—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Original Artwork by Norman J. Olson, Maplewood, MN
CALIFORNIA SUN
We wanted this remorseless golden sun
(But California sun burns lethal white).
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done.
Near 300 days a year, the solar-spun
Coils rattlesnake the hardpan: venom Light.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun,
Willed brittle, shriveled skin, the snow-blind stun,
Sharp flashes of mirror. The cluster-clouds pack tight.
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done
Before the baptismal pretense is begun.
What’s not drought-stunted, freckled by the blight.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun.
We abled the parkour crown fire to free-run,
Let witless thickets, underbrush, ignite.
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done.
Moist ointment’s gently stroked into not one
Scorched sore place, stand of pines crisped matchstick-slight.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun
To gild our shoulders Mediterranean,
To mold us Greek-shield bronze, all backs upright.
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun
(But California sun burns lethal white).
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done.
Near 300 days a year, the solar-spun
Coils rattlesnake the hardpan: venom Light.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun,
Willed brittle, shriveled skin, the snow-blind stun,
Sharp flashes of mirror. The cluster-clouds pack tight.
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done
Before the baptismal pretense is begun.
What’s not drought-stunted, freckled by the blight.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun.
We abled the parkour crown fire to free-run,
Let witless thickets, underbrush, ignite.
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done.
Moist ointment’s gently stroked into not one
Scorched sore place, stand of pines crisped matchstick-slight.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun
To gild our shoulders Mediterranean,
To mold us Greek-shield bronze, all backs upright.
Earth, faintly spattered, dries; the rain is done.
We wanted this remorseless golden sun.
SONTAG’S ODE TO JOY
Not Susan Sontag, she, but Henrietta;
Just eighteen years old, chosen by Beethoven
To sing the solo soprano, from cabaletta
To quartet recitative, that heaven-cloven,
Ether-ascending rise among star-fields
(Joan Sutherland best displays what she could do,
Sontag, with agile evenness that yields
To none, though back-row choristers croon like glue)…
But this is not the conquest of hers best known:
Violins, with arm-threatening brusque bow-strokes,
Drums, trumpets, cymbals, trombones in prestissimo
Make joyous ruckus fit for felling oaks:
Conductor Umlauf ceases and—uproar!
Onstage, Beethoven “helping” beat the time,
Too deaf, too lost in his own private score
Of innovations, choral surge sublime
Known by a perfect pitch lodged in the head;
His harsh arm-beats must follow where he’s led.
Young Sontag, with that spontaneity
And sense of rightness fitting her late teen years,
Shyly plucks the Composer-deity
By the still-flailing sleeve; her eyes brim tears,
She gentles him round to face up to applause,
The rough man’s Roman triumph, his due by laws.
This shag-haired man who laughs yet seldom smiles
Upturns the skeptical lip-ends a girl beguiles.
Not Susan Sontag, she, but Henrietta;
Just eighteen years old, chosen by Beethoven
To sing the solo soprano, from cabaletta
To quartet recitative, that heaven-cloven,
Ether-ascending rise among star-fields
(Joan Sutherland best displays what she could do,
Sontag, with agile evenness that yields
To none, though back-row choristers croon like glue)…
But this is not the conquest of hers best known:
Violins, with arm-threatening brusque bow-strokes,
Drums, trumpets, cymbals, trombones in prestissimo
Make joyous ruckus fit for felling oaks:
Conductor Umlauf ceases and—uproar!
Onstage, Beethoven “helping” beat the time,
Too deaf, too lost in his own private score
Of innovations, choral surge sublime
Known by a perfect pitch lodged in the head;
His harsh arm-beats must follow where he’s led.
Young Sontag, with that spontaneity
And sense of rightness fitting her late teen years,
Shyly plucks the Composer-deity
By the still-flailing sleeve; her eyes brim tears,
She gentles him round to face up to applause,
The rough man’s Roman triumph, his due by laws.
This shag-haired man who laughs yet seldom smiles
Upturns the skeptical lip-ends a girl beguiles.
YOUNG KLARKASH-TOM*
Your “Ode to the Abyss”—a prodigy’s
First fingering of astringent stellar fruits?—
Brags flexing machinelike mandibles to seize
The unwary who scan your lines for easy routes
To ecstatic-singing suns. Fools! Reread the title,
All you in denial of Youth’s prophetic powers.
No glowing paths, milk-spilled star-carpets brittle
Will pave your facile access toward chill towers
Lit smiling like seraphs’ lips. All you who would breach
This Void that suckles at the light-year’s breast,
This Void that mutates from viper to cosmic leech:
Enter or shun the vast planets’, the failed stars’ nest,
Prodigious baptismal font of each black hole.
This parasite clamped to the Tree of Light eats at its soul.
*H.P. Lovecraft’s whimsical name for his fellow
fantasy writer and denizen of Cthulhu, Auburn’s Clark Ashton Smith.
Your “Ode to the Abyss”—a prodigy’s
First fingering of astringent stellar fruits?—
Brags flexing machinelike mandibles to seize
The unwary who scan your lines for easy routes
To ecstatic-singing suns. Fools! Reread the title,
All you in denial of Youth’s prophetic powers.
No glowing paths, milk-spilled star-carpets brittle
Will pave your facile access toward chill towers
Lit smiling like seraphs’ lips. All you who would breach
This Void that suckles at the light-year’s breast,
This Void that mutates from viper to cosmic leech:
Enter or shun the vast planets’, the failed stars’ nest,
Prodigious baptismal font of each black hole.
This parasite clamped to the Tree of Light eats at its soul.
*H.P. Lovecraft’s whimsical name for his fellow
fantasy writer and denizen of Cthulhu, Auburn’s Clark Ashton Smith.
CAS: THE LEGACY
Besotted followers of Clark Ashton Smith,
Probe as you will the ecstatically stippled cosmos,
Tie round the lost planets each their ouroboros
Whose bite will snap diamantine monoliths
Rather than sever the tail fanged in its own mouth;
Pursue if you will the comet that takes on star
Proportion snowballing up galaxies without a jar;
One such ice-chariot’s burst would dispel all drought.
Yet such is his worth even in the pandemic year,
His interchangeable human characters
Share one aspect: their thirst for quests endear
Us to our own magnanimity, our curse
And benefice, our sick enthrallments to the strange,
The lovely-grotesque that drives us
beyond all evolvable range…
Besotted followers of Clark Ashton Smith,
Probe as you will the ecstatically stippled cosmos,
Tie round the lost planets each their ouroboros
Whose bite will snap diamantine monoliths
Rather than sever the tail fanged in its own mouth;
Pursue if you will the comet that takes on star
Proportion snowballing up galaxies without a jar;
One such ice-chariot’s burst would dispel all drought.
Yet such is his worth even in the pandemic year,
His interchangeable human characters
Share one aspect: their thirst for quests endear
Us to our own magnanimity, our curse
And benefice, our sick enthrallments to the strange,
The lovely-grotesque that drives us
beyond all evolvable range…
WITHOUT LEFT HAND
(c. 1979)
Harry Newstone has left; the Sacramento
Symphony has a last Anglophile memento,
Part of a Newstone program: Holst’s Perfect Fool
Ballet. Possibly Newstone’s too, Ravel’s
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,
Since Harry N. also championed Modern French.
Alas, I’m merely Trumpet Four; the hell
Of it is, Left Hand, of trumpets, requires just three.
What right arm would I not give like Wittgenstein
To partake of Ravel’s unfurling gorgeousness?
I must settle (good as it is) for Gustav Holst.
His Ballet Music for The Perfect Fool
(Residually Planetary in idiom,
Yet recognizably of Later Holstian Chaste,
Of technique to temper if not bar Mars-delirium)
Is manageable without untoward drool
Released by the spit valve, though there’s always some…
But oh, the rapturousness of the Left Hand,
Whose jazz despairs, bluesmongering harrumphs
Raise head-and-nape-hair static via the grand
Steinway. Backstage, Philippe Entremont
Flight-tests glissandos; arpeggiates and thumps:
I witness him gradually ease, or self-undaunt.
It’s Entremont right here, as if entre nous,
The nearest I’ll get to M. Ravel in view.
Performance ensues; behind the orchestral shell,
I listen to more potent trumpet mentors’
Shell-shaking blasts to affright the Trojan Stentor;
Entremont tops whole orchestras in volume,
With lyricism to shame flotillas of harps.
Beside this airbender, space-time simply warps.
Then it’s my turn to join the section for Holst;
We play, we bow, and for me, all seems half-well.
(c. 1979)
Harry Newstone has left; the Sacramento
Symphony has a last Anglophile memento,
Part of a Newstone program: Holst’s Perfect Fool
Ballet. Possibly Newstone’s too, Ravel’s
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,
Since Harry N. also championed Modern French.
Alas, I’m merely Trumpet Four; the hell
Of it is, Left Hand, of trumpets, requires just three.
What right arm would I not give like Wittgenstein
To partake of Ravel’s unfurling gorgeousness?
I must settle (good as it is) for Gustav Holst.
His Ballet Music for The Perfect Fool
(Residually Planetary in idiom,
Yet recognizably of Later Holstian Chaste,
Of technique to temper if not bar Mars-delirium)
Is manageable without untoward drool
Released by the spit valve, though there’s always some…
But oh, the rapturousness of the Left Hand,
Whose jazz despairs, bluesmongering harrumphs
Raise head-and-nape-hair static via the grand
Steinway. Backstage, Philippe Entremont
Flight-tests glissandos; arpeggiates and thumps:
I witness him gradually ease, or self-undaunt.
It’s Entremont right here, as if entre nous,
The nearest I’ll get to M. Ravel in view.
Performance ensues; behind the orchestral shell,
I listen to more potent trumpet mentors’
Shell-shaking blasts to affright the Trojan Stentor;
Entremont tops whole orchestras in volume,
With lyricism to shame flotillas of harps.
Beside this airbender, space-time simply warps.
Then it’s my turn to join the section for Holst;
We play, we bow, and for me, all seems half-well.
Today’s LittleNip:
BOGLE
—Tom Goff
Found, on our hexagonal kitchen chest of soups,
Last night’s bent little peel from top of the bottle,
The tiny foil scrap that helped seal the cork,
With “Bogle Vineyards” embossed on it, olive green
Against a lighter olive taper-wisp
Of calligraphic bottle-capping “BV.”
Judging from this half-crumpled shred of logo,
Will we long, or ever, remember the Pinot Noir,
Dark and edged as if scything our taste buds?
“Too strong,” we declared in unison at first sip,
Then, the settling down to like how it sank
Gratefully into us as we sank into it.
___________________
—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff this morning for his skilled poetry, and Norman Olson for his equally skilled original art!
—Oil by Norman J. Olson
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