Adrift on a Breeze

—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Anonymous Photos of Yellow Swallowtails

COLLEGE SCENE, MIDSUMMER

Morning gasoline-smells: the mowers,
each cutting wheeled machine, men mounted atop,
glide over walkways, past the day’s leaf-blowers,
onto sampler-squares they crop.

A tiger swallowtail, in yellow flit,
adrift on a breeze
past liquidambar trees.

Over yonder, noises, building framework
for a new science lab, semesters away
from finishing. We have heard much the same work
done, much the same uproar,
here where we spend our day.

That same tiger swallowtail
I again saw, mid-flit in yellow,
adrift on a similar breeze
past those same liquidambar trees.

Doubtless the very same butterfly,
or a swallowtail body double,
will persist or rest while the evening wraiths,
cloud, shadow, weave their frail wreaths
under the night-field stubble.

***

Some say (good Will), which I, in sport, do sing,
Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King;
And been a King among the meaner sort.

—John Davies of Hereford, in “To our English Terence,
M[aste]r Will. Shake-speare” (1610)

 Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua)

“GOOD” WILL? WHICH WILL?…

Good Will, most likely not our Stratford man,
far more suited to Spenser’s Shepherd Willie.
Like Marie Antoinette, but much less silly,
playing the flockster; really a dapper Dan
at Hampton Court. Where better, king-parts in sport?
Meaning, this was no elastic-straining stretch.
Insider, buffooning, no rustic “clown,” no wretch,
yet forfeiting altogether his good report.
Companion for a King? James, we suppose:
the words Great Oxford writ in a monarch’s hand.
King among the meaner sort? That would be scanned;
like unto Bolingbroke, subtle, not coming to blows,
yet rousing rabble…? Will’s words, deposing a Queen
(Richard II, hint, hint), in one stunning scene…?

“For Every Word Doth Almost Tell My Name…”

He writes of wanting a deeply buried name.
Buried, on what counts? Ancient family title,
disgraced by motley garb. Worse yet, more vital
a matter for keeping mum, some sensual shame.
More telltale still, confides that he is lame:
whether he means his “with a lame hand to write”
—referring to stroke? Or long-ago wound, by night,
dealt him in stealth?—the line flows much the same:

pity, self-pity, welling the way no eyes
would fill, more like a hemorrhage of the spirit.
Yet each and every sonnet, to endear it,
has frankness, makes unwisdom become the wise.
How does he impress the stamp of dark enigma
on so clear an inventory of social stigma?

SPRING FIRE
(Composer Arnold Bax, 1913)

A score you never heard. Ironic: cheated
by your own Muses’ lavish-supernal gifts.
Every occasion to play this work, defeated.
Friends try; the aspiring mood takes hold, then rifts,
rifts open, orchestra dazed by orchestration;
young players, their very houses clichés, asked
to strum or stroke in Dionysian fashion,
turn into coy nymphs or musical satyrs. Tasked
far out of sync with Spring Fire’s rhythms; then War.
Small wonder you stowed ecstasy in a chest.
That chest went with you far, and yet how far?
Your Cello Sonata skimmed some of its best.
The rapture, recycled or fresh, stayed decades long.
Your own voice, stung to life on a Muse’s prong.

***

Chappell of Bond Street; 1964.
Musicologist Lewis Foreman holds
of Bax’s tone poem Spring Fire the one score.
On loan from Chappell’s emporium. What unfolds?
Red fire, raw thick black smoke. The store’s ablaze!
Foreman, punctually, just the day before,
returned the unique, the mighty music score.
Like Alexandrian books in olden days!
Quite gone, with lovely pianos, many works
by British composers…this loss worst of all
perhaps. It seems the gods have rained down gall,
have rained down molten lead. Yet they play quirks
and tricks for good as well as bad. Somewhere,
there’s one more score, a Spring Fire no fire will scorch.
Even the deities, once in a while, play fair.
For raging flame, Fate’s mighty counter-torch…

***

The delicate rain strikes leaf, turns emerald.
Droplets lift, quite atomized by sun.
Spring of the world’s beginning, all things rare
yet super-abundant. You awake, all Id.
Heart ripens, libido strengthens chlorophyll-green.
You stretch as told to by your own sinew-fire.

This is the building of the human spire,
all instinctive, nothing measured or ruled
save layer by layer acquired, all quite lean,
all skin, all sex, quite adequate, all one.
Poised pounce-ready, all vibration, languid,
richly branching, amassing, while still spare.

You listen; a noise—of something to beware?
Woodland voices, familiar in their choir.
But this, all new. The twitching of an aphid?
No novelty…Fresh velvet! You, enthralled,
encounter—Her. Who is She, was She begun
the same First Day as you? Her bearing, serene.

Her eyes take your full measure. Leafblade sheen.
If you could speak to her…how to prepare?
One hard look either way turns shy to shun.
You knew a god once, played a golden lyre.
If you could conjure that song when most called
for. Listen; she speaks. The lifting of a lid.

Her speech, her timbre. Goat: a newborn kid,
so innocent of voice. Innards careen
in you, up, down, around. Somehow you’ve sprawled
next to her, on downy grass. Two skins, both bare,
every last brush of touch a live desire.
If either had cause to think, one—both?—might run.

What’s come over you? Legs and flanks turn dun.
You steady yourself: on four hooves. You may bid
two legs keep you erect, yet you’re no sire
of your own wishes. She too takes new sheen,
smooth hardwood, coiling aloft in fragrant air.
You’re separate again, like two who’ve brawled

and broken off their combat. Through the green
dash others sexually aroused and keen
to press their advantage. Is each life a snare?

***

We pass from new domain to new domain.
How long a life can springfire green sustain?

___________________

Today’s LittleNip:

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

—Pablo Neruda

__________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Tom Goff for his soft words about swallowtails and other delights today!

 Lion en des Feuilles

(Lion in the Leaves)

—Anonymous Foreshadowing of Fall

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