Alone And Not Alone

 Tuesday's Rose

—Poetry and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA

WHEN PARADISE BURNED,

we thought it was the storm, the angry winds,
the slowness of realization, the stunned
wonderment, how long it took in our
description of loss, how it returned
and expanded, even harder
this time to sacrifice
even more trees,
and ways in,
and ways out,
and it became
one loud poem
of anguish and pain,
and the fires resisted,
daringly, and furiously
as we watched—as we stayed—
and we, like the
forests, cannot breathe
death's lure as we stand, and wait
and burn, and the poem will not let us
go—let us go, and all the forests go—and
we cannot breathe, we are so unbelieving, and
it was always the trees by which we could breathe.

 

 

 

Haunt of Light

 

THE HUMAN MASS

caught in the white-rage of fear, the being
hustles—then dark strangeness, cold and
angry eyes paralyzed in a stare—such
a fearsome glare to grope through
the indifferent caring of some
vague enemy—imagined or
known—the slowness it
takes, the blind flurry,
through and toward,
but never fully sent
by mind or hurry
interest impedes
and becomes
a narrowing
toward a
pin-point
of dark-
ness
open
ing

 

 

 

A Sound

 

A CALL TO HIS MOTHER

thin
voice
of dying . . .

heart around
throat—that wounding—
that dying

oh, mercy—such praying—
so slow and useless,
this dying

only the helpless
observing—only the
anger to appreciate such dying 

 

 

 

The Ruse

 

AS IF

we took a house to be our own
but it was old and made of ruin
it would not fix it would not mend

although we'd patch
and spend and spend
and tell ourselves

'one effort more'
and fix another
broken door

and summer came and summer went
and still our house wore discontent
the same as we—as if it wanted more

 

 

 

Old Love

 

 

WHEREVER THEY LOVE
After Couple on the Shore, 1906/07
                —Edvard Munch

Always goodbye—wherever
they love—no way to return.
The melancholy beaches
are lost to winter now.

They remember what was true :
the dark gulls overhead—
kept afloat
by slow, untiring wings.

The gray world moves
in endless white waves
that try to cover what is lost.
There is no other—

no other anything they want and
cannot keep. So they embrace—
with every tender, vanished place
reclaimed, in resurrected love.

                                    
(prev. pub. by Medusa's Kitchen, 2013)

 

 

 

The White Pallor of the Sky

 

THE WHITE PALLOR OF THE SKY

What of the white pallor of the sky
this day—this day without mercy, this
dimensionless day, this white-fog morning.

I test the skies with my gray look. How thin.
They could not hold me. I shall not fly
nor lift a dreary wing in agitation.

I may just sift against this day until I fit—
somewhere near or far—it does not matter.
I am in a drift.

Some wet bird lets a cry cut through.
I feel it reach
and offer back my silence.

Nowhere does sensation end; I am
all of it, the pale gray light, monotonous,
the few shapes wavering through.

The same bird calls. I open myself.
I let it through.


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 11/22/16)

 

 

 

A Touch of Blues

 

WHY MELT

Why melt when sorrow loves you like that,
like blithering rain, or withering pain, like
that—trying to abstain—make sense, go
splat—all over again—life is like that,
a wheel, and a stain, on a wall, or a
floor—stutter no more, it doesn’t
become... you are no more than,
what a shame, glorious sorrow
fit for singing, something like
that... something like wrong...
finger-nail-scraping down a
wet window full of life’s
pitiless rain—oh you—
oh you—I know how
you feel, I—like you,
a commiserate stain,
the bearer of pain...

 

 

 

Tomorrow

 

 

 

RITUALIZING

HERE WHERE I BURN LOVES
TO KEEP WARM
ON A LONG WINTER OF SILENCE
IN A COLD ROOM
I DREAM OF REGRETS
SO PAST AND FURIOUS
THAT I FLUNG LIKE FOOD
INTO EVERY STARVATION
THE WAY MY ANGRY MOTHER ONCE
THREW RICE AGAINST A WALL

*   but   *   oh   *   but   *   oh   *

I have a vision of
such silence and calm
a lifting of everything
like a huge fluttering cloth
before it is dropped
over a table or a bed
that these last few matches
I sacrifice to incense
that I use for solitude
when every dark of me unfolds
to patient celebration

                                        
(prev. pub. in Poet News, 2/90
and Medusa’s Kitchen, 1/12/10)

______________________

Today’s LittleNip:

AWRY
—Joyce Odam

We are at once alone and not alone,
oblique with sorrow,
caught in a seam.

You dance toward the center
I catch your falling.
What does it mean?

                             
(prev. pub. in Poems for All, #907
and Brevities #15, 2004)

______________________

Joyce Odam, our Tuesday's Rose, has swept through this morning with tales of “Angry Winter Nights”, our Seed of the Week, telling us about fierce storms both inside ourselves and outside with those stormy skies. And the seagulls! Always the seagulls and the beach with Joyce, “kept afloat/by slow untiring wings.”

Our new Seed of the Week is “Always Chasing Buses”. 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.

 

In yesterday's post, we apparently gave you a nonworking link to the Wilzig Erotic Art Museum interview of Norman Olson. A link that works is www.facebook.com/WilzigEroticArtMuseum/videos/443428413395766/.

______________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Joseph Nolan, Stockton, CA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
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