Sombreuil: The First Rose of Spring
—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Photos
SOMBREUIL
White garden sheen, months long
Your petals lasted,
Your rose-glow a nuanced strong,
Never blinding; rather, quite soft,
Constant atop your leaf-dark loft,
Confident on your tough-spined staff
As any masthead,
Presuming immunity to the gusts
And to the rose-rusts
That soon should fox your Sombreuil
Pages, all-dog-ear folds,
No binding to keep overlapping satins in calf.
All through these peak pandemic months,
The sturdy humans died.
Your frailty unpeeled withstood the colds,
Every weather-snap, each abrupt slide
Down-thermometer into ice.
Of late, flicked off by tramontanes unseen,
Or prey to warm February sun,
The clean-linen petals, from the stem’s head pried:
Ground-scattered as over the veiled head of the bride
The raw pellets, the uncooked rice.
Sombreuil, you have no more need
Of your sunlight-toughened tulle,
No use now for that petaled sheen,
Snowbank-in-shade,
No more need to outride
What wrenches the solo human
From the ensemble human,
What cankers tear hairs from the sick scalp in clumps.
White garden sheen, months long
Your petals lasted,
Your rose-glow a nuanced strong,
Never blinding; rather, quite soft,
Constant atop your leaf-dark loft,
Confident on your tough-spined staff
As any masthead,
Presuming immunity to the gusts
And to the rose-rusts
That soon should fox your Sombreuil
Pages, all-dog-ear folds,
No binding to keep overlapping satins in calf.
All through these peak pandemic months,
The sturdy humans died.
Your frailty unpeeled withstood the colds,
Every weather-snap, each abrupt slide
Down-thermometer into ice.
Of late, flicked off by tramontanes unseen,
Or prey to warm February sun,
The clean-linen petals, from the stem’s head pried:
Ground-scattered as over the veiled head of the bride
The raw pellets, the uncooked rice.
Sombreuil, you have no more need
Of your sunlight-toughened tulle,
No use now for that petaled sheen,
Snowbank-in-shade,
No more need to outride
What wrenches the solo human
From the ensemble human,
What cankers tear hairs from the sick scalp in clumps.
SINFIONETTA
In Memory of Alan Balter
(c. 1978)
At the San Francisco Conservatory
Of Music, a most remarkable conductor.
Alan Balter, confidence-builder, slim, quite
Beatle-haired. I suspect he kept music scores
—That must have been it—in his capacious man-purse.
How scrupulously, Time-conscious, he’d rehearse
Beethoven’s Ninth, Daphnis and Chloe Two,
L’Histoire du Soldat, or Luciano Berio’s
New Serialist-Post-Modernist collage,
Listening, listening where to give us cues,
Extract from young tyros more than they had to give.
A clarinetist first, he’d not just beat time,
But, reed-embouchuring, lip-model the singing line,
Puff out long fine-spun puffs we might emulate.
Alan went elsewhere: small professional orchestras;
Not much of his work preserved (he died young:
lung cancer
Surely no Marlboro or Camel spread); YouTube
Enshrines a rehearsal clip: Sinfonietta,
Leoš Janáček. There’s Alan, Yankee coach
For a Murderer’s Row of trumpets and other brass:
While these greats tune up their blare to his baton,
Strings wait enthralled, just knowing
their notes will come,
The lyric lines as Alan helps them unspool
Via airstreams forward-propelled through
pursed clarinet lips….
In Memory of Alan Balter
(c. 1978)
At the San Francisco Conservatory
Of Music, a most remarkable conductor.
Alan Balter, confidence-builder, slim, quite
Beatle-haired. I suspect he kept music scores
—That must have been it—in his capacious man-purse.
How scrupulously, Time-conscious, he’d rehearse
Beethoven’s Ninth, Daphnis and Chloe Two,
L’Histoire du Soldat, or Luciano Berio’s
New Serialist-Post-Modernist collage,
Listening, listening where to give us cues,
Extract from young tyros more than they had to give.
A clarinetist first, he’d not just beat time,
But, reed-embouchuring, lip-model the singing line,
Puff out long fine-spun puffs we might emulate.
Alan went elsewhere: small professional orchestras;
Not much of his work preserved (he died young:
lung cancer
Surely no Marlboro or Camel spread); YouTube
Enshrines a rehearsal clip: Sinfonietta,
Leoš Janáček. There’s Alan, Yankee coach
For a Murderer’s Row of trumpets and other brass:
While these greats tune up their blare to his baton,
Strings wait enthralled, just knowing
their notes will come,
The lyric lines as Alan helps them unspool
Via airstreams forward-propelled through
pursed clarinet lips….
MERRILL / merrill
Little or Big?
I proudly own James Merrill’s Collected Poems,
Edited by McClatchy and by Yenser,
An Eighth World’s Wonder, mausoleum-tome, em-
Panoplied-, lavendered-, gray-greened-, black-bound, denser
Sibling to Everyman’s Pocket Poets Merrill,
Small Merrill, head-shrunk from Big Merrill, by Langdon Hammer.
Think as you would of Pound’s Cantos, reduced to carols.
We cud-chewers, in the sheltering-in-place slammer
Pandemic-confined, what do we treasure? Big suitcase-
Bulges the poet, to zipper, must sit shut?
Or shall we lessen the load, trim to a loose-laced,
Drawstringed single duffel’s dearth, unstuffed of glut?
Intermezzo
Mirror, mirror, on or off the wall,
Which is the truer, trustier mirror of all?
Who is more the cool still one’s warm-blooded brother
And who the passive, glazed-upon Other?
Suitcase or Carry-On?
How best might Merrill clear Customs? As Anatole France
Declares, one duty-lightening carry-on bag?
Proust begs to differ, lugging his Remembrance.
One version to…slip through fissures? The other to sag?
Which Merrill to savor? Mere madeleines to dream on?
More macro? Or micro-sized, more Reynaldo Hahn?
Little or Big?
I proudly own James Merrill’s Collected Poems,
Edited by McClatchy and by Yenser,
An Eighth World’s Wonder, mausoleum-tome, em-
Panoplied-, lavendered-, gray-greened-, black-bound, denser
Sibling to Everyman’s Pocket Poets Merrill,
Small Merrill, head-shrunk from Big Merrill, by Langdon Hammer.
Think as you would of Pound’s Cantos, reduced to carols.
We cud-chewers, in the sheltering-in-place slammer
Pandemic-confined, what do we treasure? Big suitcase-
Bulges the poet, to zipper, must sit shut?
Or shall we lessen the load, trim to a loose-laced,
Drawstringed single duffel’s dearth, unstuffed of glut?
Intermezzo
Mirror, mirror, on or off the wall,
Which is the truer, trustier mirror of all?
Who is more the cool still one’s warm-blooded brother
And who the passive, glazed-upon Other?
Suitcase or Carry-On?
How best might Merrill clear Customs? As Anatole France
Declares, one duty-lightening carry-on bag?
Proust begs to differ, lugging his Remembrance.
One version to…slip through fissures? The other to sag?
Which Merrill to savor? Mere madeleines to dream on?
More macro? Or micro-sized, more Reynaldo Hahn?
MILLAY’S DAY
(February 22, 2021, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 129th birthday)
The rotten miraculous luck of the Millays:
Young Vincent, female knight-errant to skewer
The dragon Poverty, and the malaise
Ensuing from endless chores, the royal ewer
Brimming dark heavy water sudsing slats
Of floorboard, Vincent and Norma and Kathleen
Song-singing, verse-improvising not to go bats
While Mother’s-away-at-nursing-work makes bean
Dinners, and meatless stews, necessities.
Now Vincent conceives Renascence, Rebirthday,
More festal than any frosted cake, to seize
Pre-resurrecting audition for her Play:
Young Impudent Genius, daring Time the Malign.
Millay still remarkable, at One-Twenty-Nine.
[Posted online by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, Steepletop, NY]
(February 22, 2021, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 129th birthday)
The rotten miraculous luck of the Millays:
Young Vincent, female knight-errant to skewer
The dragon Poverty, and the malaise
Ensuing from endless chores, the royal ewer
Brimming dark heavy water sudsing slats
Of floorboard, Vincent and Norma and Kathleen
Song-singing, verse-improvising not to go bats
While Mother’s-away-at-nursing-work makes bean
Dinners, and meatless stews, necessities.
Now Vincent conceives Renascence, Rebirthday,
More festal than any frosted cake, to seize
Pre-resurrecting audition for her Play:
Young Impudent Genius, daring Time the Malign.
Millay still remarkable, at One-Twenty-Nine.
[Posted online by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, Steepletop, NY]
WINE FROM THESE GRAPES
(1st edition, limited, 2 vols.)
Mid-fame in 1934, Millay:
Your elegant careless miniscule scrawl
Ornifies the Worthy Charta paper
With its rag edges that, handled, subtly fray.
How, scant years hence, the hotel will burn down
With your much-worked-for manuscript in it
(deeded much the same black scrawl and cram
that labors to make fingers-flying letters fit
Each verse-full page…Or is it typewriter-ribboned,
With strikethroughs littered, with eccentric
key-tangles jostling grey fadeouts,
odd loose gaps and splays?)
The product now before me, elegance
In large-print Harper & Brothers gracile serifs
That rank themselves like cloud-borne seraphs,
With stylish ligature loops that join
Each s and t, each e and t,
Every suave audacious line an entity,
Or say, curved as a hand-shielding basket hilt
Guarding a thin flexible blade whose sharp point
can quickly foin.
This is ascension, yours, at its height,
With each last clean-scansioning stanza;
On sings the contralto throat, the red-haired romanza.
This, even as you foreknew, life’s a honey-tongued jilt,
Mere months between your Now and that dread fall
From the smooth-speeding roadster (open-topped,
midwinter, in which your hair would blow back,
you lapped in rugs!),
The injured resort to the dulling drugs.
Your Epitaph for the Race of Man,
Second volume of this collector’s set, my copy
Numbered Three Hundred Twenty-Four
Of Three Hundred Thirty-five,
Another presage of the not quite yet-arrived guest
Who’d have you to wife,
No soot upon snowmelt where
your pen-point pressed,
No vanishing into the red-westering vapor
The vows you pressed on the air of which
they’re spun:
See where you inked the long-tailed y
in the signed Millay,
The y-tail delicate, fierce and fine
Which in no soft palm incises the dark lifeline.
(1st edition, limited, 2 vols.)
Mid-fame in 1934, Millay:
Your elegant careless miniscule scrawl
Ornifies the Worthy Charta paper
With its rag edges that, handled, subtly fray.
How, scant years hence, the hotel will burn down
With your much-worked-for manuscript in it
(deeded much the same black scrawl and cram
that labors to make fingers-flying letters fit
Each verse-full page…Or is it typewriter-ribboned,
With strikethroughs littered, with eccentric
key-tangles jostling grey fadeouts,
odd loose gaps and splays?)
The product now before me, elegance
In large-print Harper & Brothers gracile serifs
That rank themselves like cloud-borne seraphs,
With stylish ligature loops that join
Each s and t, each e and t,
Every suave audacious line an entity,
Or say, curved as a hand-shielding basket hilt
Guarding a thin flexible blade whose sharp point
can quickly foin.
This is ascension, yours, at its height,
With each last clean-scansioning stanza;
On sings the contralto throat, the red-haired romanza.
This, even as you foreknew, life’s a honey-tongued jilt,
Mere months between your Now and that dread fall
From the smooth-speeding roadster (open-topped,
midwinter, in which your hair would blow back,
you lapped in rugs!),
The injured resort to the dulling drugs.
Your Epitaph for the Race of Man,
Second volume of this collector’s set, my copy
Numbered Three Hundred Twenty-Four
Of Three Hundred Thirty-five,
Another presage of the not quite yet-arrived guest
Who’d have you to wife,
No soot upon snowmelt where
your pen-point pressed,
No vanishing into the red-westering vapor
The vows you pressed on the air of which
they’re spun:
See where you inked the long-tailed y
in the signed Millay,
The y-tail delicate, fierce and fine
Which in no soft palm incises the dark lifeline.
ON MILLAY’S MOST FAMOUS THEATER PIECE
In Aria da Capo—this brief play
That starts with Columbine paired to Pierrot
And leads us to the sacrificial fray
Evoking that paper cleaver, Sykes-Picot,
The Iraq-and-Syria-sundering boundary
As, guarding one side the sheep, one side the water,
One side sparse grass, one side bright jewelry,
Two shepherds, erstwhile friends, each other slaughter—
Who, reading now, can’t see our ecosystem-
Failure goading gaunt throngs from scraped-bare lands
Into the gun’s eye, egging on Cataclysm
Eager to aggravate the spread of sands?
What onrush of mindful clarity will turn us
From Chaos, who fatten saturnine Cothurnus?
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
_____________________
Good morning on this Spring Equinox and a big thank-you to Tom Goff as we start another weekend! Not every blogger can end a post with “From Chaos, who fatten saturnine Cothurnus?”… Ah, poetry! lovely roses and unexpected words. (See www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-a-solstice-and-an-equinox for the difference between a solstice and an equinox.)
In Aria da Capo—this brief play
That starts with Columbine paired to Pierrot
And leads us to the sacrificial fray
Evoking that paper cleaver, Sykes-Picot,
The Iraq-and-Syria-sundering boundary
As, guarding one side the sheep, one side the water,
One side sparse grass, one side bright jewelry,
Two shepherds, erstwhile friends, each other slaughter—
Who, reading now, can’t see our ecosystem-
Failure goading gaunt throngs from scraped-bare lands
Into the gun’s eye, egging on Cataclysm
Eager to aggravate the spread of sands?
What onrush of mindful clarity will turn us
From Chaos, who fatten saturnine Cothurnus?
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
_____________________
Good morning on this Spring Equinox and a big thank-you to Tom Goff as we start another weekend! Not every blogger can end a post with “From Chaos, who fatten saturnine Cothurnus?”… Ah, poetry! lovely roses and unexpected words. (See www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-a-solstice-and-an-equinox for the difference between a solstice and an equinox.)
Word of the Day from Tom's poem above: FOIN: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/foin/.
_____________________
—Medusa
—Medusa
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