Henry Gould

from JULY

4

My daughter is writing a paper for school
on Emily Dickinson. The white bride
in the Amherst attic — songs of tribe
encrypted in bundled fascicles —

chaste words she would not put to pen
to shuttle through the marketplace —
veiled, Married — til pickled Time
itself tickled them forth — so shy, inept —

handwritten — for your eyes only, O
betrothed — of my tribe, my tongue...
Phoebe, your father's unbegotten
mind seems full of dead leaves, blowing;

icons of father-mother soaking adrift
in a flickering river, always dreaming
upstream, and floating down, married
like Hamlet to the name of action, furtive,

unconfirmed. Penitent emperor,
kneeling at the snowy gate
to beg forgiveness. Dante
never returned to his native Florence

but learned an unknown tongue
for the whole armory of heaven, still
outside. Like the magic word: listen,
children — the voice of the thrush

in the flaming shrubbery — the bee
humming from the dying bull
into a flock of white-gold bloodroot
hidden in the watershed (a Mississippi

wilderness). So my sullen heart
swells, muttering, untranslatable
toward schoolroom flag, slate,
chalk — a furious grouse my sentinel,

a prophet in the dry chernozem,
grasslands waving in the endlessness
(fathers rooting in the abstract sand
of astro-turf under a vaulting metronome).

Dante leaned against a stone across
the street, while Brunelleschi
and his brothers built it
brick by brick. Warm red succor

the color of a red puccoon (huge, gentle,
towering) pops up, plays peekaboo
behind a wilderness of cabs, mopeds
(poking through coppery nuggets

of Renaissance dust). Bloodstone
crowning Florence like a carpenter's
torn cedar sapling stacked on top —
it is finished. Sturdy, unstable

enough to last — vernacular,
close to the ground, some salient
camouflaged pheasant's home
beneath a veneer of Lupercalia

(thrumming with prancing cocks
in a self-enclosed Camelot or
re-sold Hammersmith) — ovoid, pre-
Ptolemaic — some Narcissus-chicken

atop a ruddy orb borne in brownian
motion: here's where the phantom
bee hovers within your mortified
absent riverhead of prairie-worn nubbed

diadems, Emily — ready to place you
on your cicada, thrown from the husk
of iron Caesar's backhanded cusp of
doubled ladybug target sheep (splayed,

fateful). And in the glossolalia
of Shakespeare's bumblebeehived
head, the King of Jordan's baby
brother bobs beneath the soughing,

sighing rivergrass — tone mosaic
of an infant tongue, like ting-tonged
bronzen wind-chimes round a goat-
belled herd of unsound smoke:

the harmony that Dante heard
when first he felt the baptism
of Beatrice (bubblebath within
domestic... his. Duomo-dreamt).

And if nine muses in July slipped
downstream toward a swollen, stolen
summa... it were a felix loss
for Caesar's breastplate — broken jewel,

cool dove, stone sister — moosed-over
mossy garnet in a woodland of
autumnal jasper. Duels
of August — golden — over now —

are nevermore. Veteran stone,
an Inca sacrifice — a frozen child,
limed over, liminal (ditched
first-born son, whose knot

entwines the ceremonial sword
like twine around a strong man's
house — holds it for a host
of Jacobean thieves) turned

gypsy roost now, camel-humped,
bull-dragged and wobbly, a
knife-line violin, the last bow
of your father's father's ho-hum

poem... finished. Built. Where
the river flows both ways around
your coracle's felt node (or
upside-dome). So row

some more, toward summer —
toward hurtling chords of warmer
wind. For the grasslands of your
mini-Rome are no more rusted

than busted us (trust me on this).
Understand, we stand in good here
for the minor coppers who dug
her out of the lincoln logs — Scythians

with charlie horses carved into their
knobby, needy, bowlegged errors —
still, they hit the bell's aye — rose. And
this is a drawing-out of thundering wraiths.
 

<^>