Getting Un-jostled

Susan Hennies will be reading Monday night at HQ, 25th & R Streets, Sacramento, 7:30pm. She sends us this poem which she wrote with Joe Finkleman; it's intended for alternating voices. I find the whole concept of multiple readers fascinating, and have several books of this genre. I suspect there is a huge Snake Event of such things in the future. Anyway, for now, enjoy this poem, and also look forward to Susan and Joe reading together in August—more about that, later:


VIEWS
—Susan Hennies and Joe Finkleman

The center of the house was on the edge
As if the universe (universal constant) had shifted
And we lived on the other side of the Mobius strip.
I would look to the west through French doors
That never opened.

Always I wanted windows:
a way out of the dove greys and wines
into the scarlets and umbers of the fall leaves
or the sparrow-winged spring
slicing skies of Michigan blue.

We looked across the table to the west,
as if we were behind time,
as if today had left us behind.

You gave me a crimson umbrella once
like one you had wept to own when you were a child,
never understanding why I was not ecstatic
to have realized your dream.

Every sunset rimmed the sainted mount.
It was where I learned to read in the morning,
my back to the yesterday of uplifted sea floor
proclaiming that once it had been something else
and someday it would be something else again.

Instead, hiding in the shadows of the sculpted carpet,
I longed to ride the wind-spattered rain
drumming its secrets against the window.
Nose pressed to glass, I
traced the gnarled black branchings of our family tree
generations of hollow women
bent with fruiting emptiness.

And in the evening I faced the backside of today
With tomorrow at my back
In the wonder of back-lit clouds
And sharp edged granitic smudges

Still you peddle guilt like the umbrella vendor
and I barter six rain soaked panes
against the unbroken wall of your bitterness.

Making pictures of what wasn’t
And what wouldn’t be the center of my home
On the western edge held by
French doors that would never open for me.

_______________________

And last night's Natomas Library reading was fine, indeed, with the lively Gene Avery and Birthday Boy (25!) Todd Cirillo. A wonderful time was had by all.

In other news, I'm headed off to the sea (the Bay of Coos in Oregon) for a few days, so Medusa, lazy as she is, won't be posting while I'm gone. But as William Blake says,

Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet
This is not Done by Jostling in the Street

I'll be glad to get away from street-jostling for a few days, filling my lungs with salt air and my eyes with the craggy cliffs of the north coast. Look for more from Medusa's Kitchen starting next Tuesday, Sept. 26—I'll bring you back a thousand yarns about the sea! But don't forget about us; spend the time getting poems sent over to both the Kitchen (anything, published or not) and the Review—next deadline for that is August 15.

—Medusa (now lemming it up the Coast)