Adrift

Alone
—Poetry and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA

WHITE CANDLE
After Erica Jong: At the Edge of the Body (Cover picture)

A candle floating on the river in a small boat—
a child’s boat—or the soul of a dreamer—

an unwavering candle, taking up the whole boat,
while the watcher from the shore watches the candle.

Or no one is watching. Who put it there? The sun is
lowering—is changing the look of the sky, which also

is watching the burning white candle in the boat on the
small river—small enough to be a pond. And maybe

the child has just been called away by a worried voice—
a match-playing child who stole the match—who stole

the candle for the makeshift boat that floats with its
burning passenger on the little sun-drenched river.

___________________

THE WHITE BOAT
After The Voice, 1983, by Edvard Munch

The boat glides by, a white boat in the dreaming night,
bearing two occupants in soundless drift from edge to
edge of sleep. The shore trees fasten to the land and to
the stationary sky to hold the dream in place. Between
the shadows of the trees the dreamer listens, captured
in another dream. She stares toward the ending where
a muffled voice is telling her a secret that she under-
stands. The boat has reached the moon-path, though
time does not move. What’s real and not real are the
same, all in the question of the mind : the dreamer in
her white dissolving dress : the unknown occupants in
the drifting boat that shrinks and shrinks between the
structured trees. What matters most is just assumed.
The night is locked until the dreamer wakes. The boat
keeps drifting through the background like a thought
that never seems to reach. If night could only move,
all this would be erased. Night does not move.  

 The Mirror

WOMAN DAY-DREAMING

A woman
in a white apron

and a hat to shade her from the sun
sits in the day’s warm light,

hands in her lap, palms down,
mind-drifting to a place

that takes her from herself.
And the day shuts down.

Her work is waiting—
it waits behind her in a long field;

her work is waiting
in a house full of windows

that glaze their eyes
in the day’s warm silence

and also seem to forget
her work is waiting.

 Unanswerable

THE ABSTRACTION OF FOG

If it were not for fog, I might go as

substance through the gray moving night,
avoid the invisibility of strangeness—

be anywhere and nowhere, without point of
reference, as if drifting out of dream-state into
landscape of half-sleep—winter hovering,

wet and drear, erasing me as I waken,
being of myself, but nowhere else.
The lack of fog leaves me almost lonely for it—
this substance of being, replete with sentience

and anxiety, with concrete movement of will
and form, this glaringness of presence,
observed or unobserved, beingness of being.
non-illusion, remains a wet swallowing—

a hole filled with itself—all the lostness
of context—this whole insistence on reality,
with only partial recognition of it.

Whatever was real becomes unreal,
becomes mystery of fate, becomes

abstraction like fog—like lost being in fog.

 Shadows

IN THE WHITENESS
                   A great silence overcomes me,
                   and I wonder why I ever thought
                   to use language.           —Rumi


Adrift in the whiteness, I am becoming white shadow,
not even the sky on this small lake to reflect me.
I cannot see the shores on either side.
I have no oars.
I try to think of the words for this,
but it is all sensation.
I may be caught in a stillness,
or I may be falling;
there seems to be no difference.
I may be borne upon the back of a white bird.
or maybe I am the bird.
This may be the true dream of my existence—
the one with no ending.
All is here, and was ever here. There is nowhere else.
I am a moment out of eternity—one snowflake—
one last tear that slips down my cheek
and reaches the corner of my silent mouth.
I taste my own existence.

__________________

MAN BENDING TO LIGHT A CIGARETTE
IN THE WIND

On a cold morning—in drifting sunlight—on a
walk with a companion who helps shield with
his body the act of lighting this cigarette so they
can continue their walk—pausing just outside
my window while their two shadows wait in the
patience that it takes to be shadows—then the
man turns—as does his companion—and they
laugh sharply in the voice-carrying morning,
and continue down the sidewalk.

 Conspiracy

MIND-WANDERER

Hunched into a gray darkness where no random word
would find him, at long last safe from the conditioned
self, like an unconnected word from an unformed
sentence, like something vague . . .

like this stray shadow in stray light—all things
beginning in a new forming, like the way his eye
could wander away from his mind, or the way
he could lean against invisibility and be absorbed.

He was always adrift—one of the felt
sensations, like instinct that avoids.
He could disappear in a swarm of
humanity, or in a solo echo of footsteps.

If he saw his reflection,
he would not know himself 
for a moment,
would not want to be called back.

It was not always the poem
that called him—
it was more the lack of the poem,
that search he was always on.

_________________
           
OH, HUMAN MIND

. . . as far as the cold white moon can see . . .
that mountain range
that cold gray sea
that tiny ship
adrift in time
that endless sky
through which the final soul must climb
                    
. . . what loneliness is quite as deep . . .
what vow to break
what promise keep . . .
oh, human mind
that wants to stay
and wants to go
and dares not pray
to emptiness, or its rebuke

. . . what is the scope in such vast reach . . .
beyond what eye
and mind can know
one brilliant moon
shines like a clue
horizon gone
the mountains strain
the waves repeat
time’s ship has vanished . . . far or deep

 Rumors

SCENE FROM ONE OF THE YEARS

In this recall, I am drifting through a year of some-
body’s black-and-white garden. The land stretches
out from a white two-story house. Clouds hang in
soft clumps against a bright gray sky that is held
in the distant slowness of my eyes. If there are
others in the world, I am removed from them
by this sparse mood of junctured time though
something holds the camera, my serious face
is caught in an expression that I cannot read.
I have just returned from walking through
fields where I went to see the cows—of
which I was afraid and I remember the
cows—how they would turn—each
one to look at me—I was small—
smaller than my fears—which
were many and someone has
abandoned me to my life
with only this remnant
to find and hold me
here, waiting for
myself to come
out of myself
but I never do.

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

TO BE SET ADRIFT
—Joyce Odam

To be set adrift in the boat,
the water lapping at the sides
the companion sitting at the other end
comparing me all this time to its own silence . . .

and the thought of land, and the thought of sky,
and the turbulent depth, and to learn the motion
and sense of direction, and learn the patience
it takes, and never ask where we are going.


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 6/11)

_____________________

Thank you to Joyce Odam for these dreamy poems today, working with the current Seed of the Week: "Adrift", and for her beautiful, beautiful photos which accompany them!

Our new Seed of the Week is "Hills to Climb".  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.

To see the cover picture for Erica Jong’s book, At the Edge of the Body, go to ericajong.com/edgeofbody.htm/.

_____________________

—Medusa 

 The Voice, 1893
—Painting by Edvard Munch

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