Errata Alert!

Here and there I've mentioned the Towe Auto Museum poetry contest, and I've listed the deadline as November 15. WRONG! The actual deadline is NOVEMBER 10—yikes! that's tomorrow (postmarked). Sorry, folks! Get 'em in NOW.

Allegra Silberstein has a busy week: Tonight she releases her new rattlechap, In the Folds, at The Book Collector (1008 24th St., Sac., 7:30 pm). Then on Friday (11/11), she hosts The Other Voice at the Davis Unitarian Universalist Church: Beulah Amsterdam and Mary Dawson, 7:30 pm. 27074 Patwin Rd., Davis. Info: 530-753-2634.

There will be NO Second Saturday Poems-for-All reading at The Book Collector this week (11/12), but Richard Hansen says: the bookstore WILL BE OPEN in the evening until at least 9 pm (later if the aisles are swollen with folks). Come check out the latest releases in our small press/local poetry section.

About Sunday (11/13), however, Richard says: Please join us in celebrating the release of Bill Pieper's latest novel, Gomez, of which Persia Woolley, author of The Guenevere Trilogy writes: "New spin on the legendary affair of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, this time in free-wheeling pre-AIDS San Francisco. A rich canvas of love, sex, loyalty and deceit with delightful flashes of black humor." A reading from the book, food & libation, and, of course, books for sale. Love, sex, loyalty and deceit! Kewl! That's 4 pm at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sac. Info: 442-9295.


MY NOVEMBER GUEST
—Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

___________________

DUST OF SNOW
—Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

___________________

THE BEAR
—Robert Frost

The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific tread,
Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems,
Between two metaphysical extremes.
He sits back on his fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,
(He almost looks religious but he's not),
And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,
At the other agreeing with another Greek
Which may be thought, but only so to speak.
A baggy figure, equally pathetic
When sedentary and when peripatetic.

__________________

Thanks, Bob! As for everyone else, I'll see you tonight!

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)