More dashed-off Palio obliquities...

9

 
Fern-like wing of pterodactyl memory
flickers across my still piano keys.
A tight-wound, sprightly voice (for skating
stories) glides aslant late winter atmosphere.

 
Today's bright leafless April air.
What roguish Osric sun enforced
the tale's evasive metamorphoses?
Nile Indian-mound harbors a meteor.

 
Some sweet-sad circus waltz, limping
toward lair of Boris - and Natasha's
eyebrow-temple's early-bird nostalgia's
blue-gray mini-Yenisei lone-wolf lope.

 
Shuttlings, crisscrossing strings -
knots, hefting a milkweed countryman
suspended from bronze-copper perihelion.
Mean angle, hour unacceptable.  She hangs

 
about, her gaze freezing the frieze,
arms flung high like everlasting piers.
Not to move.  Gray dove (in tears).
A quit-coin, masted, bridged, in breeze.

 
As if the catenary lift (elliptical)
of all those wheeling premonitions,
prohibitions, circled your Samson-
shoulder's own shy shadow (typical

 
eclipse).  The fresco registered each one.
Your date is waiting in the wings, forlorn
like some unlucky Frieda for her balder
Abe - an April skid-schedule for Phaethon.

About yesterday's post : I don't want to give the impression of simply tying poetry to religion. I've always viewed the market/racket in artistic "spirituality" with distaste & suspicion. The various cults of transcendental thinking, the hi-jinks, occult mumbo-jumbo of poetic mages & popularizers - the whiff of pseudo-religion puts me off Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, some of Olson, many more. But maybe to others I come across the same way...

That's not my intention. Poetry's purview is everything under the sun, every subject, ever level of tone & style - omnivorous - lightweight & heavy, secular & "catholic".

However - by the same permission - there's room in poetry for special projects like my own (the saga of Henry). Dante thought so, anyway.

Fontegaia, Fontegaia...

8

 
The light slows in the evening, thickens
like dark honey, grows more dense.
In the high room - in the quiet confluence
of silent frescos, frozen civic scenes.

 
Here time slows gradually toward stillness, too.
The moon glints through an eastern window,
sunset radiates the western view - tomorrow's
just a Washington slept here, nestled in futurity.

 
Below that tower, on a sunken stream
(imaginary Di) somebody's plucky packet 
boat makes for the source.  He plunks
half a piano, for a double-deck of dreamers -

 
weaklings, cards - dressed to the nines
(someone elected them almost at least...)
- he played the fastest 44 out East, they
said.  Curved ivory whispers in the pines.

 
Music revolves around and round
until it finishes where it began -
a double wreath of birth and death,
the milk and honey of Melchizedek.

 
A tom-tom of the doom (eternity).
Such were words he muttered quietly
while tinkling the pilot's keys, while
angling that penny-swap mosquito boat.

 
Such be the b-flat of finality.
It drones for you, for me,
it is the adamant of history...
the high room's bright hilarity.

Can I say anything more about this poem, Fontegaia, without spoiling the fun (if there is any)?

Have been at my idiosyncratic process for so long it's sort of hard to take a step back.

Is it all so dark, abstruse, obscure? Maybe. Maybe requires a lot of scaffolding, instruction manuals...

I follow certain ways of seeing things & thinking about things. I share much of this, I believe (I hope), with other like-minded people. But as a poet, I don't enjoy cliches and shopworn generalizations about deep & mysterious facets of experience. I want to see (& say) things as they are, or as they were "on the 1st day of creation". This is an aspect of the intellectual game of my poems. The serial-continuous-repetitive forms are, I guess, in part anyway, a mode of expressive contemplation or meditation. I want to express the "brow of reality", in my own way.

As you can probably tell, I've come increasingly to see things through some kind of spiritual-theological lens. (Of course, this loses a lot of people, scares them off.) There are a few mental foundations I return to, whenever I try to do one of these self-summaries.

Such as the notion that reality is "personal" in some ultimate sense. That the universe is suspended in some fairly indescribable creative consciousness.

& the idea that human history is subsumed within a (very) dramatic narrative of salvation history, which involves, on its most basic level, a promise or covenant between the Eternal and the mortal, the human; and which promise is fulfilled in the most distinct and "incarnational" fashion, in actual human history.

& the counterbalancing notion that this "salvation drama" has been, from the beginning, in some sense a symbolic intervention - a representative action : the full, mysterious, intricate, various & particular truth(s) of which cannot be concretized in language. Language - even "sacred" language - only acts as sign : pointing, directing us to look & see & understand. Truth itself (going back to the notion of the "personal", subjective quality of creative consciousness) can only be embodied. (Walt Whitman descants on this point over & over again, in great phrases : "The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything." & etc. etc.)

These two counterbalancing notions (actual - yet representative - salvation drama) find their crux, for me anyway, in the Good Friday & Easter events. A representative (unjust) death; a representative resurrection. As the death on the Cross is a figure for the death of Everyman & -woman - for our own particular mortality; and the resurrection is the same, ie., has representative meaning for each of us, personally, subjectively.

(Someone like me might also argue (& in so doing enter perhaps confusing & dangerous theological waters) that the clear recognition of both the actual & representative elements of this drama, is the sign itself of Joachim's & Bonaventure's coming of the "new age" : which was, for them, to be a change & renovation of the world, under the reign of contemplation.)

In my poems these events are encapsulated in the various "plays" I make on the letter "J", the word "Jay"... in one important example, "J" stands for "Jonah", which means "dove" in Hebrew. In this word are meshed both (1)the (comic) story of the runaway prophet in the bowels of the whale (a symbol, for me, of the existential blind travails of Everyman), and (2) the story of Pentecost, of the simultaneous and omnipresent manifestation of the post-resurrection-spirit - the "ghost-dance" presence of God (as dove) in the heart of Everyman. So in "Jonah" you have the melding of both crucifixion (the whale) and resurrection (the dove).

Poetry, in my view & practice anyway, offers a means of expressing visions of "how things are", which contrast with the methods & results of standard discursive prose, philosophical reflection, scientific analysis, etc. Poetry, as an art of "embodied" language, offers fundamentally dramatic models of reality; by "performing" language as self-sufficient play and exploration, these models suggest a universe which (somehow) underwrites & shares these same qualities - by rendering it suffused with personality & consciousness (as Whitman, again, pioneered so powerfully). In my understanding, a recognition & growing trust in these aspects of reality might help open the door to the full flowering of the love and confidence which is already hidden (in potentiality, in seed-form) in every person.

Fontegaia, I guess, is a kind of river-trip exploration of these & other realities. Along with previous extended poems (in Forth of July etc.) I try to dramatize & recapitulate these realities in the present, in the lingo of today.... and in so doing, to offer evidence for the idea that Time itself, as we know it anyway, manifests some kind of arcane ring structure - both ever-Now and (historically-chronologically-actually) symbolic - the mystery of which is in a process of continuous unfolding....

John Latta, today, conveys a discerning comment by Denise Levertov, on the Beats & "experience". More useful background on Our Past Poetickal.

Fontegaia Space Odyssey.

7

 
A still-bare delta of branching limbs
in light March rain.  Tributaries
flecked with tiny green flotillas.
Something pulsing through those stems

 
redeems the worn-out winter grass,
trash-dotted ground.  Old unshaven
hung-over hobo season!  Even pavement
sprouts your weedy wanderlust (en-masse).

 
A momentary pirhouette.  10, 9, 8...
two billion years from now, the galaxies
Andromeda and Milky Way (say stargazers)
will marry, merge.  Black-hole checkmate.

 
The End.  So let Hobo unfold his hand.
A pocket-size apocalypse (poco al poco,
loco pard).  He'll only marry Mocha
Midge, his loony star - her wedding band

 
but a wavelength long (blood orange to
dark honey milk).  Twin doubtful wraith
those two will plait - a ghostly path
across Lethe - wrung out of range

 
of deepest light (one copper penny
pays the fare).  And we were there,
fair witnesses.  It's in the air,
maroon, marine - in Magdalen's keen

 
cleaving to your fate.  A way of seeing
April blindly home; a copper wight's green
calibration, tightening a Pvt. No One's
skull.  You paid in full, O Revenant (beaming).

Where is this Fontegaia, the poem, a-goin'?

Who cares? Not Poetryland. Their loss.

It's not work, for me. It's play, though it takes some effort.

I'm trying to blend some things, some figures & ideas. I'm drawing toward a design & thematic crux of this long poem. (There is a numerical & sort of structural design, but I won't go into that.)

What's it all about? Well, I'm trying to establish some affinities - very tentative, very gradual, very indirect.

1) there's the link between, on the one hand, Siena, as a sort of aesthetic model of the "free city", with its art and natural surroundings (the hidden river Diana) - and, on the other hand, some of the spiritual roots which have a presence as part of that history : the cult of the Virgin as Patron of Siena; the background presence of St. Francis and the Franciscan ethos (poverty, brotherhood, love of nature), and the mystical-historical thinking of Joachim of Fiore & St. Bonaventure. The notion of the millennial "city coming down from heaven", the New World. The little model city which the Emperor offers to the Virgin, in the Byzantine mosaics.

2) & there's the affinity between those things & the ecstatic-visionary spirit of Walt Whitman - very "San Franciscan" - filtered partially through Hart Crane (the Bridge, the River, the hobos, the "key").

3) & there's the "river"/fountain motif... the mingling of Amazon-Nile-Mississippi-Jordan... the interest in the Ethiopian version of the "ark of the covenant".

4) & there's the mingling of several painters & their images - Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Martin Ramirez, Jasper Johns, et al. & their connections with Crane, with all these other themes, with Joachim's drawings - his (& Dante's) spiritual "geometry".

5) & there are personal & autobiographical impulses & references.

So slowly, partially, obscurely, indirectly, I'm concocting a sort of American elixir... drawing connections with old things & old poets, toward ideas and commitments which are still important for poetry & history & social life today.

(p.s. & who's this "Frisbee"? Well, Frisbee is the name my mother gave to an adventurous little Tom-Thumb character about whom she told stories, back in the 1950s - such as the one about Frisbee sailing his paper boat down the spring rainwater brooks in the dirt road called Arthur Street, where we lived. A few years later, "Frisbee" reappeared in my family history, as the name of the whirling disk produced by the Whammo company - the copyright for which my father, a lawyer, had something to do. I remember flying Frisbee prototypes around the yard with my brothers. I suppose I've already written about this, here.)

6

 
It must have been a time like this,
in the beginning of evening.  Between
naptime & dinner, supper & night-night.
In Mendelssohn (the music of what is).

 
A circuit of happenings, a plot - a splendor
played out in murmurs, mirthful surf.
Backwater pools; tributaries
trickled over turf.  You begged for more.

 
Like a supple dancer following a tune
her story swims into your heart's delight.
Nine muses, seven days... his tiny chariot
spins faster.  Frisbee matches sun and moon.

 
Then weeks of years... weak years
of broken twine... you counted swine
while waiting.  Waiting for the tail-end
of the tale, at last (printemps appears).

 
Now sunset touches dappled walls
in the lofty room, where time came
to an end.  Twelve candles frame
a moody, shaded ricochet - signals

 
from beach to ball, from all to each -
as if an omnipresent rainbow reigned
muttering warm colors.  And remained
(uttering itself just out of reach).

 
It was in the family from the beginning,
then.  (The Negus branch - remember Lucy,
when she'd just begun to skip?)  & so will be
- see the young dancer step the ancient ring.

Fontegaia zeroes in.

5

 
Saturday afternoon.  A lambent flickering
through old porch glass.  Slight rainbow
effect against yellow-green (stealing
toward brown) wood frame.  A ring

 
of midwestern Mnemosyne (faint memory
of summer cabins?) lingers on the mental
doorstep.  This is how they call,
the seraphim (hardly there, really).

 
A pair of prophets in a sunset fresco,
silent (in the weekend city hall).
They stand beside a doorway.  Still.
Wrapt irises converge on San Francisco.

 
We hardly knew you're there.
Like mutters of a hobo sketch artist,
horsing around in solitary.  O most petite
one o'nine muses, grace his gray,

 
his patriotic zero stare!  For good.
His flag's his flagging repertoire -
a simple tune of freedom (by a shore
of IKB and salty waters, streaking red).

 
Under the darkening colors, beneath
the gray, a midnight milk-&-honey train
hoots (like wayward whale) across the plain.
Upstream, along the riverbank (its wraith

 
of steam trailing the other way).  Zigzag
retreat toward monkish habitat (gray-
green palm fronds, some Sheba-almond joy).
Sheds everything, grows light (high milky jag).

I start working on these things during breaks at work. Then, if I have time & energy, I write them later.

4

 
Providence.  Rain-soaked street.
Hesitant March weather (cool, 
gray).  Low clouds, parallel
to the granite, concrete.

 
Where fountains of ocean sky
come pouring, showering... a gray
mosquito boat floats - hovering
between the streams (evasive, shy).

 
This concrete husk of solitary walks.
Maze of temporary paths.
Revolving labyrinth,
crepuscular (within gray rocks).

 
Along descending granite steps
a wake of wayward pelerine -
maybe some muttering Madeleine,
grey-eyed Ondine (of unknown depth)

 
- within an Escher etching, inside out.
We know how Jonah must have felt
beneath Leviathan's gray pelt.  That
submersible arc light, sans spout -

 
grave of abortive prophecies,
gray cul-de-sac - sacral skull
(chambered) sounding burial
at sea.  Within a sea-worm

 
(see?).  Then a swift gray seedling-
bark of buoyant pity - one o'nine 
amazing coattails, trailing five fine
contrails - thar she blows now, peeling...

C'mon down & meet Anny & me.

The segment of Fontegaia posted yesterday (#3) - seems like one of the best of the bunch. Underneath the kidding around, it emerged from some pondering about the nature of language, especially religious language.

Ever since Yeats ("go in fear of abstraction"), Pound, & the Imagists - if not long before - poetic language is contrasted with various kinds of abstract discourse. But it's possible to think of a poetry (Stevens, for example) which goes over into "enemy" territory - tries to grapple with the nature of linguistic abstraction.

In the background of my poem here, I'm thinking about the universal application of Biblical principles - say the 10 commandments, the Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount. Or even about more seemingly general notions, like "God".

If you imagine this language as a set of general laws or principles, which only make sense within the "local" context of particular persons & situations; and then if you add this concept to another concept - that of the idea of Man as "imago dei" - the image of the creator-God on earth; then the outcome is, I think, that you can begin to conceive of religion in a subjective, inward, personal & individual way. In other words, the language of religious doctrines or religious knowledge only makes sense as you apply it yourself, in your own mind, in your own actions. It's like a tool kit rather than a positive description or ontology. It's universally-applicable, but meaningless unless you make it mean something. (Is this pragmatism?) (cf. Stevens : "Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It")

& this rhymes with Roger Williams' notion of "soul liberty" - the primary, irreducible (& irreducibly free) relationship between the individual person and God's divine love. One can also "read" Christ's statements about his own work as leading in this same direction : the "Son of Man" (ie. Everyman, Man in the abstract) is the locus & benchmark of all meaning; God is not "outside", but is manifested by the "Son of Man"; the Word of the Gospel is universally applicable and everlasting; and "my word shall be your judge on the Last Day" (ie. the abstract "laws" of divine Love are reflected - inexorably - in the existential results of each person's attitude and actions toward same). (p.s. I know my interpretation of the term "Son of Man" - as Everyman - is probably not the usual or ordinary one.)

This seems like a very arguable & very American (Emersonian) set of ideas... which I am still trying to figure out for myself... no final attitude yet.

Fontegaia. To be continued...

2

 
I was lonely in the Fatso Tower.
Mangia, mangia! implored the Hungarian
waitress (my nemesis, my fate).  Someone
barged through an archaic swinging door -

 
was it you?  Or my Assemblyman?  Fair
deal, m'friend, he was shouting into his cell.
It's only a dream, he yelled.  Swell.
I tipped my left and got out of there (fast).
 

We have got roubles, methinks - right here 
in River City.  With a capital R and that
stands for Jail.  Lots of collars of a lariat
in a gray corral, Mister Fog - sheer

 
Poe-croquet, Froggy.  Malaise.  Oui.
The chirp of a pigeon on the Chom Ping
Lazy-A will never hazard me bowling
that egg scroll down me throat, Bobby.

 
Ideogram this, my Chinese characters!
Brain-drone croon-droogies - beyond pals!
The signals drip, pivot - halyards
slap, swivel - the whale-rim teeters

 
on its own spoke - Everylubber applies
his waddling gat against the shoulder, 
shirking... only, the sea is colder, colder.
Only the Transylvanian masseuse - the wise,

 
the amazing Miss Nile mid-USA (mass
Mattress of the Universe) - only she can spin
even this potted flashpunt toward one Parisian
plumb-bob.  Weave, Magdalenian - windlass!

 
3

 
Imagine, friend, a husky infant seedling
everywhere the same.  A sort of emerald
revolution, furled in jasper bronze.  Old,
yet still alive.  A kind of everyseed.

 
Coconut palm, perhaps - a milky sphere
lapped by dark and rugged threads.
Royal drink for an eagle Negus; mead
for a Queen Bea, victorious.  Sacred beer.

 
You searched for that pithy shell
like an under-Stanley for his living
Stone - paddling up, down - striving
through crystallized honey, pell-mell...

 
- but it can't be commanded, no,
nor imposed upon - only planted,
grown.  Meaning only (in the future)
what you find it locally, my loco friend -

 
the way the 2nd Coming keeps not-coming
except in your knotty heart, Pinetop.
A funny kind of phonautograph (post-op
encryption - ghost puffball thing-a-ming)...

 
She sings for Solomon's soul liberty
out of a sheepish seedling caravan -
make of it what you will, O lover-man.
It's like the storied storehouse, see,

 
of a maid on a maiden camel-trip -
like a man in the hold of a mosquito-
ship, a triple-whammy for a two-step
shamble, Sheba.  Break a leg.  Skip.

- there, got that off my chest, said the egomaniac.

We don't want to imitate the vain blind selfish applause-seeking hypocrites chastised in the Gospel.

Then again, we'd like to take part in the Grand Parade (down Highway 61).

Feel like I'm in between things... an early spring, March state... incipient &/or depressed... preoccupied with various distractions...

Feels like my poetry CAREER has been a matter of painting myself into a corner... frustrating (maybe I'm just impatient)... choices I've made which are perhaps somewhat self-defensive, compensatory...

- the yakky blogging & commenting
- the long, long (endless) poems
- the self-publishing
- the non-involvement with scenes (beyond online gabbing) & magazines

Where have I been published?
Copper Beech Press did a book, 1979
William Slaughter's online MUDLARK did the "Island Road" sequence in 1997
Tod Thilleman's Spuyten Duyvil did a book in 2000

- scattered appearances in Witz, Apex of the M, Fulcrum, Jacket, Lit, The Hat, alea, a few others...

I'm not complaining!!! Maybe it's all for the best.

Where/how do I situate myself as a poet? I started out back in the 60s, with an interest in the New York School anthologies. In the broader scheme, the NY poets might be considered informal formalists. That is, they rejected both the new prosy narrative-lyrical free-verse styles which emerged after (or with) the Confessionals, as well as the conservative formalism of the 50s (Hecht, Wilbur, Merrill, et al.). They practiced poetry as self-consciously formally-informal, and self-consciously minor (at least on the surface). Humor & light verse played a big role; irony, parody.

How you start is important. These early influences maybe inoculated me against an American "faux-naif" approach to poetic self-presentation - in the mainstream journals - which consists in a sort of earnest, prosaic, ingratiating, transparent, socially-thematic (ie. "my poem on animals"; "my poem about my mother"; "my poem on 9/11"), anecdotal stance (I know, this is a very inadequate & unfair abstraction...). Part of me just feels like that's a mode of discourse, a contest I don't want to enter. I'd rather play hockey or chess or knit shawls or something.

The other side of the coin : my failure to break into mainstream print tended to disallow any sort of relaxed, easy congress with the "ordinary" reader - any confident "public" or normative mode of call-&-response. There's no response. You get inured & adapt to being marginal & marginalized.

Anyway... after a long strange trip-hiatus in the 70s, I started back into poetry... even more distantly unconnected with contemporary goings-on. Did a lot of reading... Whitman & Dickinson, Poe & Melville... Pound, Joyce, Crane, Eliot, Stevens, Yeats... & the poets they referred to... Renaissance, Dante, Homer... Olson & Williams... some Russians (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova)... I know, it sounds like mostly men, & it was... that's one of my limitations...

Read lots of monographs & dissertations... essays & criticism...

Got very focused on how Pound & Williams & Olson brought history & prose particulars into their poems... but believe I am basically a musical/evocative rather than visual/descriptive poet, so the influence of Stevens & Crane was just as strong...

- wanted to incorporate in poetry my own view of world history, as a counter-weight to Pound/Williams/Olson's epic arguments...

- & so went off on long, long private voyages through verseland... got myself entrained into the quatrain train... a personal idiom or compositional process...

& there is no response... in the vast multiplicity of (more-)talented voices I am a pigeon blending in with the sidewalk...

(p.s. : I'm being completely unfair (in my fussy egotistical way) to those intrepid readers who do visit here, & read my scribbles... & those dear people who have responded, helped me along over the eons...)

Still hopeful & doubtful at the same time... I've constructed an odd "Henry" persona-presentation, sort of a Rhode Island embodiment of loco-locality (on top of the dome of the RI State House is a golden statue called "the Independent Man"). (Note : RI Statehood Day & my birthday are the same : 5/29.)

My long poems & sonnet sequence & short poems... I want them to be seen as a recapitulation of modern/contemporary American poetry history, with my own personal "Henry" stamp - In RI does the Olson/Williams train, Forth of July does the Crane/Stevens train, Island Road does the Berryman/Berrigan sonnet strain - that's the idea... I'm here...

Sweetly Now


 
Walking home,
head full of gloom
(my own woes muddled
with those of the world) -

 
noticed (on the sidewalk)
cheerful letters in pink chalk
(rounded, girlish - cursive script,
broken off - author skipped?) -

 
PEACE
               LOVE
(signed, in a heart-shape) CLIO

 
the Muse of History : as if to say
I'm starting over - here, today.

Reading: a history of Ethiopia; Pope Benedict's study of theology of history of St. Bonaventure; exhibit catalog of current (fabulous) Jasper Johns show at Met ("Jasper Johns : Gray").

& so begins part 4 of Fontegaia. 10 yrs after Stubborn Grew.

1

 
Good Friday moon came round somehow
on the first day of spring this year.
My little swirvy Frisbee-sailor
navigates toward deeper waters now.

 
Like that babe in Nile-reeds
in a curved mosaic.  A very slow
circle eddies in the stream... she'll row
(backstroke) whence her spring proceeds.

 
And there's a courier pigeon (camouflaged
in gray cloud) with a scroll copper-wired
around one leg - some napping friar's
hieroglyph - threefold dreambird montage.

 
Her dream a melted timepiece, burning coal.
The vision of exhausted Jonah, cornered
in Leviathan.  Your end is mine (last word
in submarine? - aground).  He's calling

 
Elijah.  Yet, there - (glinting
so faintly over collar
of coroner) - a dove, a dove!  Far
across curve of everywave... ting,

 
ting... sea-bells ring... heard everywhere
at once.  As the moon lifts ocean water
toward the source of all Victorias (the
waterfall, the reign of reigns) our cruiser-

 
nut carries each wight upon his keel
(Joe Nobody, a milkman in the morning
tinkling across the sky).  Hear the milk train
moan - a miniscule echo revolve (its creed).

     
                  3.21.08 (Good Friday)

On Good Friday 10 years ago, I finished the first book of my long quatrain freight train (Stubborn Grew). I'm still at it...

how stubborn grew the rose!  How
  stub born grew the rose stub
  born grew the rose stub born
  grew the rose stub born grew
  the rose stub  born grew the
             rose.

The latest version of Rest Note, which includes the new chapter of Fontegaia, is available here.



A*D*V*E*R*T*I*S*E*M*E*N*T

...& all my books are available here. You can look at the previews for each book, sample the poems, evaluate the print quality, etc. It's all my own work. The print is rather small, but on the other hand these are genuine "pocket books" - they will fit in your pocket. Or you can download an electronic version, for the price of a large cup of coffee.

I don't carry any imprimature but my own. There are no blurbs, recommendations, curriculum vitae, awards, medals, or insignia to be found on the covers. You'll just have to take your chances.

I have nothing against regular publishers. I've had a few, & I hope to have a few more someday. But in the meantime I've written too much to keep it all at home - my poems run to book-length sequences. I learned typesetting & editing through publishing other people. For now, this is the simplest way I can make my work available to my contemporaries.

Conclusion of Fontegaia, part 3.

28

 
It seems a squareful solid world,
a daylit world, when a gray evening
moon slopes through a curtain
of grey cloud (light frigid, furled).

 
Its face bent toward pining (yearning
service, servitude).  Its pallor speaks
some excess, overflow... weeks
of years of tidal turning... purling,

 
pearling... weighted toward their end.
When the curving edge of the earth
closes that melancholy eye (a wreath,
red-rimmed, marks its encirclement).

 
So sorrow hides itself away
like love that looks not to itself -
by a relentless law of gravitation
offering up its life (O gentle ray).

 
On the slimmest branch
of the narrowest tree,
the smallest acorn - see
it break off, launching

 
free.  To drift downstream,
almost invisible.  A pigeon
in a marble niche, a bairn
in a barn.  Light beam,

 
okay?  In the bull's-eye of a rainbow
sings a solitary pine, from the taiga.
In reunion with a dome, Diane (Siena
lifted toward you on its bending bough).