Our California

—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Anonymous Photos and Paintings of California

SATURDAY AFTERNOON SERIAL, 1943

Long sadness overshrouds the old Masked Marvel’s
cliff-dangling action serial: to unravel
the young lead’s unsolved murder, we still wait.
Unbeatable in celluloid. His fate
bloodstained, a closed True Crime book’s near-congealing
cover. Frisson—to ice the stale, unchilling
suspense, the racist tone, the master spy’s
hyper-clichéd “Jap” menace Marvel defies?
How quaint, the incessant pistols, knuckle-busters;
our hero’s team of brawling claims adjuster…

MY CALIFORNIA

Such elements combine in you: dark gold,
And earth tones auguring gold, stark cinnabar red.
Each pure strain of earth-magic leaves its trace.
Discovering your metal outstrips the veriest placer.
Mingled of others' colors, you are yet wholly
You, all you: supple, elegant, radiant.

Geiger counters clack when radiant
You pace by. Metal detectors, prospect gold
Found crisping your hair, appraise your life thus holy.
Holy the copper in your smile’s light red.
Who could rebuff my gallantry: Un placer
Conocerte? That would be Spanish, for I trace

In you one Romance-language smidgen; trace
Deep-veined or in clear skin a glow, a radiant
Consortium of cultures which defines that placer
Others might seek to delve; but you, my gold,
Bring blushing from my dream a private red
Tainting my skin, no longer me, but wholly

You. Yet: still obvious me, in love of Holy,
Pilgrim-Puzzling Enigma You. A trace
Of amusement flicks your coral mouth corners red,
Yet you raise the sardonic to that steep gradient
most canebrake-sweet that sugars the rise toward gold
Where Fate holds summit for all who seek the placer.

I seek my aureate child, no rash replacer
Of one with another woman while One, holy,
Dulcet-smiling, shrined alive in gold
And white feldspar, haunts this niche. No doubtful trace
To annoy the professional tracker. Radiant
As a rubescent dawn sun, daubing red

Each fresh day pleading with us to be read
Across live pages of grass and granite placer.
Only on radium terms can you be your radiant
Essence, precious to us lowly; holy
Down to each finger’s fingernail’s-edge trace.
Your bright skin seems to offer “easy” gold,

A pledge and subterfuge—while deeper gold
Hides darkly lodged as do the sun’s Ur-radiant
Sun-innards: the Holiest veils beneath the Holy.

FANTASIA

What will I do, what can I do, when wild
subterranean longings flame a seam
far down in my mind’s-mine, and, flaring riled
as rage, but filtered like sun’s muted beam,
these longings, these old-Adam urges groan
that your too-ready blush and urgent speech
disturb my belowground essence lorn-and-lone
with those glow-nuances far out of reach
for one whose native haunt is harsh daylight,
me, knowing your shyest vibrancy is fraught
with resonance so palpable, your voice
alone can turn coarse granite more like milk
than rock, or that you own a flair untaught
for touch that shames de chine with your sleek silk,
wakes all my skin while slumber-lulling choice? 

YOUNG “SHAKESPEARE” AT HINCHINGBROOKE, 1564

Elizabeth’s on progress with her train
Of courtiers, menials, and hangers-on;
A rout of schoolboy (college) thespians fawns,
Begs of her the chance to play, if she will deign,
A play—more truly, a skit—at Hinchingbrooke,
Next stop on her long sojourn through her realm.
Travel-weary, complaisant (underwhelmed),
Obligingly she consents to take a look.
Night in the great hall: by torchlight goes the play.
Imprisoned Catholic bishops, satirized
As animals: in a dog mask, one mouths the Host.
“We’ll have no more of this, by the Holy Ghost!”
Cries Bess. Leaves, calling for “Lights! Lights! Lights!” Chastised,
The troupe—Her Grace’s taper-sun of day
Snuffed—left in the dark. One clever stripling can see.
A king will wield this snub, in this boy’s Danish tragedy…

TO SHAKESPEARE

It isn’t only your language can entice
your worshipers to worship, though I hope
that soon enough I’ll demonstrate that vice-
from-excess-of-virtue strength, that thin tightrope
your style must teeter, daring the line-vibrate.
It’s also how you inspire by your example,
enliven comedy—tragedy even—by wit,
instill that wit in us. Here’s a brief sample:
Experienced local actor, playing Touchstone
outdoors, nonplussed to find no Rosalind…
somewhere behind set? He thinks, but quick, to clown
it, character-wise, pentameter cap and bells:
Methinks the forest is unpeopled else!
In swoops Roz-hawk, hallooed from just upwind…  

FOR TWO CO-EDITOR POETS*

Lucy

Lucille Lang Day, a name to conjure light,
And that light, light of the solstice, lang agley
As I write, but you gleam too with the night
Stars you appraise: Copernican modes of play.
Wedding poetry with your science-bent,
You might be an Emily Dickinson microscope,
The kind “in an emergency” most “prudent.”
Not over-analytic lens…more…vibrascope!

Helen Keller’s term for alert-nerved skin
Coupled with intuition—that’s your strength
Of strengths. Few others thus equipped to sense
Malignant, world-degrading human sin:
Waste, fouling our air, our water…I love the lengths
You go to give tidings, heal this present tense.


Ruth

Ruth Nolan, you debunk the “empty space”
Canard we greenhorns cling to regarding desert.
Your California’s alive with every trace
The blowing sands can hold, of where a shy lizard,
An unseen skink, wolf spider, has etched a furrow.
What you don’t know, Creation Itself might not;
You stir with dawn’s inland-outland-stirring burrows,
Crevices where a creosote bush will squat,

Take root. You take routes unlensed by prior camera,
Bring back from scarred road russet dusk exposures;
Snap exposés, eye-evidence—truth, no chimera—
Of waste in “waste places,” so styled by their polluters.
Your fire-fighting poem adjoins my neighbor lane:
Lines on hydraulic mining. Flame beside water main.  


*Of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, Scarlet Tanager Press, 2018

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Today’s LittleNip:

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.

―Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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—Medusa, with thanks to Tom Goff for today’s fine poetry! Can you spot the sonnets? 

 “In swoops Roz-hawk…”
For more about Shakespeare’s use of birds, see 

shakespearestudyguide.com/Shake2/birdsofprey.html/.

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in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.