Our Quivering Meat

THE HEAVY BEAR WHO GOES WITH ME
—Delmore Schwartz

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry bearing brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, founders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

_______________________

The pillaging of the snakepit continues, as we gussy up to get our house sold, and my own bear—he is a-howlin'. No world of sugar here! I'm off to the box store for yet another 25 of the size I use for books. Caramba! Is there no end?

Just in case YOU don't have enough books, there are four book sales in our environs this weekend:

•••Saturday, Oct. 7, 8:30 AM-noon: Friends of the Orangevale Library Book Sale, 8820 Greenback Lane, Orangevale.

•••Also Sat. (10/7), 1:30-4:30 PM: Firends of Sylvan Oaks Library Book Sale, Sylvan Oaks Library, 6700 Auburn Blvd., Citrus Heights. Gently used books and magazines may be donated [now THERE's an idea...] during regular library hours. Info: 916-729-6991.

•••Also Sat. in Citrus Heights, 9 AM-1 PM: Advent Lutheran Church book sale, including books, VHS tapes, and CDs. Advent Lutheran Church, 5901 San Juan Ave., Citrus Heights. Info: 916-635-5234.

•••Sat., 10 AM-3 PM, Friends of the Fair Oaks Library, 11601 Fair Oaks Blvd., Fair Oaks. The goal is to raise more than $1000 for the libraries in Gulfport, Mississippi. (Last sale raised $996.) Come back on Monday (10/9), 3-7 PM, for a huge clearance sale, with books going for 50 cents each or $5 a bag! Info: 916-264-2770.


New from the North:

Cottonwood author and photographer S.J. Luke, along with Redding authors Don Peery and Linda Boyden, are pleased to announce the publication of their first collaborative endeavor, Cemetery Plots, Stories Beneath the Stones. This 156-page anthology of poetry, prose and photography explores the question of death from various points of view, which are the book’s chapters: Those Left Behind, The Dead Speak, Band of Brothers, Snapshots in Time, Animal Spirits, and Larger Than Life. Whether with words or photographs, S.J. Luke enjoys telling a story. After two families, four children, five dogs, six vocations, and forty years of pursuing a poetry avocation, this first book is, for Don Peery, a culmination of work with “two friends writing.” And Linda Boyden is an author, storyteller and “recovering” elementary teacher whose first picture book, The Blue Roses, was the recipient of Lee & Low Books’ first New Voices Award, the 2003 Paterson Prize and the 2003 Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers & Storytellers’ Book of the Year, Children’s Literature. In 2006, her poem, “Cedar Songs, Left Behind” won First Prize at the 5th Annual Pleasanton Poetry Festival. Info: Linda Boyden at 530-722-0798 or lboyden@charter.net. Check out her website, too: www.lindaboyden.com


Monday at SPC:

This coming Monday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 PM, Sacramento Poetry Center will present
Richard Beban, author of Young Girl Eating a Bird, who turned to poetry in 1993 after more than thirty years as a journalist, then a television and screen writer. He holds a BA in Liberal Studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared since 1994 in more than forty-five periodicals and literary Websites, and in sixteen national anthologies, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. With his wife, the writer Kaaren Kitchell, and three other poets, he helped organize and run one of Los Angeles’ most successful weekly reading series at Venice’s Rose Cafe, and he and Kitchell produced the 2003 Freshwater Marsh Ecopoetry Celebration at Playa Vista, California in a five-hour celebration of the new freshwater marsh constructed to help restore Ballona Wetlands. He has been a featured reader at more than fifty venues, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to Berkeley’s Cody’s Books, to Shakespeare & Company, Paris. He and Kitchell, who co-authored a non-fiction book on mythology, run a monthly poetry and fiction workshop series in their living room in Playa del Rey, California. That's Monday at SPC, 25th & R Sts., Sacramento. Be there.

_______________________

THE WORLD WAS WARM AND WHITE WHEN I WAS BORN
—Delmore Schwartz

The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light.
Although the whiteness was almond and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.

How like a summer the years of youth have passed!
—How like the summer of 1914, in all truth!—
Patience, my soul, the truth is never known
Until the future has become the past
And then, only, when the love of truth at last
Becomes the truth of love, when both are one,
Then, then, then, Eden becomes Utopia and is surpassed:
For then the dream of knowledge and knowledge knows
Motive and joy at once wherever it goes.

_______________________

ALL OF THE FRUITS HAD FALLEN
—Delmore Schwartz

All of the fruits had fallen,
The bears had fallen asleep,
And the pears were useless and soft
Like used hopes, under the starlight's
Small knowledge, scattered aloft
In a glittering senseless drift:
The jackals of remorse in a cage
Drugged beyond mirth and rage.

Then, then, the dark hour flowered!
Under the silence, immense
And empty as far-off seas,
I wished for the innocence
Of my stars and my stones and my trees
All the brutality and inner sense
A dog and a bird possess,
The dog who barked at the moon
As an enemy's white fang,
The bird that thrashed up the bush
And soared to soar as it sang,
A being all present as touch,
Free of the future and past
—Until, in the dim window glass,
The fog or cloud of my face
Showed me my fear at last!

_______________________

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry, photos and art, 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.)