Entering the Mirror

Through the Meaning
—Poetry and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA

MISFORTUNE

Misfortune—that old hag, her gleaming presence,
what she wears to introduce herself, those semi-
precious birds she keeps on risky pedestals, the
charming echoes they have learned.

What does she want of me, I’ve nothing more to
lose or give. I’ve paid my dues to her demands—
those lies she told—those mis-directions that she
gave when she was all cajole and promise.

But now that I see her true face in her own mirror,
I all but lose my nerve : her costume in rags, her
makeup ruined. She turns to me again—this time
contrite—and once again I ask her to save me.

___________________

NOT QUITE SO
    After Young Girl Writing at Her Desk with Birds
                                 —Painting by Henriette Brown

Let not the cage
confine the thought, door open,
bird released, much like a poem, uncaught.

To trick the word, prepare another word.
Coax it.  Let it surprise.
Say thank you.

Begin with daydream.  Begin with stare.
Begin with pen raised over page.
Wait for page to rustle with excitement.

The page lies flat.  Refuses.  Songbird   
becomes Muse—pulls your attention
to its nearness—does not sing.

 

 

 

Summer Wane

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF LIGHT

She is in the white trance of sleep.
All color is drained from her dream.

She holds a death mask in her hand
as if it will guard her absence.

She lies upon a dark mirror.
She must duplicate herself.

Her shadow resists.
Her eyes do not flicker.

She does not feel the room go cold.
The mask takes on a new expression.

Her shadow leaves her body.
Her eyes refuse to open.

She must go through the glare to return.
She is in the white trance of sleep.

____________________

THE PARTICULAR WAY OF LIGHT

And now the arrogant stone
in its lambent light
lies in the path and thinks itself
superior to common rocks

and gleams its soft gleam
for all who pass
admiring the path
with its glints and glimmers

and the vain stone preens
to its mirrored self
and the very light that
gives it this enhancement.

 

 

 

Bouquet, Formal Pose

 

THE CONFUSION
      “Zero Plus Anything Is A World” 
                      

                 —Poem by Jane Hirschfield

I am the world, as well as zero,
and I do not rue
or yield
the risk of this.

I always assign myself
to simple truth
lest I be stricken
to some ailment of the mind
in need of solace, if not love.

I only trust the self I can identify.
Why mis-perceive such matters.
I search the wonderings.
and find them vague.

I trust the way my mind is true—
true to my myth and not the rote
of absolute and only-proven fact—
faith is the haunt of everyone—
the war of difference ever lies between. 

 

 

 

Something About Truth

 

SHRINES TO THE UNWORTHY

I make promises you may never believe.
I embroider my thoughts all over you.
I use the smallest stitches and the brightest yarn
until you forgive me of all my lies
and become happy again.

I adore you but you avoid my eyes.
You cannot stand
such brimming.
The intensity of my love is a suffocation.
I open all my windows to let you fly away.

How useful now my shrine of memories.


I give it fresh rose petals every day—
the wonderful softness when they fall
from the vase to the table top—
the bruised perfume of them.

 

 

 

Secrecy

 

WORLD-FRAGMENT
    After “Two From Gallup” from
         Pieces Of A Song by Diane di Prima

Wore the soft light of evening for awhile. Dressed
up in neon. Admired my arm at rest on a quiet table.
Went for the mirrors with my eyes. Broke my own
tradition.

Who is my sorrow now, sweet person?—one with
new lies. Don’t ask me to squander a moment. I am
too far. Don’t ask for my story or tell me yours.

I took the care out of caring and left it where it lay,
like a precious coin for somebody’s rainy day. And
I walked away—oh, new person—

I walked away, with the music still blaring and the
night too full of something I wanted to say, but the
neon world had begun to shiver, so I walked away.

 

 

 

Just the Blues

 

THE SEASHORE IDYLL
        After Seashore Idyll by Heinrich Kley

        On that god-forsaken, barren length of beach,
there was nothing left to do but make the best of
things.  He was ugly, but maybe she could make him
beautiful, for she believed in lies and spells.

       “If I love you, will you become beautiful for
me?” she would ask each time he came ashore.  And
he would say he would.  She was happy after that,
and each day at the same hour she would lean against
her lonely sea-rock, and scan the gray length of the
sea from one end to the other, and wait for him to
come out of the water.

       And he would lumber out and sit on the sand in
all his grossness and sing to her with his loud and
mournful voice which carried so far away it broke
beyond their hearing.  The sky would churn with stormy
echoes, then settle back to the flat and desolate gray
monotony of this place.  And he would droop his head
again upon his chest in some old melancholy.

       She would listen until he was through, then ask,
“How can you be so sad when I love you—you who are
so beautiful to me?”  And she would turn aside and
weep at her own boredom and sadness.

       But he would sit on the sand in all his ugliness,
and he could not lift to her his heavy arms or his
massive head, and he would sigh from his heavy heart
and tell her that she must come with him, then, into
the weightless sea, if she must have an answer they
could both believe.

       And she would lean against her old sea-rock and
think of this and wonder how it would be if she followed
him into the wide gray unknown water.  Until the sun
went down she would think of this, while he would bask in
the low cold western light and make his impression in the
sand for her, which she would later curl into and sleep.

 

 

 

Politic

 

OLD MIRROR

What quarrel is this that I have
with the unremembered self
that derives in fragments.
Dare I say again what I say to it,
that it could have saved me,
which it denies.
And we go round again
in our game of truth
and our game of lies,
which each says
the other is.
What is
this dark exchange
that envelops like a shroud :
metaphor of fear, that void,  
that grave, that crumbling year,
as if life did not exist, except in
burrowings, returning as we do
to the old battleground of self against self—
unrecognized—unyielded to—wearing the
skin-shiver of the other in an old exchange,
the mirror entered, locking both of us inside.

______________________

FALLEN MOON

It’s not as if a sob can tear your throat
the way glass can shatter in a hand
or lies from a mouth of words.

You know the difference.
Constrict that urge. Turn it into a laugh,
one that is sharp and full of danger.

Madness holds
for the moment it takes
to switch from one rage to another.

Let go the tender thought
for one more bitter.
Life is a scar—and so is love.

Remember this lesson.
Look how the searchlight tears the wall,
looking for you, crumpled now,

moon fallen into your eyes,
the night gone blank,
the room too small to hold you.

______________________

Today’s LittleNip:

LENORE
—Joyce Odam

        After Edgar Allen Poe
              —Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

Upon a high bed now, she lies,
underneath the brooding skies,
huddled figures writhe below
huddled in their robes of woe
—woe to beauty, lying there
in the ghosted, roiling air—

ghost of beauty, ghost of love,
silent soul that will not die—
rising gently now into
the invisible heavens of the sky.

_________________________

Lots of good stuff from Joyce Odam today, and our thanks to her for that! She’s talking about lies and truth, and she says it’s up to us to figure out which is which in what she’s telling us. The Seed of the Week was “Lies”, which I was assuming meant untruths, but Crafty Joyce has also flipped that to its homonym, lies, as in “lies down”. Surprise!

For Jane Hirschfield’s poem, “Zero Plus Anything Is A World”, go to poets.org/poem/zero-plus-anything-world/.

Our new Seed of the Week is “Orange”. My first choice was “Obscene”, but I decided that was too obvious, given our current political situation… so I went with orange, a Fall color with lots of other options, too. So 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.

JOY HARJO! Sorry for this late announcement, but today at 5pm, U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, will be reading from her newest book, An American Sunrise. For more info (and be sure to register), see us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4izXMQcrTRqftez9H2KyfQ OR www.poetrypromise.org/joy-harjo/. Then, on Thursday at 5pm, she will be in conversation with environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams, discussing the first comprehensive Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, ed. by Joy Harjo, called When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. Again, be sure to register. This program is produced by Poetry Promise, Inc., the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival, and The Clark County Poet Laureate.

________________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

—Public Domain Photo

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.