—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Photos
LEADING-STRINGS
Departed dear Jane Blue, poet,
writes down the sadness it is to see
dogs leashed,
dogs like slaves, like prisoners, she opines.
Or say rather, like eighteenth-,
like nineteenth-century
children in leading-strings,
leashed until trained to step
upright sturdily and not stray
or, worse image, trip, stumble,
knee-scrape, bleed until scabbed.
Leading-strings, not very often seen,
exist still, lashing moms to offspring,
offspring to moms, connection
less umbilical than telephonic,
as with the old handset cord, flexing wire coiled
and sheathed in malleable plastic,
coiled for torsion, mom-fist to child-harness
or backpack, coiled for in-gather and outflex,
for ease of retraction
from tolerated anxious outstretch almost
beyond testable limits.
Adults too feel the restraint, the backwards tug,
Keats telling Charles Armitage Brown
as to the play they’ve both plotted,
I’ve been in leading-strings long enough; let me
look to the rest.
Departed dear Jane Blue, poet,
writes down the sadness it is to see
dogs leashed,
dogs like slaves, like prisoners, she opines.
Or say rather, like eighteenth-,
like nineteenth-century
children in leading-strings,
leashed until trained to step
upright sturdily and not stray
or, worse image, trip, stumble,
knee-scrape, bleed until scabbed.
Leading-strings, not very often seen,
exist still, lashing moms to offspring,
offspring to moms, connection
less umbilical than telephonic,
as with the old handset cord, flexing wire coiled
and sheathed in malleable plastic,
coiled for torsion, mom-fist to child-harness
or backpack, coiled for in-gather and outflex,
for ease of retraction
from tolerated anxious outstretch almost
beyond testable limits.
Adults too feel the restraint, the backwards tug,
Keats telling Charles Armitage Brown
as to the play they’ve both plotted,
I’ve been in leading-strings long enough; let me
look to the rest.
MY FRIEND BAX
(Aloys Fleischmann—Aloys Og—reminisces:)
Oh, you should have met my Irish non-Irish friend
Arnold Bax. Yes, that’s right: the famous
Non-famous composer. He was a character.
Correction. I should say the great Sir Arnold Bax.
But that just embalms the living soul. Oh, you’d
Have liked him. In Ireland, he knew poets and radicals.
Wrote better than decent poetry himself
On the age-old Irish struggle against the Brits.
At times, he’d seem difficult, a bit hard to reach,
But that was his shy surface. More time spent
With him, he’d ease. He’d keep you entertained
With mimicry or literature for hours.
That, from his phase as Dermot O’Byrne, the writer.
A funny fellow: perhaps shied from revolution;
Took ship back to England prior to the Easter Rising.
Yet sympathized no less. His music’s first fame
Fell upon British ears, a savage gong,
Though, somehow, he failed to fully press his case.
Flinched from the big battle, you say? Take Willy Yeats.
Who holds it against Yeats now he surely did so?
Held that Coole Park white-swan soul high aloof
From the great bullet-fight still pocking the Post Office.
Ach, when I think of Bax, I think of this:
He wrote of it well, those grey-wall bullet gouges,
Pond-pinging splashes turned fossil, for us to inspect and think.
(Aloys Fleischmann—Aloys Og—reminisces:)
Oh, you should have met my Irish non-Irish friend
Arnold Bax. Yes, that’s right: the famous
Non-famous composer. He was a character.
Correction. I should say the great Sir Arnold Bax.
But that just embalms the living soul. Oh, you’d
Have liked him. In Ireland, he knew poets and radicals.
Wrote better than decent poetry himself
On the age-old Irish struggle against the Brits.
At times, he’d seem difficult, a bit hard to reach,
But that was his shy surface. More time spent
With him, he’d ease. He’d keep you entertained
With mimicry or literature for hours.
That, from his phase as Dermot O’Byrne, the writer.
A funny fellow: perhaps shied from revolution;
Took ship back to England prior to the Easter Rising.
Yet sympathized no less. His music’s first fame
Fell upon British ears, a savage gong,
Though, somehow, he failed to fully press his case.
Flinched from the big battle, you say? Take Willy Yeats.
Who holds it against Yeats now he surely did so?
Held that Coole Park white-swan soul high aloof
From the great bullet-fight still pocking the Post Office.
Ach, when I think of Bax, I think of this:
He wrote of it well, those grey-wall bullet gouges,
Pond-pinging splashes turned fossil, for us to inspect and think.
(Aloys Og signifies Aloys Fleischmann, Jr.—T.G.)
MISTRESS MARY
(years after the affair)
Mary Gleaves, interviewed for radio
By Michael Oliver. Extraordinary.
Shyest of English roses: may we know,
In Arnold Bax’s birth-centenary,
What it was like, your situation, mistress
To that fine, lately seldom-sung, composer?
Uncanny. Elderly Mary, no distress
Discernible save, perhaps, to any who knows her:
Seems almost eager to hint how rapturous
It was to be alive, in secret meet
That great man, trysting along through amorous
“Green and gold days” in Marlow, flesh replete
With sensual satisfaction. Empty out feeling,
Fill from skin-surface to inmost once again.
Time hurtling past in Scotland, Morar’s reeling
Storm-fronts perfectly suiting them, as when
Sex mimics the shingle-crashing rollers. Calm
Suspends then over the shoreline, love and languor…
During which calm they, “bod” and “bod” entwined,
Seem dizzied just lying still, Earth turning over.
How can they be, like fortunate stars, aligned?
Like mirror-doubling, fingers enlacing, palm
His helpless to escape palm Hers, nor wanting to?
All this, yet much unsaid, pique rarely voiced,
Though how can she not know how much she has to rue,
Positioned as Second Mistress, never First?
Shyness of hers, convenient for him: so poised
Her reticence, indiscreet blurts will never burst
From youthful unguarded lips. Every so often,
Or rather, seldom, temper flares. Resent?
Occasionally, the flame; but then, re-soften
Into her sensual giving, giving bent.
But back to the BBC. Of course, she omits
So much we guess about her, emphasizes
Sweet comradeship, expressed with iron decorum,
Expressed so because this is her nature. Rises
To interview with slight anecdotes: Bax composing,
Being read to by her, while scoring, while flame blazes
Behind the fire-dogs in their sitting room
(One may suppose he writes verse while she knits)
Or long spring walks he paces ahead still musing
In silent bliss; she trails him with his gift
Of a botanist’s book, cataloguing blooms
Or parsing various parsleys, umbel by umbel,
Partnered in a silence from which to sift
Perceived perfection, lasting albeit humble.
What can she possibly speak of in this forum
But decorous anecdotes, here with Michael Oliver?
(He probes for details, but never disrespects
That fragile-genteel plate armor that self-protects.)
She relates how she met him. Bax, with friend Grant Oliver:
Bax instantly sizes up the shy girl; must have her…
Yet did male eagerness not sound feminine depths?
Their turn of each to each, in pivot steps,
At that night’s last train stop: unison spontaneity,
Waving farewell (but let us meet again soon)
Done as would-be lovers do under a plenilune,
She-nymph, swept up in the tides of a grander deity.
______________________
Today’s LittleNip:
My life is part humor, part roses, part thorns.
—Bret Michaels
______________________
—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff for Mistress Mary (shyest of English roses), Arnold his Bax-Pal, and his reference to Sacramento's Jane Blue, keenest of poets and warmest of friends, but now, sadly, passed.
(years after the affair)
Mary Gleaves, interviewed for radio
By Michael Oliver. Extraordinary.
Shyest of English roses: may we know,
In Arnold Bax’s birth-centenary,
What it was like, your situation, mistress
To that fine, lately seldom-sung, composer?
Uncanny. Elderly Mary, no distress
Discernible save, perhaps, to any who knows her:
Seems almost eager to hint how rapturous
It was to be alive, in secret meet
That great man, trysting along through amorous
“Green and gold days” in Marlow, flesh replete
With sensual satisfaction. Empty out feeling,
Fill from skin-surface to inmost once again.
Time hurtling past in Scotland, Morar’s reeling
Storm-fronts perfectly suiting them, as when
Sex mimics the shingle-crashing rollers. Calm
Suspends then over the shoreline, love and languor…
During which calm they, “bod” and “bod” entwined,
Seem dizzied just lying still, Earth turning over.
How can they be, like fortunate stars, aligned?
Like mirror-doubling, fingers enlacing, palm
His helpless to escape palm Hers, nor wanting to?
All this, yet much unsaid, pique rarely voiced,
Though how can she not know how much she has to rue,
Positioned as Second Mistress, never First?
Shyness of hers, convenient for him: so poised
Her reticence, indiscreet blurts will never burst
From youthful unguarded lips. Every so often,
Or rather, seldom, temper flares. Resent?
Occasionally, the flame; but then, re-soften
Into her sensual giving, giving bent.
But back to the BBC. Of course, she omits
So much we guess about her, emphasizes
Sweet comradeship, expressed with iron decorum,
Expressed so because this is her nature. Rises
To interview with slight anecdotes: Bax composing,
Being read to by her, while scoring, while flame blazes
Behind the fire-dogs in their sitting room
(One may suppose he writes verse while she knits)
Or long spring walks he paces ahead still musing
In silent bliss; she trails him with his gift
Of a botanist’s book, cataloguing blooms
Or parsing various parsleys, umbel by umbel,
Partnered in a silence from which to sift
Perceived perfection, lasting albeit humble.
What can she possibly speak of in this forum
But decorous anecdotes, here with Michael Oliver?
(He probes for details, but never disrespects
That fragile-genteel plate armor that self-protects.)
She relates how she met him. Bax, with friend Grant Oliver:
Bax instantly sizes up the shy girl; must have her…
Yet did male eagerness not sound feminine depths?
Their turn of each to each, in pivot steps,
At that night’s last train stop: unison spontaneity,
Waving farewell (but let us meet again soon)
Done as would-be lovers do under a plenilune,
She-nymph, swept up in the tides of a grander deity.
______________________
Today’s LittleNip:
My life is part humor, part roses, part thorns.
—Bret Michaels
______________________
—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff for Mistress Mary (shyest of English roses), Arnold his Bax-Pal, and his reference to Sacramento's Jane Blue, keenest of poets and warmest of friends, but now, sadly, passed.
Mary Rose Tudor
“The Rose Among the Lilies of France”
“The Rose Among the Lilies of France”
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