My haibun for Frank

"Ah, touched in your bower of bone,
  Are you!"
                     (Gerard Manley Hopkins)


"the poet

the master of veils"
                     (Frank Samperi)

_____________


Looking out, and tasked beyond belief, it- it always seems I'm just not that
  much into returning or god, or the good!--

                  sparrows peck at hawks
                  or the outlandish mayfly

                                                                              and I find spirit to spirit
(Samperi-wise) is also too beyond me, tilting  always West, toward a lake
  that's contrarian and cold

Where's my Boston house, and friend, and the "sister mag" there to deflect
  some of the hate (even from poets!),
                                                                               whose bugling I heard, too?

And the child, hung on no one's arm and who won't leave any rimy stones
  unturned & run just for the joy

                  (the dread essence of eggs,
                   the mayfly's or sparrow's)

can certainly have been dearer to him than the three-numbered things along
  the parks and roads

Never unbruised did the poet give the same unum to the crowds trying to maim
  him who's (to them)

                   always seer and unclear
                   in Japan as well as here

and who'd walked alone over  the bridge from the eastside, each time a death-trap
  (and he knew it) & the waters a storm

What'er falls will rattle like Frank's Brooklyn trains, and trembling by a grave,
  always part of the tall viator--

                   the rain by upending pebbles
                   won't keep the seagulls away--

and loose souls like his who'd himself fathered and flowered (if nothing else)

I believe neither a home in the sun (with room of his own) nor the lightships
  of the page & music could've added a year

  Not Frank who'd tried (all his life) joining child to the sea.