Dove descending interior old Augustus Lutheran Church Sanctuary, founded by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, c. 1743 Providence (Trappe) PA, 18 Sept 2012.

24 September 2007

Fiction Darling / A Calendar of Poems

A Calendar of Poems

This calendar portrays America from its mythic discoveries. The full title comes from one of the same name by Sir Robert Gordon in 1625, an inducement to colonization, but the colonization here is of “another world,” as Raleigh muses. The musings and celebrations of St. Brendan, Erik the Red, Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh are not of colonies they will found but of the natural world they love and betray. These primitive speakings comprise their dreams, sacrifices, betrayals.

New ventures do not start in January. The year begins in March. St. Brendan puts out to sea in a skin covered boat, a curragh with paddles. There is a mist and an unclear call when it assumes so much, but he follows the urge.

March is rose but April is red for the blood of the Viking. Erik loses his son in the new world, the first to come in the ages. April is daring, but temporary.   

In May the gold sun raises the plants; gold heat rises into nostrils. Red lanterns shining through the fog are the first  permanent settlement of the European. But the natural rhythm is constant sun.

In these tokens are symbols of larger loss,  Raleigh losses his son in Guiana, in June. It out weighs the nuggets. He goes back to England and is hung.


July and August are exempt from historical myth narrative The new creation mystically discerns in spiders, flies, sun, orphans, snakes more than a physical world. Creatures with dithyrambs respond, caught in traps, lose their skin, renew, repay. One glimpse per decade, century, flies, spiders, children of some Orpheus.

Fall and winter oppose spring and summer. The myth does not reestablish. The great year is broken in half to the final decades of the twentieth century. These oppose the preceding centuries, to introduce a millennium we think will never end. But the millennium ends in September, fall and winter oppose spring and summer. If the first six months speak from the natural, the second half is artificial, as if  the last six decades of the 20th century ending in the 1990’ s were an epiphany that reestablishes myth. The last line, “love’s gone” is uttered by the amaranth of heaven. 

There is a lot of sowing and reaping. Erik the Red’s and Sir Walter Raleigh’s loss of sons grieve for all sons lost in war planting. With the loss comes the new world imagination of everything according to its kind. The voyage is as if St. Brendan undertook a heavenly navigation of voyages and passage of the sun in response to the green world.



2.When I worried about the meaning of nonfiction, how to tell, to prevent fiction from creeping, that fiction was a nonfiction. You cannot say the opposite, that nonfiction is a fact. This weighs. Can a pseudonym be non, tired of the same image day to day? When we mirror shaving, a fiction, makeup, clothing all fictions, how do you know what you are writing? Does it call up and say: Fiction darling. Or do you decide?


I assume everybody is consumed with questions of art, line, rhythm, image, color, flow. I also ask the nature of sun, parabolas, a passionate clean strike of a ball, life on your toes.

 When it comes necessary to know big things and small, that rich and poor are of their own and that that is the nature of knowing, which knowledge proceeds to loving, barrierlessness allowing, it sounds like a poem, space in the beginning and at end incompleteness complete with work achieves the gift.

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