In One's Mind
—Poems and Original Art by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA
UNHAPPINESS
These are the wet wings at the door
this hanging bird
fallen about the house
its pulses beating to get in
its heart complaining.
The marksman stands in a field
looking for it—
its hound uncircled and howling—
but he has lost the look of it.
Its eye is at the chimney
glowing thin
its talons grip the shrubbery
its beak is gasping at the kitchen window.
What shall we say this winter
with such a conversation piece?
We name him wrong.
He is our love
so helpless and heavy.
And we cannot move our pressure from our days.
He will not heal or die.
He is our helplessness.
Once Loved
IN HIDING
You swore you would stay mysterious,
let the rooms hide you, train the windows
not to see when you looked out of them.
You would retreat into one of the shadows.
You would not answer the disguised voice
with the edge in it.
You would use light for deflection;
silence for absorption,
you would drift out of yourself.
You would adapt to everything,
shed and layer yourself with each evasion.
Your scream would stay in your throat.
Your breath would become shallow
with listening. You would perfect your
surface, practice normalcy for its disguise.
Who would know you like this,
who would want to find you, even now,
for all your antiquated secrets.
__________________
THE OLD DARK
From the breath of cities comes the old dark
and its favorite night bird that
chitters once outside my window
and is gone—gone to what other darknesses
there are between it and its swift reflection,
that myth of substance—and I feel the night
close over where the night bird was
and erase the memory of itself—and now
the porch light shifts back into place,
and I turn back from that sound that I imagined.
Blue Dreaming
DREAM
3/12/89
Eddie-Lou says, Oh, I’ll do it, and dives under the water
in her dress, her hair just done, to attach the rope-line to
the rock. I can’t see where or how she is going to tie it,
but she does—and still under water—taking her time—
she reattaches her ear-ring though I fret and gasp above
her on the long and slippery planks of the narrow path—
the rest of the rope-line stretching out behind us . . . .
________________
IN THE GREENHOUSE
Theodore Roethke
Imagine the long dark of morning, the slithering aside,
the soundless whisperings heard above growing :
the ghost : come from the skeleton, come from the
flesh, come un-weighted by all, save death, moving
in deep sea-rhythm, made of the same stuff as wind,
looking around with new force—being both seed and
withered conclusion, both orchid and moss—moving
now to the source of love : memory and its rhyme . . . .
looking toward the glass distortion to the sky
(made of that light) the images in the glass :
fragmented eyes that are green, struck blind by light,
glancings of time in shock-value of
timelessness . . . turning that look aside . . .
so out of death (whatever death is) the ghost, male
and aware, knows all that it gave old question to,
dreaming back to all the error and concern—
teaching again, whatever next comes to learn :
all that moves here—all that is alive in the
grave-like dark, damp as a forest—are
transmutations, in stubborn life (whatever life is)
celebrating this most perfect place that is
everywhere, but here most especially :
Ghost of Roethke—putting it all back—
whatever was out of order—whatever was harmed.
Planetary
STONE-WRITTEN POEMS
Words on stone—abbreviations of life,
succinct, or falling short—
that celebrate
(or delegate) to history’s recall.
Cemetery walkers wander here—and here—
reading these measures of esteem:
the names, the dates, the outworn plaudits,
and marvel at how faint, how worn
they have become, communicative now
to scanning eyes—to whispering voice—
perhaps with bits of reverence
for sentiment most prettily engraved.
Neverending
SUNSETS
Sometimes the call is faint
and from a distance unrecalled,
the first reminding,
a pleasing thought that tried to hide.
But a call was there,
sifting between the silences.
I strained to hear it.
It had words, muffled and tender.
It had urgency.
It made a promise too thin to hear.
Had I time enough I would have followed
the first echo. I counted on the loyalty
of love that was as fragile.
What in this terrible moment of loss
took precedence—what did I lose
that mourns so heavily in me now?
I search the golden end of every sunset,
feeling, knowing, and remembering—
but all the sunsets glow like this,
and none remember me.
Three Flamingos
PICTURE FRAME
After Time and Eternity by John Haberle, c. 1890
Torn notes and one small photograph
—all thumb-tacked inside a frame
to mean what they mean.
Pocket watch full of lost time.
King of spades and nine of hearts.
A crude cross on a wooden-bead chain.
The watch says 2:27. It hangs on a nail.
The cross is a rosary.
Or not.
The nine of hearts and king of spades
have no significance
out of the deck.
Bent nails stick up from their shadows
where
there used to be glass—
the backing,
a wall of yellow—
the frame, a thick-door brown.
A tarnished plaque is tacked
at the bottom with some words
too faint to be read.
It’s all there
to be seen. And we look.
What is Art?
_________________
Today’s LittleNip:
ANAMNESIS
—Joyce Odam
Here is a gray thread pulling me back through
reams of somewhere as old and far
as all faint memory—blue with age—
following itself along old routes and mazes
dense with detail heaped in the oily shadows
of night as it stitches the ragged years together.
(first pub. in Sustenance, 2001)
__________________
Many thanks to Joyce Odam for today’s fine poems and original artwork! For more about painter John Haberle (see below), go to nbmaa.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/john-haberle-american-master-of-illusion/.
Our new Seed of the Week is, in honor of Labor Day, Hard Labor. 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.
—Medusa
Time and Eternity
—Painting by John Haberle
—Painting by John Haberle
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