most August wind-chime

MIGRANT TABERNACLE

So another August 8th-month

inches toward its close.

Whatever Pilate says,

goes – IN RI, nailed to a terebinth.

Whatever happens, happens, now.

An old man is an oak leaf

skimming like a thief,

going to ground.  & when the winds blow

the silver pipes of Sophie’s chime

go tingle-tangle... melody

of sea-blue cherub, see?

Clasping Columbia, his sweet tame

turtledove.  While her fire-engine chair

waits in my octagon

beneath late-summer sun –

a migrant tabernacle... Amor-

Shalom... transportable to Paradise.

Her father is a recent

immigrant, & citizen.

The Shekinah is mercy for chaste eyes –

unquenchable fountain of pure love

for simple existence, for

its mysterious source.  Our

wisdom, Sophie – like your turtledove –

comes shimmering down... she permeates

all things, & everywhere.

As it was always, my dear –

the mind of Love revives, creates.

8.31.18

the rubles flow from here to there

SAND UNDERFOOT

A mouse ran across a bridge

one winter, in Leningrad –

his name was little Vlad.

He had a key, which was his badge.

He wanted to be Czar one day.

It made things easier.

When life got crazier

he took control – things were okay.

The rubles flow from here to there

in pockets of his underwear –

he makes a face, to scare

the other wolves (the sheep won’t dare).

He liquidated people in the way.

It wasn’t always easy...

Scotland Yard (like Stasi)

fingerpoints (Polonium 1-A).

The light flutes in another realm –

coral reef of seraphim

& monks on mountain rim

(Kievan polyphonic Argo-helm).

A scattershot of goldfinch tunes

or chords of Marian

sis-diva Anderson

lift off cimetière dunes

Pushkin or Berryman would know.

Sparse salty grass.

Sand underfoot, hélas.

A Black Sea seething, as of long ago.

8.28.18

poem in memory of Sen. John McCain

UNPERISHING REPUBLIC

                                        i.m. Sen. John McCain

Politicians are not often poets

though they might be actors

in a denouement of Shakespeare’s

Measure for Measure.  Just deserts

are rarely staged there, in the Senate,

these days – when a thumbs-down

from a stalwart shaken lion

mimes the freedom to be obstinate

against all bullies, liars, tyrants.

When a simple judgement – white

supremacists aren’t patriots,

they’re traitors – damns those deviants

from one magnanimous dream of Union

(human, not partisan;

global, not only Arizonan).

Comanches raided every town

along the Rio Grande, once: Yankee

& Viet Cong slaughtered

each other, martyred

kids; but we transmute reality

by change of heart, by radical

meekness.  With mutual

respect... consensual

advice, consent... our ancient legal

dance of equity, for human dignity...

so might this son of Cain

be able to smile again

in that unperishing Republic of hilarity.

8.27.18

aqueducts for bumblebees

JESTER THREADS

In the anonymous late grass,

among the stray brown

stalks like overgrown

aqueducts for bumblebees

Hobo looks off toward the flesh-

tone Mississippi bridge.

He yearns for the courage

to be like Woodpecker, in his mesh

of stealthy wasps & stolen honey –

I mean that Thunderbird,

drilling his fiery word

dovetailing out of Galilee;

the lightning rod atop the dome

whose inner lining is mosaic;

a kingfisher, whose beak

flings Geryon from his kingdom.

Late August air grows clear, autumnal.

He’ll shed his jester threads

like Hal doffs Falstaff duds

& lie down by the Rio del

Espiritu Santo.  Watch how that firebird

melts hearts into unison –

lifts into comprehension

both Jerusalem & Athens, toward

a chastened & revived Cosmopolis

where neighbor-love is measure

of the planetary future... &

then he’ll mosey back to Minneapolis.

8.24.18

by the teeth of St. Anthony Falls

SAY HELLO

End of summer sounds.  A surf

of crickets & cicadas

swells into the branches.

Phantom cottonwoods (leaf-

hearts pale yellow, dried-out husks).

Anemic light, grown timid

spooked by swollen shade –

August forecast (autumn dusk).

Henry attends to his North Star,

his Union under onion

dome... tending toward ruin

now.  Anger drives the darkness car.

Sleek starlings yoked in harnesses.

Electronic neon

beckoning Power’s iron

catalogs (bright pigeonhole affinities).

He stands by the teeth of St. Anthony

Falls – a Berryman

apparition, a ghastly John

lingering by fish-scale cutlery

(zombie ice-fishing is reviving

local watering holes,

say Twin Cities

polls).  Barely surviving

in professional cinch, Polaris

remains fixed in place –

kingfisher Falcon-Ace

tweaked by that wench in Paris

                  *

out of all shape, except a heart-

scarred origami –

Guillaume or Alexei

dovetailing it to Jordan-sprite.

So helpless Noah watches his waters

subside.  He turn to Hobo –

Hobo turn to her.  So

child become grain – grain gathers

to child.  On the scandalous retina

of Mary Magdalen,

the Earth rewinds again

as Man – wrath spun to mattina.

I have no rage.  The otherness

of your... your mother-smile.

He lay for a while

on sands of Jordan wilderness,

at peace.  Your American motherland

is an adamant green

Everywhere.  A limestone

welcome-mat (with waves of eye-in-hand).

It was here before we all arrived;

it was not to be won quite yet

by war, but by legitimate

befriending – loving everything that lived. 

& only a bum in San Francisco

or homeless reprobate

treated like jail-bait

knows Charity enough to say hello

& happy lovey-dovey Thanksgiving to you

8.22.18

Hagia Sophia with mermaid eyes

TATTOO-BASKET

                                    for Sophie, on her birthday

She shines like a little smile of light,

your happiness.  Shot through

with violets, with rue

of yellow-gold... a sea-green Amphitrite.

She swam from a box out of the bottomland.

Big Muddy concept –

buried in refuse, inept

mentalities.  Blind eye-in-hand,

dread fright of bloody bandage-men.

I stood on my headwaters,

the only Falls that matters –

Mill City, where they grind the grain –

a nauseated Hamlet, dizzy

with green v-vertigo.

Boxed rivers overflow.

He’s Hobo now, or Ishmael, fire-fizzy;

curled up in a tattoo-basket,

floating in the womb

of his own dream-doom

to Gulf of Mexico (Nantucket?)...

where butterflies of poetry

emerge as monarchs

from sea-chrysalides

& sketch fine arcs on pottery

insouciantly, with haunted grace.

Winking tesserae,

unscrambled... Hagia Sophia

with mermaid eyes (each facet-face).

8.21.18

serpent ocarina

FEATHERED WHEEL

The king is carrying his cross

wearing his crown of thorns.

Only his mother mourns.

The restless crowd is at a loss.

So history plays out

on broken banjo string –

scratchy LP spinning

over & over the tethered Scapegoat

Song.  A narrow beam of rust-

red copper, through shade

of rock.  Copperhead

of light.  Serpent mouthing dust.

Tan sand (some Navajo camouflage).

Everyman, eaten

by ants.  Has-been.

Hobo, dreaming in a stream-montage.

Nobody.  Only air, flashing

like feathered wheel –

Thunderbird heel?

Lo, him – Kingfisher, splashing.

In the clay matrix, Morning Star

pirouettes in Paris

for Apollinaire.  Pax

lounges with Liberty, while from afar

twin pillars of a temple rise

in unison – an azure

octave, lifting her

amid dew-glittering, sea-breathing sighs.

8.10.18

all the way to Mt. Moriah

ALMOND-BREAD

This weightless branch of butternut

floats in the August stillness

like palm-frond of Isis

in sky-barge of Cleopatra-Nut.

Earth grown deserted as a pyramid.

Nothing moves in silence

like Lion-Sphinx

crouching with a question on her eyelid-

casket – just for you, Orpheus-

Oedipus.  Your arcane

cane limps against the grain,

gone serpentine... a missing Theseus.

Where’s Ariadne then?  Arise,

light Jonah-seer, sweet

grey-eyed sister!  Meet

him in the wrinkles of the Minotaur’s

disguise, find him in the stone face

sleeping like a Roman guard –

motionless, Medusa-hard,

until your gardener grins in his place.

She’s kneading my clay now, adamantine

mother of amusement.

All the way to Mount

Moriah, she’s dragging my crown.

She’s molding the planet, children –

shaping this loafer into ships

of almond-bread, with those lips.

Those eyes are sparks for tinder-men.

8.9.18

where everything is born

GREAT BRIDGES

When summer is a woven synthesis

of differences, a music

of what happens, homesick

Hobo thinks of Providence – yes,

Ocean State – that tiny place

where everything is born.

Microcosm, on a horn

of sea-salt... on a wave of seamless

grace.  There dreamt his dream

of mater Giuliana,

in her moss-green llama-

shawl (Francescan almond-gleam

within Ravenna).  Dante found Christ

in Beatrice’s almond joy;

hypostasis in our eye;

omnipresence of the Holy Ghost.

That fusion in Jerusalem –

gemstone of solid air;

communion of river

& sky great bridges ravel, hem

by curving hem (triplicate

unruffled grace).

Traveling eucharist,

friendship seal... rose safety net...

personification (into human

rainbow) of a humble

kiss.  Gold bumblebee,

sweet Henry-awk... sunken, risen.

7.21.18

the axis of the earth

ACORN-DHOU

The river moving through the cottonwoods

inspires Hobo-composer

to exceed his Oeuvre

Clumpy-Cloddy in the key of C.  Buds

trace their roots down limestone crevices

to seek that cave-lake

where dark streams make

ripples in a mirror-image (Beatrice’s

triune goddess?) in a palimpsest

of light reflections.  Mother,

lover, friend... your sister-

dove.  Affectionate witness –

Akhmatova’s golub-golubyanka

(an undertone beneath

the granite banks).  The wreath

Natasha flung into Fontanka –

today an angel, tomorrow only a worm

in the grave... only a promise.

Mary, in her distress,

beholds the gardener beside the tomb.

Hobo digs deeper, down his own

dream-channel.  Almond

eyes... the veil of Isis

in West Branch... curtains for Henry’s own

Clover, in Washington (where Adam delved

while Eve spun vortex-grief).

Vertigo in high relief

on Henry’s charcoal Chartres – shelved

Synagogue laid low, below Ecclesia –

belies a Nazarene concord

older than Byzantine crossword

shaded by almond-Hebrew Bona Dea.

Keep digging then, my clod.  You’ll find

the key, within a boxwood box

where lies a bunch of keys.

A black Egyptian Queequeg pine-

box, layered with tattoos

of hero-griffins – figures

of hexagonal stars

that shine like golden bees... Who’s

                    *

there?  Out of the mirror-wars

of courtly kangaroos,

through shady fig trees

shines her diamond Southern Cross –

the double trinity of Black Elk’s

six-way sign.  An acorn

emerald, lightly borne

as crown of Restoration Day : melek’s

JFK : Zion’s Nazir out of Galilee;

spume-signal from an Ocean

State – whale-oil ensign,

anointed Son... clé-figured Charity.

That old medieval Paris of Villon.

Pigments of blood, limestone

& sky.  Stained-glass zone

of intellectual Aquinas-light – reason

& faith cross-braided, interwoven

in the jewel-box of Suger,

in the emerald sepulcher

of Wolfram’s wayfaring communion-

wafer.  Omnipresent grail

of equal daughters, equal

sons... Love’s universal

sea-supremacy – each heart’s high sail.

So the rod of Aaron blossomed

over Nile sandbanks,

& a bronze serpent yanks

all eyes to Hobo’s Bottomland

Jonah.  Out of that Okie Okean,

out of that Osage eagle’s

den, your clay-born angels

rise to foot their river-span –

a bridge of International Orange

pillared like Jachin, Boaz

in wisdom’s corny maze

of adamantine joy.  So rich & strange!

Whispered by the Sybil through

these gold oak leaves,

for everyone who grieves.

A comfortable acorn-dhou

                   *

down Nile, or Mississippi, weaves

her zigzag victor-wake;

from Jordan to Lake

Galilee, her circle rings the sheaves.

7.20.18

unbreakable chords

HUMAN ECHO

Your nostalgia for the aristocracy

of childhood, Vladimir,

I understand.  So here :

infantile tyrants bear it away

in sappy cerements of innocence.

Galla & her golden boy

& their brief beehive day

drowse in Ravenna, under silence

of mosaic stars; Dante too

sleeps there, still far

from his Firenze mère –

the milky galaxy of midnight blue,

his babble-realm of splendor-joy.

A fluent melody

pours endlessly

from thine ineffable benevolence, Blue J;

a spiral at the cave entrance,

an everlasting sign

of all Creation

(ceaseless, calm, majestic dance).

Those unbreakable chords of Mendelssohn

at the end of the trolley line;

the sound of the violin

lesson, the neighborhood of children...

& the shadow of the Thunderbird

in the immense oak tree

the dark green sanctuary

of Morning Star   dolphin-shepherd

                     *

out of deep-twined memory

by the cistern heard

rose-enfolded Word

out of Ocean’s fond   Jonah-infinity

Instinctive fright becomes aggression,

dominance abets revenge;

since long before Stonehenge

each weak scapegoat endures oppression

& the tantrum of the infant

replicated by depression

each political occasion

filters through both mob & tyrant.

But it shall not be so with thee.

I have no wrath, the Ghost

murmurs; I am the Most

High Heartbeat, mild Invisibility –

indivisible reply

out of the crystalline

& quintessential Union

at the source of Earth & Sky.

I am your human echo, come to be

among you, in my realm

of love, mercy, wisdom –

I am the Nazir, chanting out of Galilee.

& then I saw her, Jonah-Shadow –

wings extending over all

of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Ghost-heart we feel, ghost-bird we know.

7.18.18

stone, water, light, fire

DOUBLE RING

The agitations of a stone thrown in the stream

make ripples that become

a smooth continuum

of moving wheels.  One Gothic beam

draws light through stone and water –

blending elements

into high bafflements

of rainbow glass, mind with nature

beyond nature, reason with wonder.

Agnes – her exacting threads

trace Ariadne’s leads

through wilderness of sea & thunder.

Grant – his strange & strict constructions

spin a decussated

dream landscape – fated

black dirt looming beneath confections

of late sunset West Branch foliage.

Why, then, this mirage

of images?  The poet’s rage

wells from embodied fury – & her voice

– Arachne’s, Ariadne’s – is mortal

as that scar-calendar

of dread Coatlicue

unsnagged by force from Mexican corral.

Her poem is cast-iron Poseidon-net

straight from the furnace,

thus : a human face

veiled by the smoke of calumet

                     *

morphing brute fraudulence to peace,

transmuting blank white

voids to violet

& moss-green habitats of paradise.

St. Maximus Confessor, musing

monk, articulated

in theory what unfolded

in reality – fusion of divine choosing

with human liberty in understanding,

in enactment, as the spirit

moves us : radiant

tangle of wheels into a double ring.

All spokes are joined there, in the personal –

as in a room near Golgotha

babble turned glossolalia

& tongues aflame lit one bright coronal.

The poet chants out of that mental fire

& dances like a Nazirite

her intellectual delight

inviting you & me to join the choir

around that altar of a rolling stone –

a living hearth-fire

of the Earth’s desire

for equilibrium, once we throw down

the Minotaur lodged in our hearts.

Malevolent violence & lust

& greed for dominance must

be renounced... & so the dancing starts.

7.17.18

wave-factor

ARBOR DAY

The wave-factor on a riverboat

differs downstream (or

up).  Rocking the shore

like thread of Agnes Martin’s Night

Sea.  & we are far from home.

Waves of corny grain,

of grass, of wheat... Main

Street.  Grant Wood’s metronome.

He lived four blocks from Henry Negus.

Farmer turned lawyer-

transportation czar

(bus co.) in Iowa City – is

my namesake (great grandfather).

Quaker-shlepherd genehaulogy.

American Gothic, see (flea!) –

straight from dry-humus bow-bent flower.

Arbor Day.  Planting families

of fanatics in the grass –

another word for pass

the ammunition, Grandma.  Crazies,

huh?  All-American.  Beyond

the scope of Scopes Trial,

Solomon... we’re all

afloat upon some stinkin’ frogpond

paddle-wheeler.  Gothic was light

pontoon (Jerusalem).

Grail-Sepulchre rim.

Gitchee-Pollen-Air, up & walkin’... right?

7.15.18

how to say hallelujah

OLD HAUNTS

The poem reaches like a zigzag vine

through thick vernacular

toward the actual here

& now (woodpecker in a pine).

Turbulent nation, giving birth

to glossolalia.

How to say hallelujah

in Osage, in downtown Fort Worth?

Don’t ask Dallas.  Some holy fool,

some mendicant small-fry

tried to catch Caesar’s eye

before that scapegoat kicked the stool –

you know the rule.  I’d’ve marched

if I had to.  The heat

made everything complete

hell.  Our very words parched

on our lips, like crackling cicada husk.

Some said he was coming back,

some just nibbled hardtack,

but all agreed – he could really busk,

back in the day.  Seldom was heard

a discouraging word, when

he blew that harp.  Listen,

disconsolate hearts.  What appeared

before you on the road to Emma’s

echoes again like dew

before morning – will do,

will do.  Old haunts of summers...

7.12.18

like spinning Jenny Gyre

SAFETY LINES

The late-May lilacs are long gone

but light grey limbs

& the green leaves rim

the grass with shade yet, absent one.

The sound of an ocean softly seething

in the branches overhead.

Is she alive or dead –

my sainted, tainted Juliet?  Still breathing

somewhere?  Imago or Imogen...

merely some ghoulish Ravlin-

Gouldash revenant, then?

Some Beatrice-crystal-Poe routine,

arising ghastly from dank ditch-ravine?

But no... a memory

lifts all azury

from sparkle-spray beneath benign

leap of wide Golden Gate.  Almond-

eyed sprite, a-whirl

like spinning Jenny Gyre

balanced on catenary wire... light bond

that ravels tout le monde... infinite

undisplaceable safety net

& cloudy calumet

confirming universal concord... so be it!

Grave knot that tightens less & less

toward infinite regress

of infinitesimal kiss

(minute atomic balm of tenderness

                     *

merging without mixture or separateness).

Maximus once limned it thus,

the monk who bore witness

(with loss of limb) for concept Orthodox –

incarnate knot of human & divine,

united unlikeness – like

that tomb slab, a limestone block

marked by what seems a breaking line

but only seems; the two are one

in one Person, of three

in all; still guarantee

amid the waltz of turning sun & moon

of Love’s immoveable eternity.

Out of deep matrix

of Ocean – intergalactic

scheme of merry stars in that sea...

inconceivable conception of

all origins (harmonic

correlations, thick

with measureless & dancing life).

The Manitou all people know,

Aquinas wrote.  The God

who dreamed this serenade...

we meet you in the shady slough

beneath great knots of wild grapevines

beside the muddy Jordan –

down by where solitary John

once cast a seine for Jonah (safety lines).

7.11.18

conducting veinous electricity

MUD-ANGELS

These three mud-clay homunculi

hung from pink ribbons

in my tent – lumpy remains

from some Dance of Death?  My

mother must have brought them back

from Mexico (mud-angels

to guard her potter’s wheel).

Coatlicue of Quauhnahuac,

adamant Madre of encrusted Time!

Out of your bottomland

whirls eye-in-hand –

out of Monk’s Mound’s perennial slime...

Clay muscles rolling stone – conducting

veinous electricity –

out of nothing come to be

loaves loafing from the oven (rising,

singing).  A moss-green Isis by the Nile

(or in West Branch) you

rain your rivers blue,

compassionate Magdalen – your smile

lifts Jesús from the grave, raises

Enrique from the cemetery

too (some ordinary

day on Earth).  Hobo Jay cleanses

all hearts, rinses eyes with river-clay –

sighs, EPHPHATHA.  From boulders

God can lift up equal daughters,

equal sons... just look at buried Henry-manqué!

7.10.18

Reasoning about the existence of God tonight ?

Back in my Caesar salad days, I used to ham it up on the old blog almost every waking slumber.  My forte (whether by music, poetry or pure verbiage) having always been improv - "uniquely suited" (as they say) to extensive bloggification on all matters pertinent and impertinent - I was having a field day every night.

Oh well, enough about that.  I've been reading - trying to read - an extremely dense and philosophically technical book by Denys Turner, titled Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge UP, 2004).  It's one heck of a meatloaf.

Turner is defending against an old traditional challenge to St. Thomas Aquinas.  He's too rational, he's too philosophical : and as such, he veers too far toward the "natural", the secular, the humanist, the agnostickal, the pantheist, etc.  Turner is also challenging those contemporary theologians who have basically surrendered any rational argument for theism, on behalf of an interpretation of "negative theology", apophaticism, & so forth, which disallows rational argument on behalf of mystical (post-rational?) faith.

I'm not doing Turner justice, and am bowdlerizing & totally messing up what this extremely logically assiduous scholar engage is trying to say.  Nevertheless, I'm on his side.

After working through, very carefully, the alternative mentalities of Kant, Bertrand Russell ("the world is just a fact") and a few other prominent agnostics, Turner comes around to defending, very obliquely, very elegantly, the logic of Aquinas, regarding the one most basic & most profound children's question at the heart of philosophy and religion : Why is there anything, rather than nothing?

Sit back and think about it, quietly, for a while.  La vida es sueno.

There is no simple "positively theological" answer to this basic question, as Turner makes clear.  Negative theology, "apophaticism", is inherent in our reasoning itself : because we know we cannot explain how God has produced this intricate dream-cosmos.  The question ends in wonder.

Which leads Turner, and Aquinas (and me) back to the delicate distinctions of the Chalcedonian creed.  We know God only through her manifestation as the conjunction of differences : the human-divine Person... "without separation, without confusion..."

Love manifest as infinite mystery, gift, harmony... and, in the end (at the center of interplanetary melody) - victory, glory, law, fulfillment, redemption.  Star of Redemption... promised land, "kingdom of heaven".

Don't ask me to explain.  Bird has left the cage.