—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Photos Courtesy of Public Domain
A FROSTED BULB
I shut the carport bulb off at daybreak.
My neighbor keeps his glowing all day long.
Our HOA must think it’s my mistake
Not to maintain a lightbulb’s all-day blaze.
But isn’t this ukase, Keep your light lit up,
A collective psyche’s telltale slip, mistrust
In lightwave strength and length of distant sun?
As if that penetrating reach of heat
Were one faint lightbulb that molests the dust,
Stirs motes adrift around its naked flare,
Yet lacks the lumens to pierce the Everywhere
While, nightly confounding daily, it can’t fight
Our eyelids’ urge or need for outer darkness?
My neighbor seems to think his glaring starkness
More potent by a bulb’s worth than the One
Whose own star-crossed solarity, all lust
To burn, Next-Door believes a passing phase.
Soon, the moth-kissed, moth-eaten orb the moon
Vies with the now-legitimate frosted bulb
By strums of nocturne-silver plenilune;
She’s a seductress who would tantalize
Us with each plectrum-stroke: we who forget,
We moth-wings who flit into her bright net,
Her kilowatts can blind us to her lies
About the source she’s forced to plagiarize.
Burn on, soft bulb of moon, hot bulb of sun;
If eyes turn askance from either of you one instant,
They light on the neighbor bulb, the only constant.
I shut the carport bulb off at daybreak.
My neighbor keeps his glowing all day long.
Our HOA must think it’s my mistake
Not to maintain a lightbulb’s all-day blaze.
But isn’t this ukase, Keep your light lit up,
A collective psyche’s telltale slip, mistrust
In lightwave strength and length of distant sun?
As if that penetrating reach of heat
Were one faint lightbulb that molests the dust,
Stirs motes adrift around its naked flare,
Yet lacks the lumens to pierce the Everywhere
While, nightly confounding daily, it can’t fight
Our eyelids’ urge or need for outer darkness?
My neighbor seems to think his glaring starkness
More potent by a bulb’s worth than the One
Whose own star-crossed solarity, all lust
To burn, Next-Door believes a passing phase.
Soon, the moth-kissed, moth-eaten orb the moon
Vies with the now-legitimate frosted bulb
By strums of nocturne-silver plenilune;
She’s a seductress who would tantalize
Us with each plectrum-stroke: we who forget,
We moth-wings who flit into her bright net,
Her kilowatts can blind us to her lies
About the source she’s forced to plagiarize.
Burn on, soft bulb of moon, hot bulb of sun;
If eyes turn askance from either of you one instant,
They light on the neighbor bulb, the only constant.
THE LIFE WE MEDIATE
CAN ONLY FILTRATE
for Andrew Williamson
Filters and filters barricade the mind.
Our eyesight comes traduced by aqueous humor.
Tell how, through floaters, eye-skin clouds like rind.
All truth vast Vision serves us, largely rumor
Pushed through opacities (touch? taste?), each sense
Illusory when schools rank it separate,
Delusional when we attempt to fence
All inputs in conceptual bounds, the gate
Shut, so we claim, on walls worse than a mesh
Of kelp that “purifies” the drifting shine
Turned murk where weed impounds the salt-dense thrash
Of wet we hope to thresh, to scrub out brine,
Rinse out sea-bottom sand, and call it clean.
We warp the sensual truth we term serene.
And for Tracy Rauschkolb, on her Shakespearean sonnet assignment
THE PARK OF DISENNOBLED STATUES
“Great” Robert E. Lee, to my abiding shame,
Is one of several distant relatives,
All masters over slaves, of local fame
Or national…but their cruelty; what gives?
What gives, evidently, plinths that once did prop them,
As ropes tug at them, keelhaul, yank them down.
Worshipped, ignored, what monument’s not part clown?
Bye-bye, Bobby and all…so nice to have lopped them,
Seen them torn down; but what of our own artwork?
Pope Julius, done in bronze by Michelangelo,
Came lassoed to pavement, melted to metal murk,
Turned cannon; but would any spreader of the evangel know
This loudmouth’s a cousin? What happens to statuary?
Is all art unsafe now, by dint of human flaws?
Lifespan cut short, as if tabled by actuary?
Shiva unleashed? Each statute an anarchist clause?
I like Bulgaria’s way with Communist icons.
Let’s try it here, let’s devote to Lee’s kind a park,
The Park of Disennobled Statues. Let bygones
Be real bygones, by sunlight, by moon-cratered dark.
Subject these white-sidewall worthies to dislocation,
Sweep up these equestrian dummies in one clutter,
Give them a brass-doorknob taste of segregation,
Where birds on their shoulders, not DAR ladies’ hearts, flutter.
Let ultra-white cats be herded where they can’t visit
Oppression in deed or by subconscious presence
On “lessers,” on “Others.” Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
But come, if you do, to look askance at rare pheasants.
Slowly, how slowly, will bronze take the stain of bluegrass,
Turn business for pigeons, and not on the grass, alas…
EUGENE AND GEORGE AND FRYDERYK*
Two lovers in one portrait, later cleaved:
The artist, Delacroix, who brushes in Sand,
George, and Chopin, Fryderyk, relieved
As ever from the quotidian, at a—grand?
No, upright—piano, facial mask alit
And shadowed. Seraphic self-forgetfulness
Now serenades needlepoint George, whose hands have quit
(And quiet the cloth in her lap) while his caress
Works his galvanic-demonic touch on keys
Virtuosos might leave for dead with each dead bang,
Nailing each key to keyboard like a shrike,
Making the instrument quake heave-ho like freight.
Each finger’s specific gravity, lightweight,
Gives largess or widow’s mite to Chopin’s tang;
Each ring of her opiate smoke sequesters release;
Her eardrums observe the melodic heft of thumbs,
The skitter of ivory-ebony repeats,
As first, second, third, fourth, fifth finger queue up for strikes
The limber Pleyel upright can ease like bleats
From goats. No strain in Chopin-strains as numbs
The Robert Schumanns who injure themselves and cease
Recitals due to delusions of finger-hammers,
Isolate mallets, invulnerable clamorers.
Let more cherubic Chopin, half elate,
Half practical, leave his trained digits vulnerable,
Domineering, allied, or singular-nimble,
Boastful or shy, as each natal bent admits.
Watch George, her saturnine face lit up as flits
Each rapid-changing, crossing substitution
Of second for fourth, slide from black keys to whites.
So subtle and fleet a display can fill whole nights.
How hard to believe that soon, strange retribution
Will gorge on this romance of consummate or tease,
Of enigmas, abstinent sexualities,
Coughs into a handkerchief spotted red, disputes
And icy, aloof Majorcan innuendos…
Passionate breakup hard upon sweet phases,
As ecstasies yield to wrath’s worst unripe fruits,
The white-hot or suave mazurkas, polonaises,
Sputter out into hairpin diminuendos.
Delacroix’s canvas, hacked as destined, apart,
Dismays us who write, The fragility of art;
Yet we do retain each savagely cleft half,
As if these prefigured the made then unmade love,
Once rapture, snuffed in a cynical half-barked laugh.
Let’s close on Chopin’s The third finger is a great singer,
Wit from the dandy of many a lemon glove,
Whose lips could emit a shapely sardonic zinger.
*I’m hugely indebted to Alan Walker’s magisterial
Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times of 2018.
LAST WORDS, NOT FAMOUS
[Edward de Vere, mid-1603:]
King James at least keeps word; my claim to forest,
He recognizes, yet not yet the power
To keep that same sweet woodland whole; so, no rest
Till once more in full family grasp, my bower.
Long lamed, now hard a-work to save good fame,
A hopeless tribulation undergone,
I labor on Prince Hamlet’s last words, Name
My gift to pass on down, no jewel to pawn:
For I leave sons (one earl, hot-tempered, known;
One lovely, jailed, unjailed, scarce half redeemed,
Unknown for mine) to live when my rose, blown
And petal-scattered, will be as little themed
And sung as half-done plays left to complete
For Derby. No dumb-shows, mind; no false conceits.
______________________
Today’s LittleNip or Two:
SIR JAMES CLARK
(Physician-in-Ordinary
to Queen Victoria)
—Tom Goff
There once lived a doctor named Clark,
His malpractices many and stark.
He misdiagnosed Keats
And, to cap all his feats,
Dismissed Chopin’s tubercular bark.
***
Queen Victoria’s quack doctor, Clark,
That enigma as weird as a quark,
Botched the case of Prince Albert
Yet, sharp as a halberd,
Turned Sir. He owned acres of park.
***
Dumbledore bumbledore,
Royal Victoria
Stubbornly stood up for
Quacks in high place,
Gave them great latitudes,
Incomprehensible
Badges and platitudes
Masking disgrace.
_______________________
—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff for his lovely, shiny light bulbs of poetry ideas this morning. and listening for Majorcan innuendos...
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