—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Artwork
—Public Domain Artwork
OATEN STOP
For no clear reason I can tell,
the pastoral, from hill to dell,
depends on shepherds playing flutes,
a tad more portable than lutes.
First question is about this prop:
why call a flute an “oaten stop?”
Next query, less ethereal:
why oats, made milk and cereal?
I’ve eaten oats in my oatmeal;
oatmeal with oat milk, sheer surreal.
The off-white whiteness goes down smooth
as pamphlets from kiosk or booth
stuffed with Jehovah down my throat.
What gives my gullet rights to gloat
of blenders crammed with oaten liquid?
Or spooned-out bowlfuls thick and viscid?
I gulp no dream of rural flutes:
I muse how the glutinous bulges glutes.
If malt does more than Milton can
to justify God’s ways to man,
the same cannot be claimed for oats.
I won’t eat kids, the young of goats,
but sooner that, or bite raw sheep,
than greet day with a too-long steep
of overnight oats: to torture airy
dawn with chilled and mortuary
oat-mess from the kitchen morgue
on prompts from npr.org:
what’s pastoral about all that?
More shepherd-like to tread the vat
and press the grapes, ferment the wine
than eat or drink this swill for swine.
Like swallowing gobbets, Grendel’s meat,
though Stevia-flavored to be sweet.
Sam Johnson says this feeds a horse,
though Scottish folk call it—main course.
Get thee behind me, oaten stop
for stomachs who can stand the plop
of oatmeal into porcelain bowls
that might more fitly fatten foals.
DOWNES CONDUCTS BAX
(Sir Edward Downes and the London Symphony, early Seventies)
What a happy Happy Forest for once!
Appropriate rollicking tempo, woodwinds rustic
friendly, so tipsy that, an ounce more giddy, fistic
riot would run. Then, languorous as nuns
of less religious, more amorous persuasion;
last, heels kick up again centaur more than monk.
Now Third Symphony. Woodland-crowned elation
abruptly broken off for Nietzschean funk,
descent toward Nibelungen-dark negation,
ascent toward Alpenheim. The conflagration-
anvil-climax a bit Tinker Toy
where it should be a Giftzwerg’s sledgehammer,
split Siegfried’s sword, the anvil, the forge. The joy
of the second lyric theme needs lammergeier
glide for its lento clock not to run down.
Nonetheless, what balance and legato
(how we underpraise Seventies stereo!);
the second movement, steady Alpenglow,
patient brushstrokes, long-breathed phrasal flow.
If any ever was, a caring rendition,
inspecting detail even as eyes lift toward Vision.
Third movement’s equipoise, lightness and speed
reined in at dressage, midair-suspended steed:
the perfect Epilogue. All stately pace,
the three-four “march,” all tension subdued to: grace.
Fireflies, water-shivers, transhuman lauds;
Sidhe-beings in Irish processional, AE’s “gawds…”
BAX’S WAR: IRELAND, 1922
Movement Two of Symphony One means war.
Civil War roils within all who ache like Bax,
a man lashed to twin horses lashed to gallop afar
in rending directions: neither beast towards Pax.
Worse than that, anarchy loosed, as William Yeats
has lately sung: drunk Lords of Misrule in Ireland
kick over all barrels restraining archaic Fates;
like gasoline drums that spill, touched off by firebrand,
then combust into storm. Mute films loom: shades of heroes,
wind-whipped silhouettes. Superimposed, this war
on scrims of old revolts. Uproot wet corpses
ripe from the boneyard: D flat minor forces
its crowbar into C major. Discord scars
(a hotel Bax stays in, scored with bullet zeros):
All ancient green magic, immanent Sidhe of Eire,
defaced: quintessentially British Ruined Monastery.
LEGEND FOR PIANO AND VIOLIN
(John Ireland)
The rapture sobers down to a mild flare
(Graham’s Greene wood, last choked embers of affair?),
still, Helen Perkin, virtuosic girl
induced by your tutelage to free from its tight furl
passion once giddy, strides the stage to play
this not-so-tour-de-force, a morning grey
suffusing the strings. A melancholic horn
first lights vast musicscapes bare as Samson shorn.
You hark back all the same to that grey spring
that promises not much of anything,
which, maugre all that cloud-feather, is yet spring,
without her who’s adrift in your peevish mind.
Her, grace itself, though clad in storm’s gradgrind…
Your thoughts run slow, half leaden, run aground
from that good overlarge lunch on Sussex Downs.
What do you see? Snapped awake as, chin to chest,
the body seizures with spasms of broken rest.
Who are They who come trooping so near you?
Swift children, white-garbed, elusive to the view?
Because composed, composer, of dust motes
all the world knows for swirls, lit-through sunfloats.
Tambourines half audible tug at strands
of gust until they fray at you like sands.
In such a ring, baby John of Gaunt, in bands
of infancy King Henry Sixth, Lacklands
as yet unrisen to wealth or place, their handstands,
their springs and step-dances ring around the rose
turn mazy circles—how their sheer white glows…
and in the midst fair Helen, Queen of the May
to crown and consummate this shepherd’s hey.
Then flown, one flirt as in Pope’s poetic frown,
stage center, a girl in black-flowing soloist’s gown…
INFLUENCE NO ANXIETY
[W]e are the makers of manners, Kate.
—Shakespeare, Henry V
Charlton Ogburn, Jr., in This Star
of England’s foreword, credits Edward de Vere
with human prototypes who’d soon shine far
in eloquence, whimsy, passion, courage, fear,
all but inventing customs, ways to spar
or quarrel, juggle their jests, endow, endear;
then misconducts, facades, hypocrisies to scar
the angel within. New people would soon appear
to match them in life. Now, Harold Bloom has read
this, Dorothy’s, Charlton Sr.’s magnum opus,
or how could he so go after them, his focus
on vilifying? Yet something all theirs has fed
his Shakespeare-conception…Invention…of the human?
Hmm…there’s a vein to mine, diamonds from bitumen.
______________________
Today’s LittleNip:
EXERCISE
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA
I need to practice writing like a bard
don’t skip a beat or leave your feet each line
it should not be a feat that is too hard
just type some words and hope they come out fine
okay I get the point you’re trying to make
the form they wrote a thousand years ago
before they thought to call a loch a lake
when coins could mean you had a lot of dough
ahoy, aha, there’s land within our reach
that looks all well and good for us to roam
if we could only land upon that beach
we’ll take it for our own and make it home
now free from being subjects to a king
we make the rules and sell the land, ka-ching!
_____________________
Tonight from 7-8:30pm, go to Zoom online at zoom.us/j/5757580081 (Meeting ID: 575 758 0081) to hear a reading by Ellen Bass and Jericho Brown. Host: Society of the Muse of the Southwest. Info: www.facebook.com/events/734574003747600/?notif_t=plan_user_invited¬if_id=1590556509396920/.
—Medusa, thanking our cheeky Pan-poets for today’s fine music!
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.
For no clear reason I can tell,
the pastoral, from hill to dell,
depends on shepherds playing flutes,
a tad more portable than lutes.
First question is about this prop:
why call a flute an “oaten stop?”
Next query, less ethereal:
why oats, made milk and cereal?
I’ve eaten oats in my oatmeal;
oatmeal with oat milk, sheer surreal.
The off-white whiteness goes down smooth
as pamphlets from kiosk or booth
stuffed with Jehovah down my throat.
What gives my gullet rights to gloat
of blenders crammed with oaten liquid?
Or spooned-out bowlfuls thick and viscid?
I gulp no dream of rural flutes:
I muse how the glutinous bulges glutes.
If malt does more than Milton can
to justify God’s ways to man,
the same cannot be claimed for oats.
I won’t eat kids, the young of goats,
but sooner that, or bite raw sheep,
than greet day with a too-long steep
of overnight oats: to torture airy
dawn with chilled and mortuary
oat-mess from the kitchen morgue
on prompts from npr.org:
what’s pastoral about all that?
More shepherd-like to tread the vat
and press the grapes, ferment the wine
than eat or drink this swill for swine.
Like swallowing gobbets, Grendel’s meat,
though Stevia-flavored to be sweet.
Sam Johnson says this feeds a horse,
though Scottish folk call it—main course.
Get thee behind me, oaten stop
for stomachs who can stand the plop
of oatmeal into porcelain bowls
that might more fitly fatten foals.
A Shepherd Playing Flute
Painting by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1897
DOWNES CONDUCTS BAX
(Sir Edward Downes and the London Symphony, early Seventies)
What a happy Happy Forest for once!
Appropriate rollicking tempo, woodwinds rustic
friendly, so tipsy that, an ounce more giddy, fistic
riot would run. Then, languorous as nuns
of less religious, more amorous persuasion;
last, heels kick up again centaur more than monk.
Now Third Symphony. Woodland-crowned elation
abruptly broken off for Nietzschean funk,
descent toward Nibelungen-dark negation,
ascent toward Alpenheim. The conflagration-
anvil-climax a bit Tinker Toy
where it should be a Giftzwerg’s sledgehammer,
split Siegfried’s sword, the anvil, the forge. The joy
of the second lyric theme needs lammergeier
glide for its lento clock not to run down.
Nonetheless, what balance and legato
(how we underpraise Seventies stereo!);
the second movement, steady Alpenglow,
patient brushstrokes, long-breathed phrasal flow.
If any ever was, a caring rendition,
inspecting detail even as eyes lift toward Vision.
Third movement’s equipoise, lightness and speed
reined in at dressage, midair-suspended steed:
the perfect Epilogue. All stately pace,
the three-four “march,” all tension subdued to: grace.
Fireflies, water-shivers, transhuman lauds;
Sidhe-beings in Irish processional, AE’s “gawds…”
BAX’S WAR: IRELAND, 1922
Movement Two of Symphony One means war.
Civil War roils within all who ache like Bax,
a man lashed to twin horses lashed to gallop afar
in rending directions: neither beast towards Pax.
Worse than that, anarchy loosed, as William Yeats
has lately sung: drunk Lords of Misrule in Ireland
kick over all barrels restraining archaic Fates;
like gasoline drums that spill, touched off by firebrand,
then combust into storm. Mute films loom: shades of heroes,
wind-whipped silhouettes. Superimposed, this war
on scrims of old revolts. Uproot wet corpses
ripe from the boneyard: D flat minor forces
its crowbar into C major. Discord scars
(a hotel Bax stays in, scored with bullet zeros):
All ancient green magic, immanent Sidhe of Eire,
defaced: quintessentially British Ruined Monastery.
Painting by Pauca Verba
LEGEND FOR PIANO AND VIOLIN
(John Ireland)
The rapture sobers down to a mild flare
(Graham’s Greene wood, last choked embers of affair?),
still, Helen Perkin, virtuosic girl
induced by your tutelage to free from its tight furl
passion once giddy, strides the stage to play
this not-so-tour-de-force, a morning grey
suffusing the strings. A melancholic horn
first lights vast musicscapes bare as Samson shorn.
You hark back all the same to that grey spring
that promises not much of anything,
which, maugre all that cloud-feather, is yet spring,
without her who’s adrift in your peevish mind.
Her, grace itself, though clad in storm’s gradgrind…
Your thoughts run slow, half leaden, run aground
from that good overlarge lunch on Sussex Downs.
What do you see? Snapped awake as, chin to chest,
the body seizures with spasms of broken rest.
Who are They who come trooping so near you?
Swift children, white-garbed, elusive to the view?
Because composed, composer, of dust motes
all the world knows for swirls, lit-through sunfloats.
Tambourines half audible tug at strands
of gust until they fray at you like sands.
In such a ring, baby John of Gaunt, in bands
of infancy King Henry Sixth, Lacklands
as yet unrisen to wealth or place, their handstands,
their springs and step-dances ring around the rose
turn mazy circles—how their sheer white glows…
and in the midst fair Helen, Queen of the May
to crown and consummate this shepherd’s hey.
Then flown, one flirt as in Pope’s poetic frown,
stage center, a girl in black-flowing soloist’s gown…
INFLUENCE NO ANXIETY
[W]e are the makers of manners, Kate.
—Shakespeare, Henry V
Charlton Ogburn, Jr., in This Star
of England’s foreword, credits Edward de Vere
with human prototypes who’d soon shine far
in eloquence, whimsy, passion, courage, fear,
all but inventing customs, ways to spar
or quarrel, juggle their jests, endow, endear;
then misconducts, facades, hypocrisies to scar
the angel within. New people would soon appear
to match them in life. Now, Harold Bloom has read
this, Dorothy’s, Charlton Sr.’s magnum opus,
or how could he so go after them, his focus
on vilifying? Yet something all theirs has fed
his Shakespeare-conception…Invention…of the human?
Hmm…there’s a vein to mine, diamonds from bitumen.
______________________
Today’s LittleNip:
EXERCISE
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA
I need to practice writing like a bard
don’t skip a beat or leave your feet each line
it should not be a feat that is too hard
just type some words and hope they come out fine
okay I get the point you’re trying to make
the form they wrote a thousand years ago
before they thought to call a loch a lake
when coins could mean you had a lot of dough
ahoy, aha, there’s land within our reach
that looks all well and good for us to roam
if we could only land upon that beach
we’ll take it for our own and make it home
now free from being subjects to a king
we make the rules and sell the land, ka-ching!
_____________________
Tonight from 7-8:30pm, go to Zoom online at zoom.us/j/5757580081 (Meeting ID: 575 758 0081) to hear a reading by Ellen Bass and Jericho Brown. Host: Society of the Muse of the Southwest. Info: www.facebook.com/events/734574003747600/?notif_t=plan_user_invited¬if_id=1590556509396920/.
—Medusa, thanking our cheeky Pan-poets for today’s fine music!
—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Joseph Dolan, Stockton, CA
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.