Muses of Fire

—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Anonymous Photos

THE NAME OF THE MONITOR
North Bloomfield, California, c. 1850

The term for these rough breakers of tall hills,
how strange. Called monitors, these tools that…warn?
Does “monitor” suit instruments which kill
by water blasts drained from a mountain tarn?
As if the admonition of a scold,
flame of that lashing tongue that works to scald
poor sinners, weighed like these jets of ice-cold
which strip the gold-concealing ridges bald. 
We read the Book of Nature, but this hose
acts like the man who counts no tome quite read
till he’s ripped out each mastered page, and mows
of floor-strewn, excavated brains lie spread.
Archaic layer on layer just peels away.
Here, Chaos remains. No sign of any First Day. 

WorldFire!
(1914)

In Arnold Bax’s Piano Quintet, G minor
attacks with a two-fisted piano hammer,
then cello unfolds its multi-story melodic
fireman’s ladder. What a concatenation
of influences, where Germanic aggressive
gesture, a wee bit frosted by Grieg,
commingles with Irish lament. This great
work, summoned or channeled with whirlwind
youthfulness from regions no young sorcerer
should penetrate, whips up premonitory
clouds: the thrust toward mobilizing armies,
the Sarajevo assassination, the muddle in England.
Since Ireland’s a brooding quiet not-yet-front,
the second movement’s a quiet song, a slow
stepdance in tipple meter, nothing too much of brogue.
Dark panic from Russia intervenes: Lisztian
diminished-chord tremolos, with Ravel-style
upper intervals, deposit us in deep forest
or on windswept steppes: then, full-throated
flame with a freight-train undersong only
woodland firefighters truly know; a Dance
of Death in Mother Russia and Ukraine, in France,
in Alsace-Lorraine, in Belgium. Scorched-earth
cataclysm, then, brakes applied with a screech:
the tremors again, fortissimo. At last descent
into the decrescendo depths. On the CD
a Baxian friend kindly burned for me,
applause is the fourth movement. Not
the yahooing and roaring we hear from American
concertgoers, but steady flames emitted
from respectful palms, and we are in
Cologne, where pianist Michael Endres
and his string quartet partners from the Hochschule
have swept the auditorium with golden
conflagration. Bax’s posthumous friends,
gathered in that erstwhile fortress town,
poised at distance from, but opposite to, Verdun.
All this in what Germans call Köln,
which registers in my non-Teutonic ear as kiln. 

CAR PARK THEATER

In the college parking lot
all spaces empty, end of day.
Dark-shrouded sun is free to play
—once it has shrugged clouds off, come out—
across the paved expanse with light
shot silver-gray. And, beyond that,
stored in that sun, enough éclat
to catch a perched hawk in the bright.
The beam glows orange red across
the hawk’s breast, where it’s taloned still,
serene, not moving one lone quill.
Atop a lamppost, sunset gloss
highlighting individual plumes,
it peers for game in all these glooms.
The least grass-shiver’s a dead loss
for the unwary creature snapped
up in the beak, transfixed, enrapt
at one pounce in the deadly claws.
But that’s not come to pass this instant:
motionless of body, hawk’s
unstatuesque work is to clock
by swift head-swivels all the distant
grass and ground for signs. I let
my gaze go soft, leave bird alone;
eyes focus on the earthen tones,
greenbelt hues. Into my glance-net
saunters an iridescent shape.
A turkey pecks and pokes the ground,
so diligent he makes no sound
albeit paved & unpaved landscape
is quick to echo. Lumbering,
he could be a ring-fenced denizen,
rough customer, rank citizen:
Shakespeare’s disdain, ye old groundling.
And as black night starts to disrobe
of sunset gauze, loft-seated lords
and lowlifes gather, sticks and swords:
lamplight’s shadow-doubling probe
turns parking lot the world’s great Globe.
As if to outdo the skyward shire,
through sundown darts a hummingbird,
head, neck, and gorget fiercely girt
in coppery red…a Muse of fire…?  

FOR W.S. MERWIN (1927-2019)

who never lived not quite to see this week’s
New Yorker article bringing a South African painter
to attention the way his artworks draw light
attentive to his patient work of unearthing
the word unearthing is two parts the same as
unearthly but then you surely knew the painter
also a poet and his wife a poet you were all your life
even before the cry within you we call vocation engaged

in one work with that couple and with all who perform
elegy that burial which is also a resummoning of
the gone life to move again forward edging again
almost into light

                You held inside you reservation
concern for what you must have thought error in lives
lives such as Pound Berryman Plath Hughes
yet knew respect and reverence dwelled in you all
the while never unaware their ways were never yours

you took it upon you to restore ground others
maniacally tilled yield upon yield for that swelling
cylinder whose tang and sweet liquidity
intricately chambered held a warning it may
never have meant but you chose to heed

arrowed as it was in a skin of spines
you who knew this mania to cultivate
solely for human use yet one more error
you who believed it right never to distort
nor exaggerate not even in metaphor

3/22/19

(the painter, also a poet, and his wife, a poet = Peter Sacks and Jorie Graham)

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Today’s LittleNip:

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

—Plutarch

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Our thanks to Tom Goff, that kindler of poetic fire whose work shimmers with rhymes—both end-rhymes and internal! Head over to Sac. Poetry Center tonight, 6pm, to polish your own poetry at the MarieWriters Generative Writing Workshop! And scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about this and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa, celebrating the Muses of Fire; may they ignite our poetry!

 (Nothing like an old flame….)

—Anonymous

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