Hinting of Nijinski

Vaslav Nijinski
—Public Domain Photos 

—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA 

ELGAR, THIRD SYMPHONY (completed by Anthony Payne)
(First Movement)

Not “pomp or circumstance,” but war itself;
a glowering theme, dark. Satirized plainchant.
The work, unfinished, demands full life, off shelf,
back under the seething pen that scrawls descant.
Now, second theme, almost inversion of
the fallen-angel diatonic start,
chromatic lyric wrangle, pressed under love,
mortality, God knows what else daunts all art.
Such air-suspended leaps hint of Nijinsky:
soft cloud-supports detain the danseur’s fallback
to stage planks. Yet of Classic iconography:
Greek limb-versus-limb in-thrustings, isometric.
(Tod Handley, how he unleashes fiery sound!
Yet each orchestral segment holds firm ground.)

FINLANDIA

Symphonic poem or festival tune or hymn,
Melodic, forthright, last cadence oblique (say “plagal”),
Foam just above the cup’s lip, not over the brim.

Sung worldwide—surely the impulse isn’t all whim?—
At Finnish concerts, Latvian funerals,
Symphonic poem or festival tune or hymn,

Composed by Sibelius, whose mood swings ran
swan-flight or grim,
Trolled out by Karelian choirs at festivals,
Foam just above the cup’s lip, not over the brim.

Finnish to the last unshrunken glacier’s rim,
Sing granite, sing lingonberry, sing Kalevala,
Symphonic poem or festival tune or hymn,

Sinew to crack Lemminkäinen’s toughest limb.
From one cliff’s flow (whether slow or swift intervals),
Foam, at the ravine’s edge, never runs over the brim.

Can you hold your ale penned in with such a prim
Black-suited Helsinki citizen? Prim, not small:
Finlandia, tone poem, festival tune, or hymn,
Not once does its head of dark foam spill over the brim.

INTERIOR WIND

The makeshift curtain
at the kitchen window
stirs and swells with a strange
impetus, afflatus. First
uncertain, I then
attribute its odd ballooning,
its thin glow,
to no breeze on which it
could lift, sway, seize, but 
to the air conditioning’s
unthought-of prank, that afflatus
to interior wind.

Imagine us among
those who first ate
Jesus’ body. Soon, late
to protect one who, anyhow,
could self-resurrect, it burst
on us that He now ate us,
dissolving us, though from outward
till, resolving in us, went out Word
we found we spoke
in tongue-crawling tongues,
falling in, each,
with strange new speech, as if
playing along with a joke but,
all the while never more stung
to stay strong yet give and give
from new spirit cyclones inside us,
at the same time alongside us.
“Divine afflatus?”
Interior wind.

Good Friday, 2020

READING “JACK STRAW’S CASTLE” (Thom Gunn)

Jack brags of houses, visionary rooms
That seem, when read of, popup books,
            but crass.
Bare half-lit spaces. Floorboard creaks. Now booms
—from shotgun metal? No; shoe-leather tread.
Rooms webbed with reminiscences whose hooks,
Not sharp delight and yet not strictly dread,
Latch onto brain cells vacant as monks’ cells
Or turret-shapes missing stones, parched summer wells,
And cram them: cotton batting grey as grass
Drought-stained with burnt tobacco ash in dreams:
Nothing of whiteness brighter than dull beige,
            or creams
Whose textures promise the palate pudding-taste
But crumble on the tongue to grit and paste.
Tongue of Jack, stuck, with one click retracts;
A dry, dry stutter, matter-of-fact cluck
Then inside-the-cheek poke of reassessment,
From below-roof high to here then down below,
            where there’s a basement,
Stanzas Jack may have hoped were wrought
As “chambers of maiden thought.”
Jack’s tongue flicks itself free; then again caught.
Where do his dreams come from?
From mind? From deep in a body’s central drum?
Furnace and kitchen, brackets, pipes, and drains,
            the infrastructure
all pulsating layers that radiate from his grey brain,
He wonders what he’s bought. 

THOM GUNN’S MOTHER: END OF INTERVIEW
(see “An Anglo-American Poet: Interview with Jim Powell”)

Mina Loy is my mother,
you’ll end by having me say.

[Powell: There, that’s an idea.]

Strange to shut off the recorder,
Thom Gunn speaking as stark as that,
albeit not said flat, but
with a smidgen of laugh.

Words uttered just half in jest:
that sore term for him, “my mother.”
Mina Loy, poet oft read, never met?
Save in some first incarnation, or other,
parallel life or parallax lens-look.

What we now know: the “Grecian” poison fife,
“oaten stop,” transverse or end-blown
monoxide flute of “The Gas-poker,”
the poem concisely choral
—manner tragic, but no less pastoral—
of his mother’s suicide, was a flute
tune, then, by this late-in-life,
a poem written down.

The brothers, Ander and Thom,
are boys in it,
witnesses to a poison-fit’s
aftermath. The passing of Mina Loy’s
dust-choked satellite
from the night’s plenilune
to slowly thinning day moon,
finds them both immersed in and emerging from,
changed by the numbness, the shock.
The mother’s red-robed frame
in transition to rigor lock.

The verse resteeps older Thom
young in the death experience:
eyes clear, not one whiff prurience.
He picks up the gas-poker flute, he fingers the stops,
then stops. She sucked at it, harmonicalike,
—face permeated blue? Monoxide red?—
till penetrated lungs-through,
as a wren might be by a shrike.   

“The smallest ears in London,”
he writes elsewhere, were his mother’s.
You notice in photos Gunn’s ears
tend to the large, not small,
but if at all
hers, in how they’re keen;
cut through conversational sheen
and subterfuge. Even Fort Point’s
“Third System” thick walls
would turn permeable veneers
for Gunn’s twin satellite dishes.

He emerges from interview
with a jest captured for the page.
Mina Loy, his new mother,
as might a sardonic she-mage,
enciphers the arid moon,
late delivery of her boon
in his bon mot, disclosing the rage
that clinches the throwaway line,
the as-yet-unstepped-on mine.
 
______________________

Today’s LittleNip:
 
SEXUAL NEW JERUSALEM
—Tom Goff
            (reply to "The 1970s": epigram by Thom Gunn)

Revealing while unrevealing: the metric from good old bad Kipling.
Idealists, friends not yet lost, smoked weed, amorous muscle rippling.

_____________________

—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff for today’s sonorous thoughts on music, poetry, and those “spirit cyclones inside us”.

For more about dancer Vaslav Nijinski, go to dancemagazine.com.au/2016/09/vaslav-nijinsky-a-historical-profile/.

 —Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Joseph Nolan, Stockton, CA

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