Lily Leaf
—Photos by Katy Brown, Davis, CA
PROGRAM NOTES
—Jeanine Stevens, Sacramento, CA
Good morning snap, crackle and pop!
How many scoops pulped for your ranting bowl?
Wear you ruby slippers in a patchouli haze—
aural fusion dispersed high flight.
Lounge with vintage violets in pewter cups at the Dead Dog Café
where contemporary folk literate over turmeric and fresh tracks.
If you want jazz with a bite, walk down a flight of stairs
where the red-eyed radio looks down the brick road
toward a raspy red heaven.
Who cares if sonic tapestries are heard along San Juan Ridge!
Buckle-up; get ready for swamp dead air logic.
New book review, The Caffeinating of Britain.
In dawn light, tiptoe along the flea walk.
Spice lives in the back room alone with various hosts.
All the bachelors have gone to the library to look up
lovey doodle. Turn your nipples to the north star.
For big fun, circle the level loop, listen
for train sounds slappety tracks, rickety racks.
Nourish the wolf note, ragged but right!
Eclectic zydeco can buy or sell Birdland.
Celebrate the left coast, delicate as a fritter.
And today’s phenomena is Top Ramen.
This is KVMR. This is Nevada City.
(A Found Poem. KVMR Program Notes#74, 2005, Nevada City,
CA. First Published in Tiger’s Eye Journal, 2016.)
Water Llily
ONE SQUARE INCH OF SILENCE
—Jeanine Stevens
The study of bioacoustics: monkey,
sea lion and gull voices against distant,
haunting Moog synthesizers.
Waiting for nature, the first light
shatters, a lone sparrow
chirps distilled splendor, a biophany—
each animal strumming its own sonic bower.
The rush is on to record soundscapes masked
by Arctic drilling. Where are the quiet places?
A congressional team listened to a 95-decibel
recording of snowmobiles racing in Yellowstone,
then another, wolves, ravens, and winter wrens.
(A bandwidth—nature’s own tone poem)
Some personal stereos play at 120 decibels
20 hours without recharging.
Aircraft, traffic, action films, jackhammers,
car alarms drowned out the wild.
Yet, few still wince when cell phones amplify
graveside services for old folks.
10 Million Americans suffer hearing loss, high blood
pressure and heart disease from excessive noise.
What races past our frequency range?
Hearing is blur, bruised ears and souls, a state
of disease, missing ancient breathwaves, the lost pulse—
the sighing in prehistoric caves.
Some have placed small red stones
to mark one square inch of silence—a silence
redefined: the elk’s bugle, the wolf’s wail, the pronghorn’s
charge, the wind’s whip and whistle.
Maybe silence is just song-held codes
of canaries, or simply a lull in birdsong after first light,
a silence that just hovers, then moves on.
(Article, “Stop, Look Listen.” AAA Magazine, Bill Donohue,
2007. First published in Medusa’s Kitchen, 2012.)
Red Dragonfly on Bud
THE PIPE WORKS
—Jeanine Stevens
I come to the old neighborhood,
a canopy of bare trees, cool azure sky
just right for ethereal tunes.
I touch underground wires, old trolley lines
that pull in my collective psyches.
Pale stones wobble my eyes.
Small shops shrink behind new coffee bars
and tacky nail salons. I kick hard pebbles
against their purple doors.
I miss my old sandwich shop.
Roasting beans, AH! the aroma tempts me.
I sit down for a latte and read the paper.
Here is a cartoon, an old “Far Side”
featuring two souls in hell. I mutter,
“I don’t know this place. No more cheap-eats!”
I want to smell something fermenting: sauerkraut
on one-buck franks, honest dust from the pipe works,
the distillery’s old corn-based sweetness.
How can small-scale guys compete
with mocha javas and rhinestone inserts
on toenails masking blue bruises?
Neighbors oppose an open-air waste
station: the stench, sore eyes, hulking ugliness,
but the work force will be protected
(picnic tables for outdoor lunches),
yet residents turn testy. Posting signs are costly.
A fair approach: let’s build taller levees.
Forget about convening the people,
wait until a small red bird re-arranges cobwebs
inside the clock. A thread is all we need:
unraveled skein, nightgown’s satin ribbons,
guitar string, mustard plaster gauze,
even an old fishing line might do. Just
a little strand hugging my finger
to follow the next piece—and the next.
(Found poem from the Sacramento Bee
and the Sacramento News and Review, February, 2007.)
The Edge of the Field
PEERING THROUGH GLASS
—Jeanine Stevens
A century ago, this spot held heirloom gardens, white tents
in summer and linen tablecloths with correct place settings.
No one minded an occasional wolf spider, knobby pickles
in glass jars or prairie chickens pecking under squat paw-paws.
Mature cherry trees blossomed next to hand-laid stone fences.
Lights strung in winter gazebos twinkled gold, like iced fireflies.
I visit so many retirement homes: Brickyard, Conner’s Corners,
and Bridgewater. Each new unit emulates a carriage house
in bouquet options: Tuscan gold or Normandy blue. Another model
features warehouse lofts, with purple ductwork and designer closets
so unlike my sagging rod, outdated mini-skirts, hippie vests in mothballs.
From the tiny balcony, I see only one-tenth of the promised communal
garden. The local market will offer “a fusion of global cultures.”
But I would I would miss gumdrops and licorice in those glass jars
at the corner market. I try to imagine this place as my own.
Yet, at home there are things I haven’t done: leave wet towels
on the faded linoleum, streak naked down the back stairs, order
a new sump pump and I still want to read that best seller:
Area Cops Investigated for Fishing with a Prostitute.
(first pub. in The Indianapolis Magazine, 2005)
________________________________
TAHOE
—Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
Blue water, lake water. Slow chop sloshes the bow,
one summer hand’s play in the pool. Two torn cloud tufts
over the western shore. Facing the gusts
the boat itself provokes, we are the prow,
we might be an ancient maiden figurehead.
We’re darting across the mirror of the sky
rippling with faint white peaks that might defy
looking-glass logic and bob up a dead
sea-captain alive from one thousand feet below:
reassemble him with appropriate spectrum glow,
filtered from long dissolve much as this lake’s fed
by tributary small inlets and by rains.
Or through that blue lens how might we slip or strain,
rinse clean, become settled sediment on a sand bed?
Water on Lily Pad
EMBODIMENT
—Tom Goff
She, she herself, and only she
Shone through her body visibly.
—“Phantom,” Coleridge
I muse on how the poet Coleridge
So strongly wrote in youth, he could inspire
Most that is valuable in Wordsworth, bridge
Ideal to ideal over mind-fire,
Lash faith to sense in interconnectedness
Of souls to bodies, bodies to the world,
Psychologist-philosopher; then, stress
And sickness caverning him Platonic, curled
Up big as elbowed Alice’s giant shape
But bottled, stoppered, druggy with confinement.
Now William. Words.Worth, World-Wide Web of a man,
Builds Samuel’s dream-concepts into refinements
Pervading all poetry-screens like flavored vapes.
Sam instead broods on one Spirit, all Essence, one Glow
as bright as the gliding Observer of all first Flow.
Burning-glass force, from each last inch of one woman.
Now, words of Samuel Coleridge bring back themes:
He gives me your phantom form, borne to me in dreams.
You shrug out of camouflage into a white
Form-clinging, becoming dress. Oh, yes, that white
Satiny floor-length dress—its hem skimmed carpet—
So becoming on you, it could somehow become
Substance of you; soon it becomes lemon sherbet.
That dress, both substance and insubstantial flare,
dissolves with one mouse-click to a light-beam…
Like your brown hair, worn fittingly as cream
Clings to strawberries. Around you, sugared air,
Confectioner’s sugar. Powder seen through steam.
You show me a mark on your arm. You say: Dog bite.
The white you wear speaks otherwise. Smooth skin. Light.
The white you wear is your own skin. Complete light.
Water Lily Pod
NATURAL BAX
—Tom Goff
…he with his music and I with my wildflowers…
—Mary Gleaves, from a BBC interview about Arnold Bax
To understand Bax, you’ve got to understand
his depth of acquaintance with nature:
he may not write rhapsodically figured bands
of verdure, herds of beasts that bleat as in Strauss.
But nature’s there, all the same. Yes, oceanic
surge in Tintagel, in symphonies, that much is clear.
I mean counterpoint: those “layers of activity,”
quite distinct from each other at times. Not
at all like Bach.
I’ve come to realize why Bax thought Bach
is mostly “sewing-machine music.” No; the term’s
quite wrong,
the perception somewhat right. Bach is a creature
—like Bax almost exactly—a creature of Nature.
When Bach has religion or dance in mind: magniloquent,
moving. Too often, though, nature’s been shoved,
squeezed into a drawing-room; keyboard and fiddles
fuguing madly, backs to a hot hearth,
all talking and talking the same intellectual matter,
squabbling, vociferating, interrupting, finishing
each other’s musical sentences, then unfinishing…
Now Bax, instead, controls the outdoors, the undertow
in Tintagel; adds in the voices of birds, the sea-spray,
the hot sun glaring through bells of brass,
the low serene tune, nude woman tangling
with nude man:
all grand plus intimate, intricate without confusion:
like unto those quiet strolls, Arnold and Mary,
ambling slowly between hedgerows in perfect calm silence,
he meditating a theme for a poem or sonata,
she leafing through the botany book he’s given her,
parsing quite precisely what strain of parsley,
flowering parsley, outspreads and branches before her.
What he knows of parsley, of leaf, tree, bole, and vine
kept quiet in his absorbent, inclusive whole sense,
the natural pattern as clear as the next movement,
however much struggle to bring it to notated sun
from mind’s-ear: that shadow. The shadows,
the dappled shush of paired footfalls lazily pacing
the spontaneity, design like undersong
in the apparently artless spring garden…
Water Lily Bud
THE WORK OF THE MONITOR
Malakoff Diggins State Park, California
—Tom Goff
This side of a twisted manzanita gorge
the monitors once forced wild mountain runoff
through blunt iron nozzles. Water blasts dislodged
cliffsides’ impacted gravel: ridges torn off:
tons of rock, ounces of gold. That wide red ledge,
hawks’ eyrie, rootwoven earth and sapling, shorn off.
One miner’s one-day’s work could silt or sludge
whole rivers to swollen. Now the noon sun, flung off
spurs of eroded granite, stuns, bruises our eyes.
That faded museum video displayed the device:
The last of the aqua-cannons, filmed still roaring
its water-breathing-dragon act, keeps pouring
pummeling imprecation through its snout.
Most of the rock’s gold fire’s long since put out.
_______________________
Today's LittleNip:
If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If you're a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!
—Shel Silverstein
______________________
Many thanks to today's fine contributors for giving us an auspicious Wednesday! Tom's final poem was first published in Field of the Cloth of Gold, Poet’s Corner Press; seen subsequently on Medusa’s Kitchen; included also in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018 (www.scarlettanager.com).
Tom writes: "Several of us Sacramento regionals are in this new book: Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Joshua McKinney, Chris Olander (listed as J.C. Olander) also. Plus a number of poets probably within a day's drive... It's introduced by Dana Gioia and Jack Foley and edited, quite wonderfully I think, by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan. I pre-ordered it in advance of the official October release, and it already came. A big book, by the way...over 400 pages."
Congratulations to Tom and all the other poets in Fire and Rain. Check it out!
—Medusa
White Seal at Rest
—Photo by Katy Brown
Celebrate poetry!
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