Lightbulb in the Sky

—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA

—Public Domain Photos

VET VISIT
(in a Time of Pandemic)

Everything now “curbside service.”
Rusty meows and meows
in the cat carrier by
me in the car. Window rolled
down, I activate iPhone,
call to mention where I’m parked.
The veterinarian,
for she seems all doctor, comes
masked and gloved out the steel door
to the car. I too am masked.
As I sign permission forms,
lift cat carrier out for
the doctor (cordial beneath
her mask), why, in forested
(old-oak-wooded) space here
behind the clinic, why then
does our encounter seem so
much like first moves in fencing?
Brief thrusts of wind—foil-pointed?—
as she hoists my rust-colored
Rusty inside. I still hear
Rusty, whose plaint-laced meows
and mews just now diminished,
alto turned tenor in one trip,
one quarter hour, home to here.

ON A LINE BY JAMES MERRILL
(preserved in a notebook)
 
Does the flute recall the trill that ran through it?

A silly question, one ventures to suggest.
A flute? A cut reed, hollow, full of holes,
or at best, cylinder of clapping keys.
Yet who can say what, in woodwind recall, rolls
through, gurgling, warbling—then dare sneeze
at what this metal medium may keep in trust
and therefore knows?

As an air column bobs a ping-pong ball aloft,
as updraft suspends the roly-poly thrall
(trunk juggling its treetop in an unseen croft?),
lip’s whistle-hole forms a smoke-ring’s unpursed O,
noteheads inflating to black grapes that glow,
each separate grape rehearsing to turn puffball.

Ah, the plain-fifed forenoon of no fawn;
echoes laze, yawn, stretch across long lawn…
when all the trill is gown, draped on flute’s body,
do molecules or animalcules, faint, wobbly
noodles, études, cling to the tootled shoot?
O frightening pants, O briefly moody hoot,
who can keep the flautist in the flute?

SHIFT VOICE, CHANGE VIEW

Enable us, altering like you, to enter
Your passionless love, impartial but intense…
                     —Thom Gunn, “Sunlight”


In Thom Gunn’s almost perfect poem, “Sunlight,”
We peer into our sun; no, not straight into.
The sun, we don’t see, not yet; for us this high light
Is that which bounces, mirror-glanced, just so
We know: air pegs a “lightbulb” in the sky there.
For now, we’re content with crooked, oblique glint,
For who can stand a lit kitchen bulb laid bare?
Most of us feel just fine with random hints
Of glare. Now watch the poem thoughtfully;
Penultimate stanza—exquisite verse—when studied,
Lays traps for reading minds, for thinking muddled,
Abstract. Yet, marshalled, so what follows, free,
Shifts angle. First, Gunn’s orb was “it,” now “you”:
Now risk sight, stare up, blaze in your full-on view.

COVER DESIGN
(Yvor Winters’ Selected Poems, edited by Thom Gunn)

I may still think the contents matter most;
Sweet ranks and files, almost a marching band’s
Parade of words, first trumpets, then descants
By fifes and clarinets, the trumpets’ ghosts
Whose echoes lag and leave the wistful trace
Engulfed and swallowed by the next band on.
A book, that cavalcade of words that pace
In lockstep for the poet’s effects to dawn.

But now the outer design speaks to that book
(As Gunn to Winters refers: student to mentor
And mentor back to student); even the look
—so Mediterranean does desire enter—
Is California, olive green and grape,
Aspiring to Greek wisdom, theme and shape.

PAPER COVER

Skin that was damp and fair
is barklike and, feel, rough…
                —Thom Gunn


I hold a book of Seamus Heaney’s
late poems, with a distaste my hands
and fingers taste; the misconceived
texture Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
have contrived for their recent
paperback covers:

that too-fine-for-nobled-stock
stock, papery-powdery, even more of sand
ground by sand: Dust to dust,
all must rub pasty then crumble,
let the cover rasp gradually away

till it won’t need much more
dryness to be dust, that dusty
irritant worse in my scabbed dry hands.
Yet, all between those covers,
rich as ever was: Still, give me,

if paperback, one with a satin-laminated feel
rather. Or, is FSG telling us things profound,
as Milton declares the spirit between covers
survives, knit of good fiber, of import, of matter?

LOU COPPOLA (1927-2020)
of the NorCal Big Band Preservation Society

At the Riverside Boulevard Elks Club, you were there,
Lou Coppola.

“Don’t Be That Way” or “In the Mood,” band-swung,
Drum-beaten, the dancer-pulses: here was where,
Heard as an echo (booming, distancing mic),
You were, Lou Coppola.

You, Lou Coppola: emcee for every dance
Of Buddy Harpham, Bill Rase, or George Bruno,
The pleasure party’s happy steady ringmaster;
Ladies’ Choice, round and round the double circle
Or lord knows what fun formulas of jitterbug
And listen-all-the-while-you-twitch-those-feet:
You, Lou Coppola.

My business was with second trumpet solo
(Awkward) or blending with the swing ensemble.
Thus, all too few words were exchanged between us,
Lou Coppola.

And yet you, Lou Coppola, were a fixture
Like play-by-play Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek,
Joe Garagiola,
Lou Coppola.

Sacramento broadcaster, baseball player,
And effervescent fan. Big Band preserver,
You, above all the preservers, Lou Coppola.

________________________

Today’s LittleNip:

MATER, FAMILIAR
—Tom Goff

Some claim artist James Whistler’s “Whistler’s Mother,”
Judged by his naming it his way, Wit slurs Mothers.
Why not Arrangement in Black and Grey? Some other?
Once lapped, both, in those dense hues, did either smother?

________________________

—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff this morning for some fine poetry, as June slips away from us!

 —Public Domain Photo

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.

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 Yes-Haw!
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