Five Elegies

—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA

—Anonymous Figures of Goats

I. For Ingrid Staklis, 1934-2019

From the cold North you came through Customs warm,
from savage bombardments barely missing: you,
secluded in birch woods or an unsplintered farm.
Too easy for us to count you of the lucky few:
we never endured the privations of a camp,
nor were we ladled thin soup and the moniker Displaced Person.
Barracks no doubt wintry in spring, walls bleeding damp.
Pneumonias would begin colds, implored not to worsen.
What wonder married or widowed you fortressed your home secure,
books in fresh English piled up like parapets,
sweet roses like spiked wires fenced around pasture.
Yet wide was the friendly entrance through the petaled thorn-nets:
your sun-yellow, dark red, dusk-pink rose petals nodded us in.
California left off where New Jelgava would begin.

Your melodious voice: a verbal pair of eyes.
Ornately brocaded armchair syllables.
When your prewar Latvian pulse remembered itself,
thought slipstreamed after a prime linguistic soul.
We’ll cling to your remembered voice ranges, one
register lifting in smiles, a mouth’s upturned corners,
the other mode gravely deploring, slight slide downward.
Be grateful, I tell myself, for your vivid lingering echo,
a new way to feel held by a voice. My own
mother’s speech, in memory, sounds almost no vowels,
only consonants left on thin paper, the rest rubbed away…

We retrieved your cats Rusty and Annie from the lonesome house.
When we think on you, your rose garden springs up quick
as emotional grass after rain loosed from a mind-cloud.
We weed the bamboo infiltrated by your neighbors.
Pomegranate blossoms unsheathe their little orange-red petticoats.
Your hydrangeas are such as the poet Rilke would approve:
petals mutating visibly, by change of ink,
from faint yellow-green to stylish aggressive pink.
Your star jasmine still shakes out earthquakes of perfume…
Ingrid, if ever my memory of you
recedes, as waters draw back from beseeching shore,
that will be sign enough I’ve been left few
remembrances from my mind’s once-ready store.
Treasure, I tell myself, that sense that you’re
right there, dressed in that stylish, loose-fitting dress,
in that there recliner. Soothing, quite secure,
our knowing that you keep that same excess,
that happy excess, of books whose plots relate
you must, while simultaneous TV news
flickers, and Annie the calico fills your lap.
Regality needing no pomp. No pump to inflate.
So rare, clear, honest your charm, so free of ruse.
We’re lulled by your warmth, as if gentled into a brief nap. 

II. Topic of Cancer

Thanks be to doctor Generao, urbane
and calm, who spotted, diagnosed the strain
of ill cells inside me,
and that quite timely, early.
A brief procedure, hopeful of a cure,
done quickly with the aim to reassure
me free of malignancy.
Done competently, securely.
Seven years on, a phone appointment kept.
It means much Dr. Generao, adept
in her work, can now learn
that I’ve since taken no turn
for the worse: I’m still here. She sounds pleased.
Think how happy me, to feel so eased. 

III. All Poets Part Goat; A Rare Few Roam the Zodiac
(In Memory of Dennis Schmitz 1937-2019)

You wrote like no one else, so why
should any one else write like you? Yet I did
purloin an occasional pen-gesture, or misconstrue
your sidelong glance at an audience, one eyebrow lifted,
“borrow” your sly verbal sidling up to perceptions
you could then stand shoulder to shoulder with,
reconstituting the bromide “beside yourself.”
As if Will Rogers danced the villanelle alongside
a self-twirling lasso. We your many mangy students
came bearing poems to your classroom,
the rough notes, as it were, pinned to foundling baskets
(cue Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid). Or rather, say
ours were often kid-poems, baby-goat poems.
We will long remember that, whatever
our scansion’s incautious twin-pronged hoofmarks
or our uncouth stanzas’ incessant nannying
bleats, you would read with care, would comment
with eagerness to praise where other
ruminant gurus might have chewed holes or
baaed repudiation. Well, about time to climb off
the ill-used goat’s back a moment and praise
your work. Your words lodge in the cranium:
reporting from the Vatican, you speculate on the Pope’s
cops who need lunch, so the chiuso sign’s on the Sistine
doorknob this noontide, tourists. I love how,
knowing Iowa, right down to the weekly soybean count
by county, you can recast Keats’ perceptions
in Lovecraft terms. Where your alter ego’s
spacecraft punches down in the “alien corn…”
Overexerting my just-birthed, still-wobbly
symbol, I see you at the lectern, a poet’s poet,
incanting your Capriol Suite, all tabor and leap,
gamboling, kicking up heels of glee without stirring
one shod foot, letting those Capricorn-short horns
whimsy and lightness peep out of your deadpan forehead.
A sports acronym conveys your verbal cavort and caper:
Among Sacramento poets, might you be the G.O.A.T? 

IV. To Wendell Berry: An Acknowledgement
(On reading an account of his work,
by Jedediah Britton-Purdy, in The Nation, 9/9/19)

American Primitive portraits: my forebears.
Slaveholders, my Kentucky folk; small farms,
their lifeways comforted via un-small harms.
The life I live I feel rests in arrears.
My grandmother, rocked in the arms of an ex-slave:
Stockholm Syndrome, foreshadowed in Frankfort
or Maysville? Kentucky knew life-spans cut short
by whip or bloodhound, so near the lyrical lave
of the broad and benevolent Ohio River…
My grandma swam the flow of the behavior,
spoke of the “darkies” she knew in her girlhood.
This terse yet musical woman, she who could
coax birds to peck food from her hand, who married down,
what blood flowed stitching soft satin for her girl-gown? 

V. Dennis Schmitz and “The Pour”

Words make not only the poem but the poet;
the greatest ones among us each possess at least
one word, one speaking word stamped with
their accent, their town, their farm, their family.
The pressure to regularize that piece of speech
resisted, with oppositional-quiet defiance,
albeit eccentric, rustic, solipsistic, absurd.

Samuel Johnson, dictionary maker, poet,
philosopher-critic, in a dainty drawing
room, cries, with tavern proclamation tones,
“Who’s for poonsh?” Punch, he meant to say;
hearing his poonsh, some drinkers almost
can taste his Midlands mud, the Lichfield decay,
scumming the brimming bowl. This, poetry?
Yes, poetry: does not Sam’s inflection spike the brandy?

You, Dennis Schmitz, reading your poem,
“The Pour.” About one of your gig-economy
Chicago jobs, you and an overalled comrade,
slow-walking a great vat of sugar melt to be
poured out stain-spread across a flat surface
for women to shape mayonnaise or peanut
brittle of. I hear your voice, a throaty baritone
etherealizing to tenor as your insights ascend,
but best of all, I hear you describing the “poor”
itself. You say “poor” for “pour,” just as
Johnson trades poonsh in exchange for punch,

and we are outside that vat, outside that
junk-food-and-candy factory, outside big-shouldered
Chicago, hearing your voice time the plosive consonant
to the glint on a Midwestern star, and the downward
blend, the “oor” in “poor,” to the fall of that star.
Does your voice confound the exertion of the pour
with its effect in strains on the limbs of the poor?

I hope I will at some future breakfast ask my wife
when to poor her coffee, poor her orange juice,
for that “poor” is your linguistic emblem,
proof of quality, if anyone asks for a certified
stamp or token, one poor proof of the poet,
like the specimen brick the ancient sage proffered,

guaranteeing his for-sale house quite solid. Some of us
imagine the philosopher’s house structured
from that solo brick. Some—you, Dennis, for one?—
cogitate new ways to bequeath the outpour
—life-giving drink, life-giving words—to the poor
for whom all good things are most justly poured …

_____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

—Robert Frost

_____________________

Our thanks to Tom Goff for his fine, melodic elegies this morning!

It’s that time again: Davis’s annual Jack Kerouac Contest takes place on Oct. 11 at the John Natsoulas Gallery, and they’re wanting poems by noon on Oct. 10. No fee, but submitters must attend the reading Oct. 11 from 7-9pm at the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st St., Davis, where Gary Snyder and the winners will read, and prizes will be announced. (Cash prizes!) E-mail poem(s) NOW to JackKerouacContest@gmail.com. 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.

—Medusa, celebrating our friend, the goat ~

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