Peter Stodolak, Umbrian Gates
MARDI GRAS TRIPTYCH
Une bonne oeuvre littéraire ne peut être que l’intelligence complète d’une idée par l’auteur. Une oeuvre ne peut être que l’intelligence de quelque chose.
– Max Jacob
1.
The big river flows south from here
all the way to Louisiana.
This time of year
with the glaze of a mirror
ice frames the restless stream’s extravaganza.
Frost and snow congeal both banks.
Stranded sides are left behind
aiming icicles like shanks
a windblown powder of unthanks
that winks below some hunter’s blind.
We hoist aspiring targets up to heaven
out of similar materials,
trussed tight across the groin.
Yet rickety scaffolds topple down again
athwart ourselves (discordant, dented bells).
That architect of Federal dome, Latrobe
amassed his rhizomatic knowledge
under aegis of a smiling globe –
touched by divining rod to probe
light plays around each marble razor’s edge.
And the soft aura hovering at Chartres
of rainbows over melancholy hill
signals a reply to forthright builders
lifting mulish, elephantine boulders –
say to this mountain, be moved. And so good will
be done. Latrobe, with age-spotted reason,
reticulates his son (whose cypress enfilade
reframes his own) down to the flood zone
of the Delta, delirious N’Orléans –
c’est là é-oùdéfunt aussi, pauvre malade.
So we must grasp that charitable star
afloat beside the pregnant moon
motionless almost, above the shore;
attend our contrapuntal dance-partner,
our Cajun counterpart (accordion-tune).
2.
My view from the window’s like an enlarged snowglobe
since the Brain Science Center’s advent – this parallax
of coruscating, meteoric flakes… like Arnold Palmer
in December sunshine, or the gold cap of Latrobe
(laissez les bontemps roulez!) after the whole (relax!)
thing is complete. Even the azure Gulf Stream’s calmer
now, in this forecast of Epiphany – even Rome’s tax
won’t send the Nazir to Jerusalem, just yet. His robe’s
like the clean smokes of these brain geeks (Max’s,
Gitanes, Gauloise) interrogating the biopolymer
of each heart’s wormhole… Rolling Rock, with corncob
on the B. & O.? They’ll fine that tyrant, par ma mère!
Tell me, if you know – when age has brought you (sober)
to the sea – was Jackie Mason son of Gleason? Axe
and it shall be cloven unto you, my prodigal palmer –
like San Francesco at the bird feeder, like Jacob
pulling the spear from his own petrified rose bomber
jacket, upside-down (dragged to his last forum, in Aix).
Have another Labatt : might as well take it to the max.
Heavy snow, from Philly to the Ohio. Skilled labor
shortage, can’t even make straight the roads. Rumor
the only thing that moves – Iron City paralyzed – backs
up to D.C. This soup, this usurping sleet… even Job
would complain, if he had to! Who governs this mob
of blunderlings? Heart’s not what Marie cracked sobs
to be, for that S.O.B. – to be in charge of Daimler,
for Chrissake! And this beer’s flat as the Loire
country (my lonely monastery). Rather be in adobe
garage in the Gobi, if I coulda been. Blues say ask,
only – sun say, shine. Nobody’s up to the task
of saying grace, my liege – only smile, and I’ll daub
this clownish ligature with congruent curve, on the axis
of my own rude replica (rough parataxis).
So lend me your ears, for Lent, light palmer
of the zither – accordion queen of zydeco abode!
Bleak February swampland’s our live-oak embalmer.
What tune then, banjo brave? Latrobe would strum it calmer
if his true love, Annie Palmer, burst through this Globe
constricted by Slobbovian imperium (see Book of Acts).
3.
Like a gawky stem of prairie grass
encased in ice, the stone struggles to be free.
Like a massive heart, plummeting by its own weight
to the sea-floor, the stymied Hamlet-spirit
of solitary human soul pauses, immobilized –
flummoxed by the paradox of grace (the zen-
koan implication of : my yoke is easy;
my burden is light). Latrobe, deluded snob,
flaunting such know-how nowhere to be found
astride America’s rough-cut contracted hills,
stumbled toward his fatal Mardi Gras – his own
son’s fever-tumulus. Yet, from a bird’s-eye view –
that AIGLE, maybe, tacking across my Navy-
blue sweatshirt from Chartres, like wingèd aegis
of Minerva – the cornices of this flawed builder
merge toward their own vanishing point.
Tacit, invisible, enfolding telos of the dome –
of the People’s House – unspoken, inexpressible
sanction of democracy… there’s a divinity that
shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.
In the colloquy with otherness, in the debate
between earthbound creatures, ineffable creator,
in the covenant of promises, upwelling life…
there we discover a pine-tree liberty –
defeat of unjust cruelty, stone-cold lacklove
at last… uplifting town, nation, and world
toward that Peaceable Kingdom (lion with lamb).
ADVENT ODE
Measurement began our might
Anemic sunlight through December flurries
like static on a television screen outside
my window, facing the Brain Science Center –
a spectral snow globe, whose motes glide
slantwise from heaven (that gray matière
de Bretagne) down to the frozen ground;
and like a frostbit mouse, my mind scurries
for the fireside of some boreal snow-mound.
December is the darkest month, and looking west
across a Minneapolis of abject vacant lots
you can picture the homeless travelers’ tents
a few blocks away – with their huddled inhabitants
of municipal diffidence. Our lack of interest
is simultaneously fiscal, personal : them that gots,
gets. And my efficient, inchoate, bland skyline here is
plain American (un-Finnish symphony of hope and fear).
I found a forgotten Christmas ornament
hidden in a green ravine of the prickly tree.
Homemade, daubed roughly 30 years ago
on a plastic sphere, like improvised poetry –
a bird’s-eye of Providence, with acrylic snow
drifting across gondolas, bright office windows.
Mute icon of breezy entanglements, bent
vows… brushed past spacetime now (God knows).
Yet graceful uncanny happenings this time of year
shed a retrospective glow, a candle in memory
like that photograph from 1931 – menorah
in the window of a Nazi street, in Kiel. The story
in the newspaper, today… brave light, draw near.
All-human flame as everlasting law – sing hallelujah!
Plain freedom at the crossroads is, for the refugees,
pure joy in Kiel, Kiev – to give, to grieve, to praise.
An old man’s memory… a rickety grape lattice.
Through hollow spaces, improbable shapes,
vague hints. Yet as the bee finds blooms
until the hive bleeds honey, so the heart leaps –
gratitude at the root of it all. So St. Nicholas
Black Elk would hum and croon, across the steeps
of rocky heights, forlorn vast loneliness… rooms
of America’s primeval spring (cool caves for grapes).
The River bears more than you know, St. Super-Sirius.
And as each snowflake is a kind of crystallized spark
so I seek a kind of humane geometry – cold
as clear ice, yet ablaze with mercy –
full of rightness in its clement origami fold.
Seraphic Maximus, in exile near Kherson,
mingles his reasoning razor with elated vision;
and that other Nicolas (of Kues) bids us to see
our blindness calibrate a sounding Light-in-Dark.
But I am that veteran Dakota, in the Omaha
bus terminal, who only wanted to say, I am a man –
your neighbor, bent through my concave snow globe –
a sundog parallax, impoverished (all upside-down).
Somehow forlorn plains plainness leads the way
to Black Elk’s omnipresent agate – its hexagonal sky
shouldering on its mantle the whole high rocky orb
above snow-peaks of Chartres (one voluminous aurora).
When Numeros married Logos – as Thierry explained,
and Nicolas (both Nikolai, in fact) embodied
in a playful game – out of the absolute zero
of ineffable Union emerged an equal sign, the Imago
of complete simplicity : whose multiplicity’s our own
inheritance, of suffering and hope… thus being human;
so amid such quantum probabilities (counter-intuitive)
resolves our fractioned contraries (to love, to give).
When Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in this nascent season,
appeared at the Capitol – bearing blessings, and a plea
for help – like a metamorphosed Prince Hal butterfly,
or funhouse-mirror icon for St. Vladimir (Kievan
King David) – one might descry the flickering
Hannukah menorah of the galaxies, blazing
across its constellated fortitude of apostolic grace;
spy Noah’s ark, tugging the Constitution of the place.
12.22.22
❂
HENRY GOULD, a Minneapolis native, returned to Minnesota in 2015 after 45 years in Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1977, where he was recipient of the Rose Low Rome Prize for Poetry and the Charles Philbrick Memorial Prize. After graduation he managed a storefront food coop in Providence, and then worked as a VISTA volunteer for 5 years. Beginning in 1983, he was employed for 30 years at the Brown U. Library. In the 1990s he helped organize a local literary non-profit called the Poetry Mission, which sponsored readings, talks, and the journal Nedge, which, with Janet Sullivan, he co-edited for 10 years. His poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as DiVersos, Poetry, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Notre Dame Review, West Branch, Boston Review, Mudlark, and Critical Flame. Three books have been published : Stone (Copper Beech Press, 1979), Stubborn Grew (Spuyten Duyvil, 2000), and Ravenna Diagram I-III (Dos Madres, 2018-2020). With Susan Brown and Thomas Epstein, he published an expansive festschrift of poems and essays in honor of poet/translator Edwin Honig, called A Glass of Green Tea – with Honig. He also edited and published a volume of Honig's collected poems, titled Time & Again : Poems 1940-1997. His book Continental Shelf: shorter poems, 1968-2020, is now available from Dos Madres Press.