Trailing Nostalgia

 Watchful

—Poetry by Joyce Odam and Robin Gale Odam,
Sacramento, CA
—Visuals by Joyce Odam

 

 

SHE SAT AT THE WINDOW
—Robin Gale Odam

How to knit the faded white
of clouds, the old blue of the sky,

the slant of rooftops, the darkened
windows, the long thread of the family—

she drew a breath and crossed the
needles. The clouds deepened.

 Reality

 

 

39 MERMAID PLACE
(Long Beach, California, circa 1939)
 —Joyce Odam

How to arrive at the myth
of this small doorway
with its familiar number;
a rustle of sound on the other side;
a movement of curtain,

and rain on its one-step-
up; and twilight at all the edges—  
as if you had just stepped out
of a wrong page in time.
What do you want here,

trailing your old nostalgia back
by a long shadow,
shivering with revision?
You must not enter;
someone else lives here,

someone nervous at your presence,
intruding upon
their replacement of you—
There,
in your own flashback:

Is the old couch still there,
and the gas heater,
and the small tight rooms,
no smaller; can you still escape
through its tiny breezeway

to the ocean, one block away?
There the seventh-waves remember
how you escaped them;
and they reach for you now
even as you reach for the doorknob

with a wet, slow-turning hand.
This is not an ending you can use.
Go back. Pretend
you never made this journey.
Let it be.
                            

(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 6/14/16)

 

 

 

 Twilight

 

AN OLD YELLOW MOON

still lives in that sky
in that place
where you once were

with the long blue street between
stacked houses and windows
that stared at each other

where night was a mystery of stories
remembered only by the ghosts of
memory that exaggerate and pray

what does it say about time
and the old dark trees that still grow there,
dark-leaved and quietly murmuring

what does it matter now that you
only half remember your being there
one of the residents of life—

in one of its places, too many now to recall
with any accuracy, they merge and wander
through each other in your mind,

keeping pages of nostalgia
for a look at other moons, full of yellow,
or staying put in the restless sky

now that you are rooted,
like the trees—
like the houses that still stand—

and the long blue street
paved with twilight shadows
with a loss of something you still reach for . . .


—Joyce Odam

_____________________

OLD BLUE
After Evening Rain, Shinobazu Pond, 1938

—Woodblock Print by Shiro Kasamatsu
—Joyce Odam

old blue shadows
lone figure in the rain
orange street lamp
shimmering
upside down reflections
a lone figure receding
silent    lonely  
only a revenant
to memory
blue trees whisper
rain    rain

the small bridge crossing
the same wet night
the narrow railing
for leaning for looking into
the shimmering water
the wet umbrella
still bobbing
in the shrinking distance
the slow blue night
still murmuring,
rain     rain

_______________________

IN THE PURPLE NIGHT 

After Murnau: Houses in the Obermarkt 

—Painting by Wassily Kandinsky (1908) 

—Robin Gale Odam 

  

My window holds the moonlight. You
will find me here in the purple night. I
will wait. The sun will rise.

       even in this night
       you will cast your silhouette
       in my darkest dream

                            
(prev. pub. in Brevities, May 2017)

 

 

 

 Tangled

 

TIDE TURNINGS
After “Riptide” by Heidi Steidmeyer, Poetry, 1999
—Joyce Odam

All that is grim, caught here on this long and
shining beach in
the warping moonlight—vague things gleaming
in the distance;

a bird wing caught in the sand; the small look of
something
made of string; the curve of the wet land where it
goes on and

on past the following night; the old deliberate way
you
glide along the water’s edge until you feel yourself
disappear—
 
and why does it always seem at once so far away
and so near—
as if time and distance can be traveled simultan-
eously.

                                                                           
(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 3/26/13; 6/16/15;
4/9/19)

 

 

 

 The World's Path

 

DRIVING THROUGH THE HILLS
—Joyce Odam

these levels of hills
beyond which reach the sky
and my yen for distance—
                  
one blue upon the other,
shades of distance receding
into the pale-to-darkening sky
                   
the hills closer now with
overlapping tones and shadows—
old twilight hills that I am watching,
                  
a thin line of river flowing up the
mountain leaving behind a small lake
upon which a small island is floating


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 4/19/11; 3/19/19;
2/28/20)

 

 

 

Call Upon

 

 

PROMISED 

—Robin Gale Odam  

But the day grew dark
even as I waited there,

held my head up high,
drank the colors of the sky—

tea leaves promised you to me.
                 

(prev. pub. in Brevities, January 2018)

 

 

 

Journal

 

 
STAN KENTON AT THE RENDEZVOUS
BALLROOM (circa 1942)
—Joyce Odam

We dance as if we own that song . . .
showing off, our steps tell-tale.
As good as ever, we insist,
dancing together as we did—
our jitterbugging, crazy style
to Big Bands that would fill the stage
all summer long. We’d press up close
to stare and sway into that sound.
And once a bead of sweat flew out
and touched my cheek from the bass player,
soloing. I was thrilled.
I did not wipe the sweat away.
We danced till two a.m.’s last song.
My poor feet burned for hours. Hours!
Those high heels I wore. Size five.
Imagine. Limping home on them.
I kept the music in my head
all night. I felt alive that year,
that year of adolescent growing
into me . . . cute, but shy,
daring just far enough all that
I tried. The war was on, and fate
was high on summer’s list. It took
us all headlong along its path.
The boys wore uniforms, the girls
short wartime skirts; we flashed our legs
and moved our hips beneath their hands.
The turning globe threw out its lights
and faceted each face a moment
in magic’s cut-glass atmosphere
before it turned and caught the next.
I’ve but to hear that song—that theme,
and I am back through treasured time
to something that I loved as much
as anything since then—that dancing,
Stan Kenton belting out his theme,
his “Artistry in Rhythm”, at
Balboa’s block-square “Rendezvous” . . .
We danced as if we owned that song.

 

 

 

 Turn of Fate

 

TURNINGS
—Joyce Odam

The amnesiac soul floats in music and sends its
shivers everywhere, shines for the life it was, for
the moment it is, for the place it cannot enter.

Wisps of sound fasten to the under-parts of
noiseless movements. Wings come through the
invisibility here. I can feel them lift me.

How did you find me amid the debris of common
relinquishments? All I ever wanted is in that glare
I cannot see through. It frightens me now to look
into such blindness. I have never been this thorough
with myself.

This would have been the turn of life in the poem
of some other hand—some space of love gone
empty again and not to be remembered.

Efforts and energies come to release me—those
birds I always tried to follow. I remember nothing
here. I look beyond myself. I am part of the vast
and continuing movement—speck of crying. What
is love.
                       

(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 3/26/13)

___________________

Today’s LittleNip:

ANAMNESIS
—Joyce Odam

Here is a gray thread, pulling me back through
reams of somewhere as old and far

as all faint memory—blue with age—
following itself along old routes and mazes

dense with detail heaped in the oily shadows
of night as it stitches the ragged years together.


(prev. pub. in Sustenance, Nov. 2000-Jan. 2001;
and Medusa’s Kitchen, 8/28/18)

___________________

Our thanks to Joyce Odam and Robin Gale Odam for today’s fine post! Our Seed of the Week was “Shifting Gears” as we move into Autumn 2024.

Our new Seed of the Week is “Snapshots”. 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. And see every Form Fiddlers’ Friday for poetry form challenges, including those of the Ekphrastic type.

Be sure to check each Tuesday for the latest Seed of the Week.

___________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

Evening Rain, Shinobazu Pond, 1938 

—Woodblock Print by Shiro Kasamatsu (1898-1991)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A reminder that
MoSt will host
The Meter Maids’
30th Anniversary Reading
on Zoom tonight, 7pm.
For info about this and other
future poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
the daily Kitchen for happenings
that might pop up
—or get changed!—
 during the week.

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
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