees (autumn

at the Arboretum) speaks to me!

Alex Weinstein, in Mt. Auburn...

stood there with Sandy (Grecian

Urn?  Likely committed it to memory).

He played the violin at 91.

Emigré from Odessa –

fruit-fly research @ Columbia –

loved poetry & science... (thread-thin,

stooped, seraphic gentleman

of Cambridge Mass.) –

& so the fleet years pass,

callow Henry, to Thanksgiving (amen,

amen).  I put my faith in one

contextual canoe –

dry tacit Quaker taboo

against unquestioned superstition;

a sort of Boston Personalism

accepting each whorl

of conscience as the real

sign of some ineffable wisdom –

spring, source, coil, J

spiraling beneath a moon

brighter than cogitation

tonight... in a jumbled chaos of hay

                  *

stacked (by osmosis-creation)

across twistronic history

into graphene infinity.

Histrionics of pacemaker nation?

No, kid – it is the equilibrium

of a canoe or gyroscope

emanating (spilling hope)

out of the heart of the Imperium

accosting the Seizer of All Good

with adjusted reciprocity

of infinite mercy –

that normative hearth-neighborhood

established on the everlasting rock

of I & Thou, of eye

& dhou (equality

the ratio of the basic J’nah-Ark).

& so the weird Isis-receptacle

of Mirror-I-Am

fuses in twin-rhyme

with Notre Dame; so the spectacle

of male narcissism becomes unviable

at ordinary crowing

of Rhode Island Red – being,

like palm at the end of the mind, able

to hoot like Owl o’Athena

in the autumn night of

history   (the shadow of love

bending over your cradle)   Ephphatha

11.5.19

the true poem always comes from elsewhere

NEAR KINNERET

This is that ancient harvest night.

You bring a refugee inside

– might be an angel of God –

& find participation is the true delight.

The otherness-&-love of God

deflects the local stream

from its own banks.  A dream

intrudes – disturbs each land of Nod.

Bright Dante, growing gaunt & gray

steps into a seashell

– beached, like him, in exile.

Tall haunted shades of Sant’Apollinare

gaze, raining compassion

from wide almond eyes

like springs, like Beatrice’s...

he feels at home.  O prodigal son!

Poema sacra must be reconfigured.

Maximus in prison

by the Black Sea... vision

like shadow of the Argo soared

– an Easter visitant, come dawning

far above Firenze, or

this rusted blue-red frenzy

ferrying Rubicon (Cain-abling)

& you are weeping, you are smiling

far beyond sacrifice,

climbing that hill-face

near Kinneret (life-reconciling).

11.2.19

an ocean swell

ACORN-RIM

This is that ancient harvest night.

Rhode Island harvesting

the sea.  A Newport wedding

(Jacqueline & Jack) at rocky height

(of Sachuest). & as the whale

harvesting the sea as well

is no less an ocean swell,

& Jonah is his pearl – still hale

& whole, alive from deeps of hell –

so Henry might rise again

from his own carapace of sin

(that shimmery-mirror Minotaur-spell).

Hobo-Falstaff lurks beneath a branch

of raven-wood (Cautantowwit,

Caws-too-much-wit).  Stone-set

into the Seeker’s providential avalanche –

one violet for the junk-jewelry state.

The salt air clears his head.

One Spirit wakens all the dead,

he chants – one Dream outshining potentate

& pyramid.  He nurses Henry back to health

like Whitman with his milky muse;

Abe & martyr Martin fuse

into the circle of their commonwealth –

a coracle or ark of Liberty

circumferencing azure shores,

whose acorn-rim Henry restores

to dappled shade (bright almond eye).

11.1.19