Love
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA
COBWEB
You’ve hung there for years.
You have become my favorite design,
the way you drape across the corner,
like an awning,
the way your spider has abandoned you.
Too much elegance for this room,
this bedroom of stuffed closet
and insomnia,
this room with its piles of clothes
and a blanket that drags
one corner to the floor.
How often I have watched you
with concentration
at just the right angle
when I lean my head back
against the wall.
You are like a shadow drawn
as an interesting detail in a painting,
I wonder why no moth has found you.
Tribulation
ENDECHA
I am your Sister of Woe,
your Waif of Sorrow, your Hag
of Misery, your Old Crow;
Perfect Wife, Phantom Mistress never had;
I am the One Remembered;
I am the One You Forget,
the One You’ll Love Forever,
the One You Conjure, the One You’ve Not Yet Met.
I am the One Who Answers—
the Named, or the Nameless Me—
the One Not In The Mirror, who,
without an image, am not allowed to be.
I am your Witch Of Worry.
I feed your dreams what I know.
Thus do I keep myself busy—
Priestess, Whore, Bedeviler—Angel of woe.
Protector
THE FOG-SWIRL
Everything disappeared as in a gray dream. We became
particles of light, broken by dark—a jealousy of forces,
and though we were whole within it, we felt part of a
texture that was both form and formlessness. Sounds
got lost within sounds. We groped and could not feel.
There was no color. No time. No sense of destination.
We moved as though suspended; as though on a distant
moor; as though transported to a place of old tales told
by survivors—but only their voices, we could not see
them. And after centuries of effort we found our way
through by second-sense and perseverance. The fog-
swirl lifted and dispersed, and we were on the other
side—as of having come through a gauntlet of fear.
And through the thinning mist, haunting voices wailed
behind us, begging our return.
_________________
DIRECTIONLESS
two horses with two riders go
through a serene forest,
show how unafraid
and how lonely
to be alone,
thus,
with
another,
and just let
the horses find the way,
step by step, and hour by
hour through the seasons that
come, one upon the other, with
no sign of guidance from the reins
Quiet
CANADIAN SNAPSHOT
in the gray places of old barns
with the timeless statue-horses
grazing forever the way they are
their heads bent down to
shadowed grasses
the way my camera found them
and never let them change
this is the way we remember
joy and sadness
those separate pangs
of having been somewhere once
and never again
no matter how true the phantasy
we know what we know and
what we see with yesterday’s eyes
a moment of composition
and everything remains indelible :
those horses never move
those barns never lose another board
the same light falls through
and the moment of the wind is caught
bending the anxious trees and the
grass and the horses’ manes
those clouds are held forever
against a flat sky
I am going back to see it all again
and I expect it to be the same :
those horses at last will
lift their heads and look at me
when I stand in the same place
and finally let them startle
and run away in the field…
I will let everything continue
Point in Time
WORD MAP
There is a curious map
of language somewhere
to be deciphered,
a golden light flashing over it,
quicker than a blink,
finding will know
what it has found—
—shadow after shadow
protecting the time it takes
for quest to find it.
_________________
FINDING THE WAY HOME
Of all the places I would bide
and would return to when I need
to heal—to rue the roads I took
where all the detours led too far,
with only me for guide
—and nothing there to heed
but all that I forsook
without a guiding star—
to die inside
without a creed
—no backward look
without a scar.
In the Light
TO KNOW THIS TRUTH
It is so easy to know this truth—
this perfection—this theory
found by accident or by someone’s
grace, this note by way of explanation,
this single puzzle-piece found and put
where it belongs. Now you can rest,
stare into your deep window, find your
horizon. Now you can lean without falling,
safe as a noon. Now you can know
how the petal feels when it curls around
its own center. Now you can be
the folding and the falling—that eventual.
How easy it all is. Look where it
takes you, this knowing—even through
the dark of your own mystery.
You know where you are: you are
here. You were never that far.
You are there, which is everywhere.
Every soul opens to let you in.
You are the missing piece. How easily
you fit into the great sighing—
the light that unfolds from the secret
darkness, and you and the eye,
that look at each other in such knowing.
__________________
Today’s LittleNip:
THE COLOR OF WHITE
—Joyce Odam
moth-words that do not connect
but say into silence
what there is to say,
find other than intention,
become frail wings of effort,
fight the maze of another’s mind
breaking on refusal and deafness,
turn into weapons,
love
against love
___________________
Many thanks to Joyce Odam for today’s fine poems and photos!
Our new Seed of the Week is an easy one: Fall Colors. 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
—Anonymous Illustration
Celebrate poetry!
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