Heaven Foreshadowed
I found a piece of
heaven today
It was not
up in the sky
but on highway ninety-nine
There was no shady glen
with cherubs playing lutes.
Instead we drove
wordlessly under
a bright cloudless sky
on mediocre asphalt
my left hand rested
on his leg
my right scribbled
frivolous verse
a satellite beamed
Mendessohn then Holst
We are still in love
We are at peace.
State Route 99 (SR 99), commonly known as Highway 99 or simply as "99," runs almost the entire length of California's Central Valley from Wheeler Ridge to Red Bluff. It serves the densely populated eastern part of the valley, connecting Sacramento, the state capital, with Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Modesto, Stockton, Turlock, Yuba City, and Chico.
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Gustav Holst was a British composer of mixed Swedish, Latvian, and German ancestry. A great-grandfather had served as composer and harp-teacher to the imperial Russian Ccurt, and his grandfather was a well-known harp teacher and composer of salon-style music in England. His father was the organist and choirmaster at All Saints' Church, Cheltenham who married a student who was also a talented singer and pianist. Gustav's younger brother, "Ernest Cossart," became a successful actor in the London, New York, and Hollywood. Holst's own youthful ambition to become a pianist was thwarted by neuritis in his right arm, but he became a professional trombone player and teacher while he pursued a career as a composer. His most important early influences were Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, but the English folksong revival and early 20th century Modernists such as Maurice Ravel led him to develop and refine a distinctive individual style. The international success of his orchestral suite The Planets made him famous in the years immediately after World War I, but his uncompromising, personal style was too austere for his popularity to endure in his own lifetime.