Enchantings

Happy Birthday, Joyce!

—Anonymous Photo
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA

ENCHANTINGS
Count nine stars for nine nights. The first man you see
after that will be your husband, if you care for him.
                —from The Folklore of Love and Courtship
 

Husband, I counted the nine stars for the nine nights
until the story came true, and you were mine.
Do not look away toward the tumbling skies—I have
conjured you—and even though you have fallen to me
by intrigue of design, I care for you. Let me brush
the tears of confusion from your eyes.

I have touched your face with my soothing hands
and now you want to ask me all these questions
and I must lie to you. Forgive me, Husband—it was
only a night of meteors—you were dreaming, that’s all.
The sky is not deprived; the memory holes will mend.
See? Already you are forgetting; already we are
beginning to talk of other things.

 Essence

ESSENCE

Here in the dusk, by a slow bright stream,
the unmindful child—
ever at the brink of curiosity,
with childlike faith and followings—
comes to sit on the bank and listen to
the moving water shimmer past.

And the bushes sigh with disturbance,
and the dark trees whisper.

And the musing child—in the dusk—
in the rippling moonlight—
sits stroking the make-believe rabbit
the child would love to keep and love.
And high in the trees now, in the dark,
a Cheshire cat sits purring.

____________________

FIRE DREAM

Do you thirst,
said the spectre—swimming before me—

my dream stretched out like a blanket, afire,
the sky foreboding at the edge of the question.

I tried to answer, but the cup I held
kept spilling, and I could only watch the pouring.

 Sprig of White

THE POET’S WIFE

She came to the door,
night-eyed, witch-haired,
and whispered,
“My poet is locked in his tower.
No one disturbs his twenty-third hour.”

“How did you meet him?”
we asked her. She smiled.
“He composed me one day
when he was drunk on rhyming.
He liked my sound and metaphor.
I liked his timing.”

“Oh, what are your children doing?”
we shuddered.
She shrugged. “They are cutting out words
from what we say, doing research
for their father.
But he throws their adjectives away—
why do they bother?

“Will you show us your forest-garden,”
we flattered.
But she warned, “Something heavy
is in the air. No one can breathe what’s growing.
The night is sick with molding green.
And I am sick with knowing.

“Will you tell him we came…” but whirlpools
moved in her moody eyes,
and she
was already climbing her husband’s stair,
taking key-shaped pins
from her struggling hair.


(first pub. in Trace, 1965)

 The Power of Suggestion

THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
        THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

shadow          shadow
moving            moving
through              through                   
sightless                 sightless
room                         room
with                             with                     
grope                              grope
tread                                  tread
soft                                       soft
sound                                      sound
muffled                                muffled
against                              against
intense                            intense
listen-                           listen-
ing…                         ing…
what                       what
moves                  moves
like                   like
this…?          this…?

 Mockery

THOSE SONGS KEPT FOREVER
OUT OF HEARING

I have dreamed them, soft as lullabies
from ache of childhood,

songs that come in fragments
and tease—

tease for the missing line
or word,

songs that haunt like a broken need—
old, lost songs, sung only by the ghosts.

___________________

THE POWER OF REGRET

I have lived with the power of regret—
I have married the ghost of sympathy,

the one who weeps all over me, and
smothers my cries with a black handkerchief.

 Regret

THE POWER
After Harpy by Edvard Munch, 1899

When you are floating, vague above him,
like his dream, admiring him with your untouch;

when you are leaning on the descending distance
between you, letting yourself down in a

slow smother, and he stirs—
when you are that contemplation, savoring the slowness,

deliberate and shining, your face a cruel serenity,
knowing you have him now, he is yours, for all eternity,

and all timelessness—his sleep a myth—it is
death—and you are everything to him.

_______________________

REALITY AND SPIRIT
(for Judith and Steve, her spirit husband)

She describes him to others,
says he is with her
all the time.

Even now?
Even now.

He waits until others are gone.
He whispers at her ear.
She will make him real now.

He gives her his words.
Gentle words.
Fragrant words.
His mind is full of her.

And she listens
to see where he is.
And he listens
with her.


(first pub. in The Poets’ Guild, 1998)

 Reality and Spirit

SUMMONED

True as the gold light in your eye
that fastened like a sun
to my dark mirage,

a circle of stars, a core of words,
like a power surrounding you.
I was only heat-shimmer,

spinning in the light.
We did not reach,
I was dreaming on a blue ice floe,

you on another.
There was nothing to save us,
but love. Even our souls wept.

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

FRAGILE
—Joyce Odam

the way one spirit moves through another
as easily as love through love—

that mystery as deep as any other

—like a leaf seen through another leaf
when held out to the sun

____________________

Happy birthday today to Joyce Odam, with many thanks for her enchanting poems and photos, as her muse muses on our Seed of the Week: You Will Need the Witch’s Cabin Key. 

Our new Seed of the Week is Catching My Breath. Smoke got you down? Or are you just looking for some late-summer zzzzzzz's? Or maybe you'd rather think more broadly about what makes you catch your breath: surprise? fear? wonderment? lust? Send your poems, photos & artwork about this (or any other) subject to kathykieth@hotmail.com. No deadline on SOWs, though, and for a peek at our past ones, click on “Calliope’s Closet”, the link at the top of this column, for plenty of others to choose from.

Tonight, 5-7pm, Poetry Off-the-Shelves meets in El Dorado Hills at the Library on Silva Valley Parkway. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about these and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa
 

 Harpy by Edvard Munch, 1899

Photos in this column can be enlarged by clicking on them once,
then click on the X in the top right corner to come back
to Medusa.