Hungers

—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento

THE ADDICTION

I have survived one day without you.
I am strong.

Today the sun is real.
The wind is not rising.
The cries of the crow are sharp
and my ears are deep.
I do not hunger for you and this
surprises me.
Whatever name you were
I do not speak.

I make one tally
on the calendar.


(first pub. in Negative Capability's
Life on the Line Anthology, 1992)

____________________

COILED

         “Life and time are a spiral, then, rather than
           merely a circle with its endless repetitions”
                                            –Roger Housden

To Be a spiral then—Be the turning—
the entering and evolving—Be the
going and arriving in the
spiralous motion—
                           upward?
            downward?
Be the
distance
and the staying
since one is the other and it
is you in your own momentum
of existence... I knew this spiral when
falling asleep as a child—I knew it then
and it frightened me. Now I know it as the
journey of the moment into nothing—all is
one sensation—a dot on the map.

_____________________

THE WINTER LOVE

That day there was a storm—a quarrel
of sky and sea—a division of force.

The clouds broke, the rain blew down,
churned under, and belonged to the sea.

The sea gathered and rose into the sky,
but there was no taming of either.

We walked along that shore to feel the
fury—answer our moods—our silence,

building now to the clash of power:
one fed the other, the whole winter of us,

daring—and uncaring of outcome.
This was a love to the finish.

WINTER AFTER WINTER
After "Wild Swans" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

It was not swans, but the dark birds of
misery that went over—over the wild sky,
claiming themselves lost.

What could we do
but listen
till they faded.
                   ___

Such were the storms of winter,
arriving and arriving
till we were wildly crying—

through them
and beyond them,
winter after winter.
                   ___

Thus love was broken, at the heart—
at the heart and mind,
and all the habits of forgiving.

Such
was
the error.
                  ___

Dearest—not a fault—but a failure.
This day is but another, and another
sad reminder—

the way we are long parted.
Death and living.
Memory and forgetting.

And, oh, these birds of sorrow
bearing everything through
the terrible skies, finding their way.

____________________

TROPHIES

The young man from River City
arrives with his pencil
full of signatures
to the desk
to receive his shipment:
bones of love
sent broken to his arms.

They, too, are useless.
He will lay them
on a water bed and watch them
gleam beneath his distant looking.
On the walls are others.
It took years.
All over his life he found them,
first as habit      then obsession.


(first pub. in Vignettes Mini-Chap, 2002)

_____________________

TO THE ADDICTED

I, too, dread light
with its indifference
though I offer it my dark future,
my expendable suffering.

I am the one with hungers,
insatiate and unnourished,
as one who starves for love,
for beauty.

And you, my old addiction—
foe or friend—
we kept each other alive
by our mutual torment,

each dependent on the other,
made of such need.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

OLD HABITS

We are so difficult today,
caught up in more domestic fray  
than we can handle though we love.
Dare we leave, or dare we stay—
old battles lost, old battles won—
their truce—their same old killing done
with not much more we’re guilty of?

_____________________

—Medusa, with thanks and thanksgiving to Joyce Odam for today's tasty fare!

Feeling overwhelmed yet? Shopping, traffic, family... or overwhelmed with gratitude (shopping, traffic, family...) This week's Seed of the Week is Overwhelmed. Good or bad, it's a season with a "groaning board" of things to overwhelm us—hopefully in mostly a good way. Write about those people, places and things which you are overwhelming you and send them (plus photos and artwork) to kathykieth@hotmail.com  No deadline, though, on SOWs—or on being overwhelmed!