Blackbird 14a

We walk by Cayuga Lake.
Vogdesa sees a grackle.
It appears before her, on this much she and I will agree, but for her it becomes a referent on a four-dimensional axis of time and memory, heartbreakingly in search of denotation, which becomes one of the forms of a moving x-ray striking a chord on a Bechstein. The pall of ardor diffuses planes of surface and sounds, seeking place in the spectrum, and longing for a sense of belonging, either simplified or swollen like a river, and altogether separated from the world’s murders or joined with its dignified and reposeful angelism. The bird plays upon the homonyms, her imposition of a patterned weaving, a harmony-chiming paraphrase of her reading. Bergson comes to mind. Spinoza comes to mind. Dymaxion fluxion. The thing we all used to locate between being and consciousness trembles and wobbles and contravenes the gyroscope (dictionary), then seiches from object to subject and commutes once more, the transubstantiating mersion. A vulgate spake d’antan the tonguewords of more fluid playwrights, those inventing metaphor and by their rhymes rebuffing the deist’s black moll. It is Chaucer’s grackle! and consequently one sunbeam’s momentary flash of illusory fix (Gottschalks hath it so). Vogdesa is unable to lie for freedom. Before the round is done, another round begins: a noble, esoteric, sublime and calculated indifference to botany, zoology, migrations, deeding, conference, faith, (suborning of course), and hegemony. E’en Ithaca’s hilltop copses vanish! Apprehension of the grackle so:

Moddel fikt de bottel crackle
Frins die ocher shacken nackle
Briss auf fridog thor unt frackal
Poppel pindt die uben grackel.

Of meanings’ planes which vie and parry, feint, shudder, and vibrate, rays and waves appear and emit undifferentiated hues and (aural) tones, a minor synaesthetic pression, the suggestive surfaces fade and inflect themselves; they grid like moving x-ray plates, each twinkle a shimmering of recollections, deliquescence, and variance. The overlord is untempered, yet still a cyclone breaks upon the shore, possibilities of consequence in tidal waves. Birds are intricate.
Yet at some point the humming hums evolve into a tale, a tale that is peopled with happy gnomes and merry elves and blind giants and buzzy gnats, which romanced prose presses into the clay of remorse, which shares its home with glee and light. And for a while it vaunts its dominion, and may even invent some cheery dance steps, unencumbered by historical perspective, dances danced in gracious gardens, say. Amalgamated aggregated inquiries and woes arch the stones of Beckett and Ruskin, benighted Crusoe’s Sisyphean beating back against the ravaging storms on an island off the coast of Chile, say. Such of her foraging yields barely sufficient scraps of fruit and weed, forming from the grackle’s gift outright of wondrous keys and contradictions, the quantum sums reciprocal and mounting, the synoptic grains, the Sargassoed sea of nutrients and sharp prickly kelps, a lofting jellyfish grand and bright, the matrix of points, the topic sentence glimpsed and blent, the maelstrom of epigraphs, a hailstorm of puffs, a fashion of adumbrated grammar peeked, a rhetoric of memory, a smoke ring foehned away and into parts,

yet remains the syntax of the holding heart,
the necessary angel,
and the lucid dream of creativity:
a poem, say, or rhapsody adreamed.