In Time's Cold Light

 

Love As Treasure

—Poetry and Original Artwork by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA

THE BETTER PART OF LOVE

Muse with me while we gather light for a poem.
We will read it later—

tell each other what it means,
then reminisce awhile,

compare amazements—how much our lives
are parallel—

how many years
we’ve known each other,

while we confess,
or commiserate—

let down the burden of our cares
to hold each other’s dark—

find some new-old words
to fill our many silences with explication,

then laugh—
or cry—

whichever is needed.  
Old friend, as close and separate as we are,

I muse these thoughts for you
from this old, well-worn and reliable, loving heart. 

 

 

 

World At Risk

 

BEGINNING

When love is a feeling
too huge to comprehend

and you would offer
the treasure

of each other
to each other

and there is something
you want to define

and it is only a moment
out of eternity and—

and—tongue-tied—how
does one ever say the rest?

 

 

 

Extant

 

THE WIFE OF THE SLEEPING MAN
After A Bedroom with a Fire Burning and a Woman 

Reading to a May Lying on a Sofa by JMW Turner, 1827

 

Now she would truly know, as though—
as though—all her well-read words would

train her mind to memorize. This was a
cozy night, her crossed feet were bare,

someone sleeping there—nearby—
and the room was warm enough to read

from a treasured book that took all her life
to read. She was the watchful wife of the

sleeping man who dreamed in his sleep,
as if she was not there. And they lived

like this : he on his couch, and she
in her reading chair, though she never

turned a page, and he never turned to a
more comfortable position, and the fire-

place never burned down—and this was
their perfection : a sing-song life without

any strife, and no ambition, and they were
content, because it was meant to be like this.   

_____________________

HIS CHAMELEON

He could love past the one he loved to the one
he could have. She let him weep and heal.
She held him. They made love
on his tantrum of grief and he was hers.

He was happy then, since he needed
happiness. She became his chameleon,
wearing a red slit dress and playing down
the room with shadows.

They had their years out— clear to her
widowhood. Whatever love he took with him
was all his. She knew that—and let him go with
his happiness and kept what was left.

It filled an envelope,
and she put a ribbon around it
and placed it in a treasure box, where it stayed,
safe in her mind, behind her smile.

 

 

 

Passage

 

Oh my house,
After "Question” by May Swenson

with your
black staircase
and mute windows

your supplicant roof  
and walls that squeeze in—
your doors that open and close

your
counted
rooms.

I love the way you float in the sky
at night
when the stars surround you

and anchor to earth
by day
with the secrets you tell yourself.

I know how old you are
in your comfort and strain—
in all your containment, oh, my house.

 

 

 

Keepsake

 

SOFT SOUNDS

The piano stood—large and lonely—in a corner of my
childhood, that long-ago place and time that are no-
where now. My hands on the keys were not enough.
My mind created music beyond my ability to play :
I found soft sounds upon it—my trivial melodies—
though my mind craved concerts of skill and fame.
I loved its hugeness, its importance in the too-small
room—the idea of it.

I never learned to read the language of music, though
I found words to love and use with all my effort—white
keys—and black keys—of thought and mood. My hands
could write, too hasty, too unreadable, like abstract
melodies that came to me—a primitive typewriter re-
ceived them then, and saved them from their illegible
existence—to have loved a piano once is a formative
love one does not lose entirely.

_____________________

WHAT A STRANGE COMPOSITE
After Portrait of a Woman by Pablo Picasso, 1936

What a strange composite—
all the loves you loved through,
each an addition to the phases
of your restive mind.

What a strange sameness
in their portrait eyes;
you could not tell them apart—
your sweeping energies

expanded into
your famous
grotesquerie revered by
the followers of such fervor.

And here I am—an old model—
facing myself
in another version
and scolding you with my heart.  

 

 

 

Now, And The Time Between

 

ERASURES

See how I erase you, Love—
how you un-exist in words
of poems
and sad love songs
that insist,   insist,    insist,
on being reminders—
all your written margins
penciled in private grief
at the mercy of afterthought
—how I release
my painful agreements
to pages where I sought answers?
Love, I know now, there are none,
only these pretensions and persuasions
resisted, or believed, how
many dreams regret their dreaming?
Forget the question. It is moot.

_____________________

THESE WINTER LINES

These winter lines full of cold fact and argument—
the new words made out of stone of the old words,

and still make it through another season of abject
difficulty. Transition! is what you would say to the

queries I would proffer, Only transition! And I am
one! And you another! Replicas of meanings we in-

flict upon ourselves, you with your roses of twilight,
the new image : scent surrounding you, birds singing

in Time’s cold light—as if there was no before and  
there is no after, and the glass walls of the years break

softly around us—and we get through them—leaving
shards and shards of each other floating in oblivion.

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

ACCORDANCE
—Joyce Odam

, if the last drip
of rain
is to be
my measure,

and rain
is scarce,

why,
to my eyelashes now,
come these tears
that follow . . .

___________________

Thank you, Joyce Odam, for your lovely poems and artwork as we wave goodbye to/erase/burn down 2020! Joyce is ably responding to our Seed of the Week: Treasures.

Our new Seed of the Week is “Whispers”, a fresh breath after the craziness of 2020. 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.

For May Swenson’s “Question”, go to www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47730/question-56d228643c3d3/.

To see Turner’s A Bedroom with a Fire Burning and a Woman Reading to a Man Lying on a Sofa, go to www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-a-bedroom-with-a-fire-burning-and-a-woman-reading-to-a-man-lying-on-a-sofa-d22739/.

___________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

Portrait of a Woman by Pablo Picasso, 1936

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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