Poetry Cats

 

—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Joseph Nolan, Stockton, CA

—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA

 

WHY I WRITE POETRY BOOKS

Heigh-ho! I write the books I write;
How else to assemble the books I wish to read?
Are these—full-length or chapbook-sized—a blight,
A sandscape trashland litter of busted things,
Or embarrassingly accumulating like rings
One feels ashamed to display on fingers?
Whatever may these verse-crammed surfaces be,
glitter or litter?
Or are these morsels edible-inedible wastes?
What word-goulash could I cook up that tastes
less bitter?
When feeling blue
I revert to Robert Graves’s aperçu:
He would declare and more than half indeed
Believe that his poetry cat,
Cat with an attitude,
The gift of a poet’s own shelf-clambering latitude,
Was raised, provisioned and fed
By doggier books of prose that would breed and breed,
Shaggy but suited with canine graces
For unremainderable display-places
Far beyond range of the keenest-eared cat’s
best gratitude. 

 

 

 

 

 

WILLY YEATS

He used to write of the poor
From Ballynahinch to Sligo.
Then strangeness of visions envisioned
Puffed puffery into Ego.

So privately involuted
His patchwork symbolism,
Peacock, moor-hen and Byzantium,
To dream let alone comprehend it
Would burst with an embolism
The regular-minded brain
That ventured by trial to mend it.

Yet mind this his tenor of meaning:
The more cryptically mystic and clipped
His politics, the more vatic
The dream-spells, the stiff-necked keening,

The stranger the star-and-beast images,
The easier in the reading. 

 

 

 

 

ZARZUELA

Plácido Domingo and zarzuela:
He loves this colorful operetta genre
That stands for his natal Spain; all aquarelle, a
Wash from melodious brush whose notes turn ornery,
As paso doble winds with castanets
And oompah brasses thump for hearts and bulls
To race in cigar-band-sized bullrings—no regrets
For banderilla’d black beasts turned sworded kills.
Alas, Domingo’s known now for venery,
A predator-lecher ghosted, half-erased.
If only he had comported himself with dignity:
His carriage like that of Otello, in the Palacio
De Bellas Artes, but unjealous; backstage, more chaste.
A Venetian Lion in stride, poor Iago effaced,
In Plácido’s baritonal tenor notes
Whose reverbs boomed off the marble balcony-curves.
Ay dios; his ill repute now is a swarm of motes
Obscuring the luscious legato Shakespeare swerves
Of line in his Gia la Pleiade in mar discende,
In present-day annals, with comic zarzuela twist,
To be recast, reduced in Fate’s rancorous fist,
Reshaped into a Don Juan Tenorio.
More zarzuela-like yet,
O the despair I then felt, unticketed at the Palacio
Till a chance-met extrovert Aussie discerned or divined
How my disappointment burned,
Till he confided: Mate, just display a few pesos,
Hold them straight up in your greedy little fist,
And you’ll scalp yourself a proper Domingo ticket.
I did my best, still thinking it not cricket,
And—miracle! I did get in,
Felt bullfighter’s prowess, fit for blowing besos
To the plauditing tauromachians at the bullring-o:
I was about to hear the great Domingo. 

 

 

 

 

FOR THE LATE MICHAEL GOODWIN
(1946-2012), conductor of the Auburn Symphony

Dear Michael Goodwin, killed so tragically soon
In a car crash…I reflect on how you’d recruit
My utility trumpet for a next concert: the phone
Would ring in the kitchen. No, I never did bruit
What Nora would say, hand clamped over the receiver,
—Tom, it’s for you. —Who is it? —Tony Blair.
Your erudite British voice,
Mellow and lithe,
The same voice by which your wit would regale where
Audiences sat in the Placer High concert hall.
A John Le Carré would admire how apples would fall
Charmed off the very tree by those debonair, blithe
Modulations of droll understatement.
Yet your baton-strokes would spur us to full engagement,
Spark standing ovations at the Mondavi Center.
If only I could enter
That which we signally lack,
Some time-travel machine or wormhole back
To catch, amid mirth-ripples, ad-libs you’d fit
To anecdotes of Beethoven, Rossini: choice
Word-badminton banter.
Alas, time dissolves most witticism-wafers:
We all know the best jests, unjotted, disperse in vapors. 

 

 

 

Today’s LittleNip:

“The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat:


If you offer him pheasant he would rather have grouse.


If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat,


If you put him in a flat then he’d rather have a house.


If you set him on a mouse then he only wants a rat,


If you set him on a rat then he’d rather chase a mouse.


Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat—


And there isn’t any call for me to shout it:


For he will do


As he do do


And there’s no doing anything about it!”


—T.S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

____________________

—Medusa, with our thanks to Tom Goff for his smooth lyricism today, bless his poetic heart, and love to his poetic cat!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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