From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450
‘They parted my garments amongst them; and upon my vesture they cast lots.’
november blue november
November 30, 2021 by at 10:06 am
a jonathan potter project
1.
mellow apricot
sky spreads out above
the hills of stevens county
a watercolor world wakes
all hallows’ morning
layer by layer
2.
my mother saw the sun
rise on her birthday morning
rise behind the gray november
veil that spanned the eastern sky
my mother stood on
the mountain and saw
3.
from gray to gray-blue
cornflower-cyan
sapphire cobalt slate stone spruce
november blue november
blues blending into
the blues the blue blues
4.
exact sunrise time
postulated in
drizzling misty mystery
fog’s gloom-gray estimation
of time’s abacus
raindrops on branches
5.
from eastern time zone
comes love’s explosion
of blood orange rose gold light
awakening the darkness
of pacific sleep
with love’s time travel
6.
between a weeping
willow and tall pine
orange sky-soup like titan’s
organonitrogen haze
sci-fi saturday
waking from strange dreams
7.
yellow on turquoise
dark horizon line
roiling clouds gentle hills trees
then becoming enormous
otherworldly peach
and plum pudding sky
8.
amid the azure
and alice blue clouds
filling the sky this morning
a golden ghost of fried egg
emerges sunny
side up and lovely
9.
redeye flight waking
orange horizon
could be another planet
the alien cityscape
river of methane
or is this philly
10.
saint lawrence river
catches the image
of this candle flame sunrise
morning drifting to the south
the sky clinging to
decreasing daylight
11.
marmalade guitar
amber-blue cloud strings
stretching to infinity
opening into music
honey-gold and bright
upon the river
12.
start at the bottom
the river’s secrets
dark blue darker skyline tells
saint joachim’s bronze bells to ring
to bid the silent
blue-gold day start here
13.
screen of trees and poles
silhouetted there
on lakeshore road a jogger
back turned on radiant beauty
pink-orange burning
dangling carrot sky
14.
pale bright scarlet veins
of pomegranate
stains on a dark blue napkin
in a billowing moment
a gold incursion
a strict horizon
15.
desultory gray
rising of the day
cormorant besprent swims by
under the gray layered sky
dives and disappears
the rain’s whispered cheers
16.
give us this day our
daily slur of sun
rising like a lonely loaf
we graze on with eyes and skin
touching each other
in the lonely light
17.
red-orange luminance
white cloudwisps wafting
above and below dark hills
calm atomic yellowing
deep breath expanding
effortless slate-blue
can sunrise be willed
no thy will does not
govern the planet’s turning
could it be the force of love
taking a deep breath
without intention
18.
saint john’s cathedral
the sun’s sentinel
pokes its pointy spying spires
up at the naked blue clouds
the gold fringed hem of
god’s skirt proclaims love
19.
no sign of sunrise
the rain it raineth
every day to quote the bard
aloof the sky refuses
these bare ruined choirs
my mind’s leafless limbs
20.
i didn’t see the sun today
but i saw a star
tonight cold and bright
i woke up but stayed
in bed at sunrise
to venture out at moonrise
21.
the sunrise has slouched
further south rough beast
but the fog comforts the hills
prodigal the ochre sun
behind the mountains
marigold the clouds
22.
standing in the street
looking southeastward
sunrise time but clouds are thick
but falcon and falconer
tell me it’s right there
slouching toward solstice
23.
river railroad bridge
rolling sunrise clouds
this train ain’t bound for glory
but still the smothered sunrise
hints at beautiful
blue dreams and journeys
24.
train crossing river
sun rising without
intending to turns the sky
and its reflection
into something never
seen until this moment
25.
thanksgiving morning
on the great river
railroad bridge like a zipper
binding the searing beauty
of the rose-gold sky
to watery earth
26.
hephaestus rises
forging molten gold
on the eastern horizon
above my alma mater
my great grandfather
smiling down on me
27.
mirror of river
grasps at burnished bronze
angelic yellow garment
pink threads of fire cobalt blue
wielding a flaming
sword to kindle day
28.
guests of the sunrise
trespassing to see
the unnameable colours
gaudily manifesting
neon banana
alien lava
29.
eighteen sunrises
viewed from steptoe butte
each year in my mind
since the day that you were born
and the world became
stunningly lovely
30.
end of november
cold aquamarine
watery cobalt serene
early morning clouds swimming
above seabottom
hills sunken city
How the Malaise Happens in Wisconsin…
January 4, 2018 by at 8:37 am
We call it the Mørketid around here, though.
Night Rain
September 25, 2017 by at 11:31 am
…presently after they shall be honored and exalted,
shall come to nothing and vanish like smoke.
Our kingdoms shall not last. The rain says that
In every word that drips from eaves tonight—
Soliloquies in sluices, gutters spit
Their gargle out on the driveway’s concrete
Like morning coffee pouring cold and hard
Into tomorrow’s undreamt cups. The words
Of rain are not to be trusted. Tonight
The roof sizzles with them—like meat on a spit.
We listen late between thunder’s concrete
Exemptions and windy inclusions that
Prescribe our mortared brick. End-stopping hard
And final as a trumpet-blast of words,
Each kingdom states the risk. What more concrete,
More sound and safe a thing to say than that?
But liquid eloquence is drowning night
And counting syllables with all the spit
And polish of modern minds that, pressed hard,
Mushroom haloed plumes, like songs without words….
What kingdom ever lasts? For those who spit
Upon their mothers’ graves have made concrete
The mystery that reigns in darkness—that
Which irrigates our time: The rain tonight
Succumbs to its own rules—its laws are hard
And fast as tongues evaporate their words.
Envoi
So rain takes note of rust, and toads (discrete
As thoughtful lovers) crowd the waterspout—
The weather front decays to scraps of snarled
And scudding cloud—the kingdoms of this world.
The House of Haddix: First Mansion
August 15, 2017 by at 11:53 am
for Louise Cowan
Wisdom builds her house,
But folly with her own hands tears it down.
– Proverbs 14:1
You enter the house to see the house, four walls
And foundation under constant hazard
Of frost and crumbling emotions in time.
You enter the house to see what the house
Is not: these four walls and seven mansions,
The ghostly heads turned from the weariness
Of history, the keepers of the shades
Now gone down to sacred rest and left restless,
Unburied. Enter the house and the senses detect
A quiet genius undisturbed as attic air,
Locked in a tomb, no part of the fixtures
But like a fiction, finding the locus
Where object and memory meet, escape
Time, and maintain vigilance over what
From root cellar grows in the house of Haddix:
Expressed, the elegant elegiacs
In the dust and mold, the fingers of bone
Trace the moistened tracks a snail will make,
Moving toward inevitable lessons of the salt-lick.
Na Muintir: Three Fragments
March 17, 2017 by at 10:17 am
(The Coming of the Gaels)
Let us sing of the coming of the Gaels,
Three tribes like three streams, wandering
Across the wide lands of the East and South,
Across the roaring body of seas, land
Of foreign powers and ways weird to Eire.
From there came the Milesians though last
In order, first in war and rule.
These were met
By bristling Firbolg and mighty Tuatha Da Danaan,
When to these the Milesians beat their path.
All three were kin of Celt’s blood, who before
The singing of songs separated to become
One tribe, they of whom we now sing our tune,
The triple-headed river of wandering men,
Come from the East, the Gaels, warring down
To the peace of a single river’s flow: the Gaels.
First the Firbolg came, and they from Hellas,
Long enslaved but cunning in their escape,
Capturing the ships of their veteran masters,
Outrunning the curses of Manannan MacLir,
They managed a beach head, and thereby good fortune
Until the Fomorians, tribe of rovers,
With a stronghold on Tory Island, waged big war
Coming down like birds of prey, across
The cold grey seas, white-tipped with chill wind,
Come down from the Island of Tory, northwest.
Because of the Firbolgs, the Fomorians would work
A petty worry in the wake of the Tuatha De Danann.
So came next these clever and skillful folk.
Awed by the finery and execution of artful works,
[Read more…]
Gerasene Farm
February 12, 2017 by at 2:24 pm
– for D.F.
“What do you want with me…?”
“We pigs are brainworkers.” – Napoleon
“Who is going to save me?” – Wilbur
Sundays during slaughter time, when work and days
Are a matter of acres and seasons, pink flesh
And exposed blue-white bone
Are surely signs of progress—satisfaction—fertility.
And when autumn begins to spit snow from its mouth
We’ll fire up the fifty-gallon drums for boiling skin
From the herd. With our blue knuckles now scalded red
We’re allowed to pretend we know Odysseus’s swineherd.
He’s a neighbor, say, who might need to borrow a pritch,
Lend his spare block-and-tackle or resharpen a bell scraper
On our millstone.
And that’s when Monsignor comes by to bless it all
One bullet at a time. It doesn’t take long after we call
And he’s there almost immediately.
There’s no dying soul,
No family grief; it’s all just business. “Tail
To snout” he likes to say, quoting from some other good book.
So Monsignor takes off the blacks and Roman collar
This Sunday, leaves them back at the rectory
And dons red buffalo plaid and tattered bibs.
“Scares the devil out of the herd,” I once heard him explain
“Don’t like black or maybe they just know.”
Flexibility
Is one of his strong points.
This day is full of a sky
Afflicted with a tin-foil glare from broken clouds—
It’s the day he’s chosen to come help because
He generally likes the business
And specifically on a Sunday. “Not unnecessary work.
A form of relaxation, I would call it.”
He grew up downwind of a giant swine operation
And of course raised his own and has some opinions on swine.
He knows his pig flesh, alright, the way
A horse trader knows teeth and hoofs.
Monsignor lowers the blue-barreled gun,
A pistol without history – it knows neither wars nor duels
But only a resting place between hunting seasons.
He stares the hogs down, and anoints
Their lives with purpose, cruel
For business, and kind but for no kind of fun.
Afterwards, he walks back to his car
To clean the muzzle and chamber.
Throats cut, they wait
With us for his return.
We don’t let him near the boiling pot.
He’s no good at that part.
But he has a great eye
For parting flesh with a .45.
And maybe for that reason he was made a Monsignor,
But when he scalds the flesh he scrapes too much flesh with the hair
And very little hair with the flesh.
We politely
Put him off to visit with the children
Or maybe put a beer in his hand and tell him to rest a bit,
Though rest isn’t in his nature anymore than
It is in the clouds that scud like corpuscles across the sky.
He was born on a farm and to hear him tell it he fought
Half the day with earth and flesh, the other half,
All blood work.
If given half a chance he could shine
Like the best of rural vicars and squires.
At any rate, his place in literature
May one day be secure—
Interpolating experience and innocence
With marksmanship and common sense:
“Pigs are a good investment—nothing wasted if you do it right.
Efficiency is in the nature of swine.”
“Why else,” Monsignor would add, “would the desperate demons
Of Gerasene plead with our Lord. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’
You can almost hear them say. It must have been a favor,
Well, maybe not a favor; more a false mercy, for our Lord
To provide that herd, that cliff, the sea beneath.
But there’s no mercy for demons, of course. That’s a figure
Of speech is all. Literature is full of them. But Scripture
Only uses it on purpose. No levity with that sort of business.”
Literature, indeed, I nod. Napoleon and Wilbur
Might talk past each other among the cold clouds
That gather and disperse in winter configurations above our heads.
But also in the sense that fictional pigs make of life and death.
It’s all fantastic friendships for nostalgia’s sake
Or a drudging work detail
To serve as footstool for naked power—
Pink flesh and blue-white bone for them—and sometimes for us.
But Monsignor? He doesn’t even bother to say–
And he gives it no more thought
Than a man of the cloth ought to be
Expected to do:
We watch him hold the pistol like an aspergillum.
And he anoints them both—Wilbur and Napoleon—
With one shot.
We were poets once and young…
February 8, 2017 by at 12:20 pm
…or younger, anyway.
So JOB was visiting the Dappled Things website, as one does, and he stumbled across this in the “featured poem of the day” department: a little ditty he composed a while back for some M.L. character…
I do so love “ogling theologians.”
[Image: Gargoyles at Notre Dame, and the Café Grotesque mascots they inspired.]
What Came in the Mail
February 7, 2017 by at 2:38 am
From JOB, for Christmas … with a note that perhaps I have an affinity for Eastern Europeans, to which I can say, Yes, I certainly do. I hadn’t read much of M. Codrescu. Know of him primarily because of his NPR gig, of course, and something he’d written in connection with New Orleans. Leafing through the table of contents, the title “dream dogs” caught my eye, which turned out to be a good choice because it is (a) short, and (b) consists of lines that are entirely left-justified, which is makes reproducing it in this post much easier.
dream dogs
years ago it was easy to dream of wolves
and wake up your lover
to show him the blood on your hip.
the wolves had ties
and followed after every sentence
rather polite.
now there are police dogs
using tear gas and the lover next to you
doesn’t wake up.
ME: I like it. Thinking that it must have been written with a woman in mind, I flip back a few pages and learn that it’s from a section named for a former wife, Alice Henderson-Codrescu. Naturally, this interests me, and so I read a few more.
reverse
the storm outside
must be the kind you read about in the newspapers,
killer of babies and bums.
the kind of rain that goes in the subway
when i hold on to the coat of a fat man
whose disastrous life
makes me happy.
ME: Not much to do with the wife, as far as I can tell, but the alliteration in “babies and bums” catches my ear, and the schadenfreude my heart … although I’ve put on a few pounds this last year, so …
zzzzzzzzzzzz
i want to touch something sensational
like the mind of a shark. the white
electric bulbs of hunger moving
straight to the teeth.
and let there be rain that day over new york.
there is no other way
i can break away from bad news
and cheap merchandise.
(the black woman with a macy’s shopping bag
just killed me
from across the street.)
it is comfortable to want
peace from the mind of a shark.
ME: I like this one, too, although I don’t have much of an idea about what it means. The title leads me to suspect it is perhaps a version of a dream he’s had, and now I wonder whether all of the poems in this section are based on dreams, since we have it in the title of the first poem above, and the imagery in each of the poems has sort of chaos we often experience in dreams. The lower case letters bring to mind W.S. Merwin, but Codrescu’s poems contain a great deal more of life as most of us find it. He isn’t trying for the sublime in every line, and in fact seems to be trying to avoid anything that might signify portentousness. So yes, I like it. Not as much as JOB’s own poetry, but I’ll be dipping back into this volume until I see more from him.
Thanks JOB!
The Pump on the Rock
December 27, 2016 by at 2:08 pm
For Barney
Since you built it, you know that there is more rock there
Than water and more air than
Rock—there where fire has no place. The familiar
Old thing, its audacity is mere and thin
As its shaft, stabbing into this Pliocene crop
Of driftless children. Dear nearly dead dynamic thing,
It hardly begins to know itself before it spits and slops
And vomits air. Then, with a cough
And a rush of sucking sounds, it slips up the crude iron pipe
That responds with shivering thunder down between the elven earth
And cousin rock, always
To engender water forth — forth — and forth.
But also, like ghosts behind a clock, crusted gray as
A vole’s pelt and crimson-jawed, the years of rust creep
Upward in more silent ease
Along its sloughing shaft, and fold
Their slender gelid claws around the man-squared handle,
Worn to a green shine with use. Its rucked crank grows grumpy and old
With weather—the same by which the gaskets, cracked as candle
Wax, have lost their Vulcan grip.
So within the icy tangle
Of four winds, a million suns pique, hone and strop
This Sisyphean siphon
Into a steady ceaseless drip,
A metronome of drops to set its count of winters in Wisconsin
As it slides and plunges air
Through its piston
For a deep transmission of elements, where ages of rock are
Greater than time. And more timeless
Than rock¬, there is water here, more — more — and more —
All of it thirsty as
Fire’s industry to slake
The spongy spring-formed surface
Of the cold-cased earth. The pump takes
A breath, drawn from subterranean catastrophes,
And exhales. Submerge your hands within its stream of cold—they will ache
Like the grief of memories —
Baptize your tongue in its running column of blue, it will be struck
Dumb as tomorrow’s yesterdays.
Democracy at Work?
November 14, 2016 by at 10:42 am
Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life’s well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill. Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates – that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right. – Leo XIII
Corporation Sole
October 26, 2016 by at 6:27 pm
The river that’s flowing before me now
Pretends to understand its lonely brother Styx.
It is October time, a time of myths
And stranger maths
Than summers know
Or passing springs can bring to sum.
The leaves surrender to a gathered text of sticks
Retailed for fuel and some
Forgotten task that lazes on the banks,
Awaiting frost’s soliloquy of spears and blades.
My whining spill of spooling line
Upsets a loon —
It glides and banks
A wake upon the distant shore.
Old grandsire Proteus appears at last, a blaze
Who builds his kindle, sure
Enough, from limb and branch of weeping pines.
The shivering fish that shake away my hook reform
Beneath the surface. Scaled with dusk,
They catch the disc
Of moon that spins and pines
For autumn’s tomb. A china plate
That shatters trees and stars, this lunar form
Resolves to hold the plait
Of Pitys’ hair the way that Pan had sighed
To grasp her battered body Boreas had thrown
In lust. So raw, his breath
Now fits its breadth
Along the side
Of evening’s flesh. Its chill now combs
My fire. I edge myself against this flaming throne
As ancient winter comes
To claim my blood as corporation sole.
The world’s collateral is not enough and preys
Upon my wasted groin.
(What god will groan
To claim my soul?)
With empty cup in hand, I wait
Between the river’s deep and castle keep. Each prays
To lift this golden weight.
Live-blogging the Brisket – Hour 4 & 5
August 21, 2016 by at 10:08 am
Perhaps to temper the fire of my hubris with a little smoke of humility, in today’s Gospel reading (Rite of ’62) our Lord’s words were a fitting reminder of priorities, even as my Weber was attending to its business, I should be minding my own:
“Therefore I say to you, be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on. Is not the life more than the meat: and the body more than the raiment? Behold the birds of the air, for they neither sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns: and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value than they?” (Matthew 6:24-26)
But then after returning home from Mass, I wondered if our Lord also considered cats in these calculations…
Alas, they seemed undeterred by maledictions and threats of malefactions, should they even be considering carnoklepty…
Of course, I should have trusted n the Lord (and it being a Sunday too!)…
Jumping Jupiter! It’s the art of Father Peter Gray!
Father Peter Gray is probably one of the most prolific artists working at an easel today. But with thousands of paintings to his name, many of them portraits of saints and popes, Father Peter hasn’t withdrawn from the world to set up shop in a Bohemian loft or an artist’s retreat with an open-air studio. Rather, when he’s not up to his elbows in ochre, mauve and indigo, he’s engaging the world head-on, walking the mean streets of Baltimore, inviting homeless men to share a home with him, and supporting these men with the money he makes through his art even as he helps them get back on their feet and reintegrated into society.
Raise a glass and sit and stare…Appreciate the man:
By the buy, the good padre also does abstracts.