Tom Goff
GET DOWN: ENTERING JUNIPER FUSE
(For Clayton Eshleman)
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
Abashed as a late birthday guest, I enter
your daunting text-labyrinth: much as you
first entered Lascaux, or Cougnac,
or Pech-Merle: “Sensations and associations
amassed and crumbled…in ways that made me feel
I was being processed through them…” So with
your autograph, heirloom of the ur-image.
I’m taken with your book-tour shaman’s numen,
transubstantiated into the most obliterate grotto
palimpsest, absorbed in your minatory (minotaury?)
utterance. Afterwards, my page having ingested
_for a fetish, a Veronica’s veil_
the blood of the sacred ballpoint,
I do read, plainly enough, your
“for Tom, with best wishes,” but not before
the me-processing, alive in the ink strokes,
reshapes them: for Tom, with heart [or heat] and stem…
With heart and stem, I must “participate in Ariadne,”
I must get down, hook, line, and sunk,
to the spelunker depths,
there is a cavern in the town (in the Tom),
but oh where shall I find it. How to enlist my heart,
reunite it with the stem-as-pen and, turn by turn,
guide the sharp inkhorn (vessel of ichor?)
to what can be
pierced and tapped
and drunk?
__________________
Thanks, Tom! Rattlesnake Press is proud to announce that Tom Goff is joining the staff of Rattlesnake Review as Historian-in-Residence, beginning with the new issue which will be coming out today at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, 7:30 PM. Tom will be writing about California poets of the past, beginning in this issue with Ina Coolbrith, California's first Poet Laureate, and it's an honor and a pleasure to have him joining our Snake posse!
By the way, the above poem first appeared on "Just Poetry", James Lee Jobe's fine blog which can be seen by clicking on "James Lee Jobe" at the right of this column, or by going to jamesleejobe.livejournal.com/.
___________________
Today in NorCal poetry:
•••Tonight (Weds., 6/11), 7:30 PM: Two Moons in June: Join us at The Book Collector for the premiere of Day Moon, a new chapbook by James DenBoer, and Mindfully Moon, a littlesnake broadside by Carol Louise Moon, as well as Volume Three of Conversations, our third book of interviews by B.L. Kennedy, featuring Art Beck, Olivia Costellano, Quinton Duval, William S. Gainer, Mario Ellis Hill, Kathryn Hohlwein, James Jee Jobe, Andy Jones, Rebecca Morrison, Viola Weinberg and Phillip T. Nails. All this PLUS a brand-new edition (#18) of Rattlesnake Review! That's at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento.
This will be the last rattle-read of the season; the Snake will be taking two months off from publications and Medusa will be left to keep things going by herself. Then we'll start up again on September 10 with a brand-new book from Patrick Grizzell, as well as a new issue of the Review (#19) and even more goodies than you can rattle yer tail at! Next deadline for Rattlesnake Review (#19) is August 15.
___________________
HELP HELP HELP!
Today is HandyStuff Quickie Day; Medusa needs your help! Let us know about your handy resources, things that you reach for on a regular basis. Send your ideas to kathykieth@hotmail.com/; we need your handy stuff—quickie!
___________________
GLAD DAY
(William Blake)
(For Lawrence Spann and the Sutterwriters)
—Tom Goff
Erect is how the glad man stands,
his incandescent lungs and heart
suffusing lampshade limbs in white,
and yet: his chest…of scant expanse:
a breather of grime and poverty?
Those long legs dance resurrection dance.
Such limbs underpin the craftsman’s stance
(Blake, copperplating fine poetry).
This man, built slender yet triumphant,
outthrusts a leg to toe dark rock
that’s one part slime, part cobalt shock.
The human, supple, elegant
of line, transfigured—suffering?
Is this the immortal naked God
poured into skin of worms and sod?
We know not what we’re capturing
when captivated by such joy
as splits our meek and milk-drunk frames
—cloud, moon satin, on dawn’s drawn blade.
This human doll, is he a toy?
Or figurine of the attainable?
His hair, of gold; his eyes, dolls’ eyes.
His lips make laughter without smiles:
Can flameless fires like these be real?
Compacting around him, yet still in flow,
time clockwork, albeit uncontained.
The hourglass bursts yet takes on sand,
the broken rise in pain and glow.
(Previously appeared in Poetry Now)
__________________
TRINITY SURE
—Tom Goff
Near Old Sacramento, three forces in a raw wind:
An army of smear and smooth, hose, chisel,
truck and jackhammer, filling the I-5 boat section
with quick-cure cement, hot black slag.
Egyptian, their intent to lay down hull
flawless, watertight as if bearing Pharaohs into afterlife
reeds and sands. The river, where late sun
drops eggs of light swirling into the clear suspension.
A great red-tailed hawk, wingspan drawn
as “a clothier’s yard” for the arrow,
marries the vulture’s thermal float with the kite’s
ferocious flapping to hover rock-in-the-stream-still.
High, high, it weightless waits, and peers down for meek
scrabbles in the bank grasses; vibrating to unknown
pleasures or pressures it swoops and describes
gyring dives, a god over the wind-whipped.
God the hawk, sun-tinged river the spirit,
boat-section rebuilders the crosspiece carpenters,
“trinity sure” to me you bring note of the world’s
ever-renewing newness, as the sun, the bird,
the curing cement are borne out chill, old, and lilac
with dead day into the dark west.
__________________
ACORN,
nut of the oak. It draws,
this bright morning, a turkey
with her brood of three
through wild-oat shimmer
down the swale,
a woodpecker who drums
the end of season,
and—both of us surprised
at dawn—the spike buck
who gauged me, then vanished
into deeper woods.
Smooth brown, as if
it longed for my hand. An itch,
or tribal memory—it begs
to be broken, leached
nut-sweet, eaten.
—Taylor Graham, Somerset
___________________
Thanks, TG! Taylor Graham sent this poem in response to yesterday's Seed of the Week. Now we have two TG's in our Snake posse; watch for Taylor's "Making Fun of Poetry" column in every issue of the Review.
And finally, a wrong-place-wrong-time poem from yet another Posse member, Katy Brown ("SnakeEyes"). Thanks, Katy. Yikes. So far no snakes up here in PPines, but we had our share of rattlers—the real ones, not the cutesy ones in our Review—in Fair Oaks, and sometimes there is just no good solution for wrong place, wrong time encounters, yes? (Is it us who are in the wrong place, or them...?)
URBAN RATTLESNAKE
—Katy Brown, Davis
It scares me how quickly I’d have murdered
that snake for them:
the undersized cat that cornered it for twenty minutes;
the pointer who patrolled the yard and missed it;
for the puppy that it bit and nearly killed;
and for my daughter whose house it circled for two days.
I’d have become my grandmother:
taking the shovel out to the woodpile;
my Great Aunt Fanny, killing the snake in the yard;
my Uncle Johnny, shooting the viper in camp;
Jan, who killed 18 last year to protect her horses.
I know snakes don’t usually stalk humans,
don’t randomly try to kill horses or dogs or cats.
I also know that between the back yard
where the cat had it cornered,
the next-door yard where it bit the puppy,
and the front porch where it lay in wait,
it circled the house spreading fear.
This urban rattlesnake was too big,
too fast, too lethal to capture—too deadly
to transport back to the urbanized river parkway.
This was a city snake
that slid and rattled its way
onto the stoop in front of the duplex
a short block away from a children’s playground.
I went looking for it with a flat-headed shovel.
I searched all the edges and corners of the two garages,
looked along the fence-line in each back yard,
checked the front flower beds.
I’d have killed it if I’d found it first.
But it was the neighbor who heard the women yell,
who used a spade to sever its head on the porch
and who dumped the two pieces into separate trash cans
just to be sure.
__________________
(For Clayton Eshleman)
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
Abashed as a late birthday guest, I enter
your daunting text-labyrinth: much as you
first entered Lascaux, or Cougnac,
or Pech-Merle: “Sensations and associations
amassed and crumbled…in ways that made me feel
I was being processed through them…” So with
your autograph, heirloom of the ur-image.
I’m taken with your book-tour shaman’s numen,
transubstantiated into the most obliterate grotto
palimpsest, absorbed in your minatory (minotaury?)
utterance. Afterwards, my page having ingested
_for a fetish, a Veronica’s veil_
the blood of the sacred ballpoint,
I do read, plainly enough, your
“for Tom, with best wishes,” but not before
the me-processing, alive in the ink strokes,
reshapes them: for Tom, with heart [or heat] and stem…
With heart and stem, I must “participate in Ariadne,”
I must get down, hook, line, and sunk,
to the spelunker depths,
there is a cavern in the town (in the Tom),
but oh where shall I find it. How to enlist my heart,
reunite it with the stem-as-pen and, turn by turn,
guide the sharp inkhorn (vessel of ichor?)
to what can be
pierced and tapped
and drunk?
__________________
Thanks, Tom! Rattlesnake Press is proud to announce that Tom Goff is joining the staff of Rattlesnake Review as Historian-in-Residence, beginning with the new issue which will be coming out today at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, 7:30 PM. Tom will be writing about California poets of the past, beginning in this issue with Ina Coolbrith, California's first Poet Laureate, and it's an honor and a pleasure to have him joining our Snake posse!
By the way, the above poem first appeared on "Just Poetry", James Lee Jobe's fine blog which can be seen by clicking on "James Lee Jobe" at the right of this column, or by going to jamesleejobe.livejournal.com/.
___________________
Today in NorCal poetry:
•••Tonight (Weds., 6/11), 7:30 PM: Two Moons in June: Join us at The Book Collector for the premiere of Day Moon, a new chapbook by James DenBoer, and Mindfully Moon, a littlesnake broadside by Carol Louise Moon, as well as Volume Three of Conversations, our third book of interviews by B.L. Kennedy, featuring Art Beck, Olivia Costellano, Quinton Duval, William S. Gainer, Mario Ellis Hill, Kathryn Hohlwein, James Jee Jobe, Andy Jones, Rebecca Morrison, Viola Weinberg and Phillip T. Nails. All this PLUS a brand-new edition (#18) of Rattlesnake Review! That's at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento.
This will be the last rattle-read of the season; the Snake will be taking two months off from publications and Medusa will be left to keep things going by herself. Then we'll start up again on September 10 with a brand-new book from Patrick Grizzell, as well as a new issue of the Review (#19) and even more goodies than you can rattle yer tail at! Next deadline for Rattlesnake Review (#19) is August 15.
___________________
HELP HELP HELP!
Today is HandyStuff Quickie Day; Medusa needs your help! Let us know about your handy resources, things that you reach for on a regular basis. Send your ideas to kathykieth@hotmail.com/; we need your handy stuff—quickie!
___________________
GLAD DAY
(William Blake)
(For Lawrence Spann and the Sutterwriters)
—Tom Goff
Erect is how the glad man stands,
his incandescent lungs and heart
suffusing lampshade limbs in white,
and yet: his chest…of scant expanse:
a breather of grime and poverty?
Those long legs dance resurrection dance.
Such limbs underpin the craftsman’s stance
(Blake, copperplating fine poetry).
This man, built slender yet triumphant,
outthrusts a leg to toe dark rock
that’s one part slime, part cobalt shock.
The human, supple, elegant
of line, transfigured—suffering?
Is this the immortal naked God
poured into skin of worms and sod?
We know not what we’re capturing
when captivated by such joy
as splits our meek and milk-drunk frames
—cloud, moon satin, on dawn’s drawn blade.
This human doll, is he a toy?
Or figurine of the attainable?
His hair, of gold; his eyes, dolls’ eyes.
His lips make laughter without smiles:
Can flameless fires like these be real?
Compacting around him, yet still in flow,
time clockwork, albeit uncontained.
The hourglass bursts yet takes on sand,
the broken rise in pain and glow.
(Previously appeared in Poetry Now)
__________________
TRINITY SURE
—Tom Goff
Near Old Sacramento, three forces in a raw wind:
An army of smear and smooth, hose, chisel,
truck and jackhammer, filling the I-5 boat section
with quick-cure cement, hot black slag.
Egyptian, their intent to lay down hull
flawless, watertight as if bearing Pharaohs into afterlife
reeds and sands. The river, where late sun
drops eggs of light swirling into the clear suspension.
A great red-tailed hawk, wingspan drawn
as “a clothier’s yard” for the arrow,
marries the vulture’s thermal float with the kite’s
ferocious flapping to hover rock-in-the-stream-still.
High, high, it weightless waits, and peers down for meek
scrabbles in the bank grasses; vibrating to unknown
pleasures or pressures it swoops and describes
gyring dives, a god over the wind-whipped.
God the hawk, sun-tinged river the spirit,
boat-section rebuilders the crosspiece carpenters,
“trinity sure” to me you bring note of the world’s
ever-renewing newness, as the sun, the bird,
the curing cement are borne out chill, old, and lilac
with dead day into the dark west.
__________________
ACORN,
nut of the oak. It draws,
this bright morning, a turkey
with her brood of three
through wild-oat shimmer
down the swale,
a woodpecker who drums
the end of season,
and—both of us surprised
at dawn—the spike buck
who gauged me, then vanished
into deeper woods.
Smooth brown, as if
it longed for my hand. An itch,
or tribal memory—it begs
to be broken, leached
nut-sweet, eaten.
—Taylor Graham, Somerset
___________________
Thanks, TG! Taylor Graham sent this poem in response to yesterday's Seed of the Week. Now we have two TG's in our Snake posse; watch for Taylor's "Making Fun of Poetry" column in every issue of the Review.
And finally, a wrong-place-wrong-time poem from yet another Posse member, Katy Brown ("SnakeEyes"). Thanks, Katy. Yikes. So far no snakes up here in PPines, but we had our share of rattlers—the real ones, not the cutesy ones in our Review—in Fair Oaks, and sometimes there is just no good solution for wrong place, wrong time encounters, yes? (Is it us who are in the wrong place, or them...?)
URBAN RATTLESNAKE
—Katy Brown, Davis
It scares me how quickly I’d have murdered
that snake for them:
the undersized cat that cornered it for twenty minutes;
the pointer who patrolled the yard and missed it;
for the puppy that it bit and nearly killed;
and for my daughter whose house it circled for two days.
I’d have become my grandmother:
taking the shovel out to the woodpile;
my Great Aunt Fanny, killing the snake in the yard;
my Uncle Johnny, shooting the viper in camp;
Jan, who killed 18 last year to protect her horses.
I know snakes don’t usually stalk humans,
don’t randomly try to kill horses or dogs or cats.
I also know that between the back yard
where the cat had it cornered,
the next-door yard where it bit the puppy,
and the front porch where it lay in wait,
it circled the house spreading fear.
This urban rattlesnake was too big,
too fast, too lethal to capture—too deadly
to transport back to the urbanized river parkway.
This was a city snake
that slid and rattled its way
onto the stoop in front of the duplex
a short block away from a children’s playground.
I went looking for it with a flat-headed shovel.
I searched all the edges and corners of the two garages,
looked along the fence-line in each back yard,
checked the front flower beds.
I’d have killed it if I’d found it first.
But it was the neighbor who heard the women yell,
who used a spade to sever its head on the porch
and who dumped the two pieces into separate trash cans
just to be sure.
__________________
Today's LittleNip:
We learn from experience that we don't learn from experience.
—George Bernard Shaw
Shaw is too much gas-bag.
—D.H. Lawrence
___________________
—Medusa (see you tonight!)
MEDUSA'S WEEKLY MENU:
(Contributors are welcome to cook up something for any and all of these!)
Monday: Weekly NorCal poetry calendar
Tuesday: Seed of the Week: Tuesday is Medusa's day to post poetry triggers such as quotes, forms, photos, memories, jokes—whatever might tickle somebody's muse. Pick up the gauntlet and send in your poetic results; and don't be shy about sending in your own triggers, too! All poems will be posted and a few of them will go into Medusa's Corner of each Rattlesnake Review. Send your work to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. No deadline for SOW; respond today, tomorrow, or whenever the muse arrives. (Print 'em out, maybe, save 'em for a dry spell?) When you send us work, though, just let us know which "seed" it was that inspired you.
Wednesday: HandyStuff Quickies: Resources for the poet, including whatever helps ease the pain of writing and/or publishing: favorite journals to read and/or submit to; books, etc., about writing; organizational tools—you know—HandyStuff! Tell us about your favorite tools.
Thursday: B.L.'s Drive-Bys: Micro-reviews by our irreverent Reviewer-in-Residence, B.L. Kennedy. Send books, CDs, DVDs, etc. to him for possible review (either as a Drive-By or in future issues of Rattlesnake Review) at P.O. Box 160664, Sacramento, CA 95816.
Friday: NorCal weekend poetry calendar
Daily (except Sunday): LittleNips: SnakeFood for the Poetic Soul: Daily munchables for poetic thought, including short paragraphs, quotes, wonky words, silliness, little-known poetry/poet facts, and other inspiration—yet another way to feed our ravenous poetic souls.
And poetry! Every day, poetry from writers near and far! The Snakes of Medusa are always hungry.......!
_________________
Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events, to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.) Medusa cannot vouch for the moral fiber of other publications, contests, etc. that she lists, however, so submit to them at your own risk. For more info about the Snake Empire, including guidelines for submitting to or obtaining our publications, click on the link to the right of this column: Rattlesnake Press (rattlesnakepress.com). And be sure to sign up for Snakebytes, our monthly e-newsletter that will keep you up-to-date on all our ophidian chicanery.
