—Flicker Photos Courtesy of Public Domain
FEATHER-HAMMER
A feather-hammer gives a double knock.
—Robert Frost
In Frost’s New England, it’s called feather-hammer,
Eccentric nickname for a Northern Flicker.
I could be kayoed by a weather-hammer,
But this word-apparition’s Katzenjammer,
Off-kilter. Sure, we know the joke’s immense,
To morph plume-soft this avian, boned, beak-dense
—As if we had only the brown-and-tan plume sheath
That swathes the small, tough knot of bird beneath—
Recruited as a trope, of ancient weather,
In service to, Knock me over with a feather,
But quirked and tricked out by such name-nonsense
As might be Iron Cotton, Blizzard Picnicker.
UNCLE CYRUS
Where the blind white sea-snakes are.
—Rudyard Kipling
There’s a Kipling poem somewhere
On the ocean-floor telegraph cables.
He compares them to white sea-snakes;
Technology, morphed into fables.
The snakes were thick spirals of wire,
Wrapped and coiled to thrive, not to yield:
The inventor who sank them down fathoms?
My ancestor Cyrus Field.
So it said in a big fat volume,
A Rosetta-Stoned genealogy
Packed with lore of long-moldy old nobles,
A fine family theology.
My grandmother worshiped that doorstop
Without cracking the spine, riffling pages;
Took for granted it said what she wanted,
That our clan was a clan for the ages.
In those fabulous mildewing pages
The book praised our kin’s fortunate star:
Dukes of Somerset (and Cyrus Field!)
With never a sinister bar.
My grandma a member, Mom qualified:
From the Lees of Virginia, no bar
Or bend sinister to deny Granny
Racist space in the D.A.R.
Such, our pride in the doings imagined
Of our clan with heraldic shield,
Partly bogus and partly offal;
We’re the children of dead Cyrus Field.
THE CEYLON DIVER HOLDS HIS BREATH
(See Amy Lowell’s John Keats, Vol. 2, p. 421)
Keats, under doctor’s orders to speak low
Or not to speak, is at the Leigh Hunts’. A party:
One Mrs. Gisborne starts a topic—so:
In music reigned the castrato Farinelli,
Whose vocal splendor, his capacity
To hold high notes ad infinitum, swelled
Or diminished, he could lengthen by his hearty
Pair of bellows, breath control, but spelled
By cyclical breathing, intake and exhale
Made simultaneous by constant practice,
Braced with support deep as his tensile belly.
Keats’ being here is sheer tenacity.
This Mrs. Gisborne cannot help but fail
To gauge how sensitive the breath-holding act is
To Keats, indeed she’s not certain he’s that Keats.
Gamely—for the ill poet broods on such
Prolonged sostenutos—he declares these feats
A trial for both singer and hearer. Touch
The subject, and you poke his damaged lungs
—Like under-the-fingernail skin pricked with pins.
How equable, though, the bob of both their tongues
With fascination on the listener’s fears:
The way a too-long-sustained cadenza spins
Unbidden empathic dreads of suffocation.
In murmurs, Keats must assent to what she says;
How can she know a publication nears:
Verses of his where a pearl diver descends,
Bare body exposed to the sharks, to the stingrays?
Hands filled or empty from oyster beds, his ration
Is risk for meager pay, risk of the bends
When full-to-bursting lungs must surface regardless
Though blood runs from his ears. The party chatter
Submerges these two talkers with hands cardless;
What earnest discussion of a most primal matter
Implicit in music as in poetry,
The instinct to gasp for air, the strain to be
Good and suspend the fermata; near to death,
Has Keats not always known how recitative
Is paid out silkworm? How like the spun shirtsleeve
Spun stanzas are threads, of unbearably thin breath?
[Mrs. Gisborne = Maria Gisborne, friend of Percy and Mary Shelley]
—Posted online in a Tiger’s Eye Press “Welcome Back” feature, 2/22
TIN, NOTHING BUT TIN
(the Cornish mine situation c. 1595, through
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford’s eyes)
In Cornwall lie the mines of tin
From which Her Majesty should gain
Long-needed revenue: the din
Of war, much flood-ruined, sodden grain
To counteract. De Vere’s proposed
To farm Her “Matey’s” tin mines, part
To raise large sums against her foes
Of Spain in Holland; partly to chart
And halt much cheating against the tinners
—Not by poor miners, but men whose fraud
Against the Queen enriches their dinners
With fine wines fetched by the day-broad
Theft of whole slabs of glittering tin
Stamped with the royal lion stamp.
De Vere recruits more honest men
(Though merchants) he thinks fit to clamp
Down on the cheat, down on the waste.
Idealism stops not there:
He means to see poor miners graced
With steady work, more wages’ share.
Alas, my lord of Buckhurst has
Opposing plans; he stands against.
The Queen’s own kinsman—somewhat crass?—
For when allusions, parsed or flensed
From “Shakespeare’s” plays, are understood,
He stands exposed—Sir Toby Belch!
His plan’s deceitful, nothing good,
Yet prods Elizabeth to welch
On pledges hinted to De Vere;
She weighs this kinsman equal with
One merely an earl, of words severe,
Not jovial-bragging like her kith.
Typical indecision works
Its will with this poor aging Queen:
Careless as ever, by her own quirks
Too soon cutpursed, with mind serene.
The loss is hers: great gains do lie
Unharvested, as crops are left
Till rain down-rains: like wheat and rye
By mold bit—so is this Queen bereft.
—For Dr. Michael Delahoyde on his
Oxfordian edition of Twelfth Night
(ID’ing Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst,
as Sir Toby Belch)
__________________________
Today's LittleNip:
A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commmercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate.
—G.K. Chesterton
__________________________
SO— when was the last time you used the term, “catpursed”, in a poem? Not more than twice this week, I reckon… Thanks to Tom Goff for waking us up with his skillful juggling of language! Tom will be reading this Monday on Sac. Poetry Center’s Socially Distant Verse, 7:30pm. Zoom: us02web.zoom.us/j/7638733462 (Meeting ID: 763 873 3462; Passcode: r3trnofsdv).
•••Meanwhile, today (Sat., 3/26), 2pm: Poetry of the Sierra Foothills features Dianna McKinnon Henning and Lara Gularte, plus open mic, at Love Birds Coffee & Tea Co., 4181 Hwy 49, Diamond Springs, CA (where Hwy 49 meets Pleasant Valley Rd.). Host: Lara Gularte.
•••Also today (Sat., 3/26), 4pm: Sac. Poetry Alliance features Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Albert Garcia at The Library of MusicLandria, 1219 S St., Sacramento, CA. Info: www.facebook.com/events/1036595227201761/.
___________________________
—Medusa
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