—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Photos of Ireland Courtesy of Public Domain
THE MATTRESS IN OUR LANE
One poet, an urbanite transposed to rural,
Declares life’s a bewildered trek through woods,
The eye not lashed by its own lashes; lashed
By a chance twig that luckily can’t lash deep.
I have perhaps a stranger analogy:
Life is a buzzing rush down freeway lanes
(This freeway’s Highway 80). Center lane:
Just five car-lengths ahead, an unsecured
Tailgate flies open, disgorges a large mattress.
Mattress flops onto open road. Truck halts.
Truck’s at a standstill. Driver leaps to the road.
Both in the crosshairs of our projectile car.
He’s trying to retrieve his grounded mattress.
No time to stop; no room on left or right.
Nora’s at the wheel. Just one recourse.
She swerves hard to the right, taking that chance.
She misses by a mohair the Mattress Man,
But: to our right? The car next to us knows
By reflex or sharp eyes, just when to move
And where to move, enough room on his right.
I still see his baseball cap, his enthused thumbs-up,
As if two base runners, by no prior signal,
Have safely executed the double steal.
Life is for those who know just when to swerve,
Who add to good sense a flair for evasive action.
We in our car, the guy in the neighbor car,
Most likely did not check our rear-view mirrors
For dwindling truck or hidden man or mattress.
Men work together even when apart?
Fine, as long as they plow adjacent lanes.
One poet, an urbanite transposed to rural,
Declares life’s a bewildered trek through woods,
The eye not lashed by its own lashes; lashed
By a chance twig that luckily can’t lash deep.
I have perhaps a stranger analogy:
Life is a buzzing rush down freeway lanes
(This freeway’s Highway 80). Center lane:
Just five car-lengths ahead, an unsecured
Tailgate flies open, disgorges a large mattress.
Mattress flops onto open road. Truck halts.
Truck’s at a standstill. Driver leaps to the road.
Both in the crosshairs of our projectile car.
He’s trying to retrieve his grounded mattress.
No time to stop; no room on left or right.
Nora’s at the wheel. Just one recourse.
She swerves hard to the right, taking that chance.
She misses by a mohair the Mattress Man,
But: to our right? The car next to us knows
By reflex or sharp eyes, just when to move
And where to move, enough room on his right.
I still see his baseball cap, his enthused thumbs-up,
As if two base runners, by no prior signal,
Have safely executed the double steal.
Life is for those who know just when to swerve,
Who add to good sense a flair for evasive action.
We in our car, the guy in the neighbor car,
Most likely did not check our rear-view mirrors
For dwindling truck or hidden man or mattress.
Men work together even when apart?
Fine, as long as they plow adjacent lanes.
TO DANA GIOIA
Your narrative verses are what I like best:
Their comic or tragicomic ironies
Fresh from old Scratch, as you scraped through his test.
Their icy understreams confound and freeze
Our sense of mirth. Their surface sheen, unfrowning,
Most of them, lightly deceptive monologues,
At first glance, melodramas à la Browning,
Minus the footnotes or his travelogues.
Your “Style” might be an amalgam of Fitzgerald’s
Gatsby, Dorian Gray, and Paradise Lost.
Long trumpets should blast, with swung flags fit for heralds,
Emblazoned with cocktails. Brass bells’ embossed
Symbols: like margaritas with salt rims.
Speaking of brass, your “Style,” its metaled fist,
Strikes much too knuckled to be forged of whims.
That last line: sucker-punch, with forearm twist.
Your narrative verses are what I like best:
Their comic or tragicomic ironies
Fresh from old Scratch, as you scraped through his test.
Their icy understreams confound and freeze
Our sense of mirth. Their surface sheen, unfrowning,
Most of them, lightly deceptive monologues,
At first glance, melodramas à la Browning,
Minus the footnotes or his travelogues.
Your “Style” might be an amalgam of Fitzgerald’s
Gatsby, Dorian Gray, and Paradise Lost.
Long trumpets should blast, with swung flags fit for heralds,
Emblazoned with cocktails. Brass bells’ embossed
Symbols: like margaritas with salt rims.
Speaking of brass, your “Style,” its metaled fist,
Strikes much too knuckled to be forged of whims.
That last line: sucker-punch, with forearm twist.
ARNOLD BAX: OBOE QUINTET (1922)
for Camerata Pacifica
Unusual: this quartet’s accomplished strings
Now partner with a noted oboist
In most unearthly blend; ensemble clings
First to Ravelian iris-shimmers, mist
Behind which hidden Ireland, not France,
Should chant an entire folk’s harp-handed pluck:
The thumb-and-index plectra, thorn’s romance
With Idealistic valor; all stop struck
By awe at the cadenza double-reeded,
Lips nimble as fingertips—just to exhale,
More work than the oboist’s grape-plump notes
needed.
Such labor bids at last that we unveil
A homespun peasant whiff of humorous
Donegal-wheeled, cart-slow squeaks and strums.
Schoolgirl grins, Sidhe-faery-mischievous,
In first violin and cello, dispel the glums.
After mirth, astringency’s called for now,
That drives no market cart hitched to a cow
Past heaps of cut peat and storm-muddied mess,
But folksong poised between green Ireland
And England for its measured stateliness,
An elfin threesquare fit for the lyre’s hand.
Then, presto! Wagonwheel-renewal of mirth;
Weird fists that lift us drop us Thump! To earth.
—For Nicholas Daniel, Catherine Leonard, Ara Gregorian,
Richard Yongjae O’Neill, and Ani Aznavoorian
GRAPEFRUIT HALF
In this the latter half of life,
I with my spoon pierce grapefruit sections.
Warned off all grapefruit (doctors’ sanctions),
I sneak around such directives rife
With offsets. Early mornings, Fruit
Will not null out night’s medicine,
And so on tiptoe, enter Scene
With Spoon whose round spearpoint uproots
Pink gobbets snowcapped with Stevia-drift.
The effect is Acapulco-like;
Utensil digs in as once feet would shift
Soft citrusy-sugared sand. It strikes
Me the dark blue bowl Grapefruit’s in,
Translucent, compares to the clarity
Of long-ago Shallows. Charitably:
Those were more aqua. Color of Sin
I’d left back in Tenochtitlán?
Enacting cool-hearted un-Mexican Faun?
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.
—Dana Gioia
_____________________
Our thanks to Tom Goff for his poetry this morning! Tom writes, “The poem to Dana Gioia reminds me that his book of essays, Studying with Miss Bishop, is an entertaining and enlightening read.” Thanks for the tip, Tom.
_____________________
—Medusa
In this the latter half of life,
I with my spoon pierce grapefruit sections.
Warned off all grapefruit (doctors’ sanctions),
I sneak around such directives rife
With offsets. Early mornings, Fruit
Will not null out night’s medicine,
And so on tiptoe, enter Scene
With Spoon whose round spearpoint uproots
Pink gobbets snowcapped with Stevia-drift.
The effect is Acapulco-like;
Utensil digs in as once feet would shift
Soft citrusy-sugared sand. It strikes
Me the dark blue bowl Grapefruit’s in,
Translucent, compares to the clarity
Of long-ago Shallows. Charitably:
Those were more aqua. Color of Sin
I’d left back in Tenochtitlán?
Enacting cool-hearted un-Mexican Faun?
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.
—Dana Gioia
_____________________
Our thanks to Tom Goff for his poetry this morning! Tom writes, “The poem to Dana Gioia reminds me that his book of essays, Studying with Miss Bishop, is an entertaining and enlightening read.” Thanks for the tip, Tom.
_____________________
—Medusa
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
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Would you like to be a SnakePal?
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Just remember:
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for poetry, of course!
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
All you have to do is send poetry and/or
photos and artwork to
kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world, including
that which was previously-published.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
