—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Anonymous Photos
—Anonymous Photos
HEAVY MY HEART
A Shakespeare dirge is called a dump.
Heavy my music now for you:
Dump must be my tune. This I construe
From miseries that sink and sag
Quite leaden within the heart’s red bag,
Nothing but lump.
Repeat the playing, dump and dump.
The heart’s now heavy-laboring pump
Can scarcely clear bilge from a ship.
No, no, what drags me downward, far
Below crass sewer line or sump,
Is nothing showy like a scar.
More bird: months dead on the window ledge.
Drowned man, clothes soaked, in grass and sedge.
No, they’re no source for dirge or dump.
This fall makes me stone drawn to a stone,
The Stone that makes up Earth’s heart’s core,
Gone cold, a dank magnetic clump.
Or if still white flame as before,
Ferocious lament, all fume and groan.
MERE PRONOUNCEMENT
My irritable flaw
is to take umbrage at
pronunciations raw, revealing only that
you read by halt short sight,
not with the unerring ear.
Aversion to word-blight
scarce filters out this fear
of losing all I have.
When you pronounce “short-lǐved,”
linguistic glaciers calve.
Smug, I orate “short-līved,”
my Shakespeare player’s bray
my hedge against dismay
where vowels and labials shift,
distend apart our rift,
wedge rivermouth wide bay.
Eroding brain; late day.
DISQUIET
Disharmony flares all around us now.
So baffling, so disquieting all events,
all good smiles gutter out. The best intents
darken, sicken, fade upon the brow.
What rotten fruit grows instantly on the bough,
drops off and poisons soil already spent,
leaves a Chernobyl of most noisome scent
albeit bred song-sweet, nurtured to endow?
Will this discord turn soft again to touch
our ears with ripe sounds, plaintive yet controlled?
In swirling times on shifting grounds, can such
true chords, piquant suspensions, yet be rolled
out still silky rich? Or deathly faint?
Is the goddess, Grandmother Music, outmoded, quaint?
THE SOUNDING OF THE MAROON
(11/11/1918)
A firework designed to make a single loud report
like the noise of a cannon (often with a bright flash
of light), used esp. as a warning or signal.
—Oxford English Dictionary
Symphonic Variations: Bax is working
on the score when, plunged in the movement Play,
he learns the maroon has sounded its last bay,
the cannon’s mouth-howl, late harbinger of lurking
Zeppelins bomb-laden. Does the berserking
blank, rupturing air, reach him in broadest day,
acoustic shadow aim the Big Bertha bray,
clear from Hyde Park announce the war-god’s shirking
at long and bitter last? The cannon-blast,
named strangely maroon—the shade of Mars’s skin?—
jotted near letter GG, thirty-one bars past.
To mark no more friends lost to the world’s worst sin?
(And you, love of mine: days hence, maroon will be
the rich color of your ancestral land’s flag: free.)
A Starry Night
—Painting by Vincent van Gogh
AGAINST POETIC IRONY
Tiresome silly intellectual jests
pepper our poems like an old coarse pepper.
Mingus at least had unerring Jimmy Knepper
to sound a comic trombone with manic zests
and yet still mournful smears and gobbets of moan.
But that is sincerest jazz: now what have we
to utter without forced guffaws through poetry?
If frivolous, let us at least revive the pun.
I want like Mark Antony just to speak right on.
Right on! with raised fist, went our smothered “ironic” joke
while that same burying-Caesar speech did cloak
true irony, lingering long past the last breath drawn.
I want to speak truth of a kind so plain it nailed
a man’s hands long ago; could still see one jailed.
___________________
Today’s LittleNip:
I loved when I was young
The girls in all the bars.
And coming home I hung
My hat upon the stars.
—Anonymous (quoted by Arnold Bax in Farewell, My Youth:
“There is no doubt that we [music students] used the wheeling
constellations as our hatracks.”)
____________________
Be sure to get your wildlife artwork down to Sac. Poetry Center for the Gone Wild showing this month; submissions will be accepted today from 12-2pm, and tomorrow from 10am-2pm. 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.
Also on the calendar today: The Good Earth Movement in Placerville presents Taylor Graham plus a holiday open mic, 250 Main St., 6:30pm.
—Medusa
Celebrate poetry!
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