Like An Addiction

 —Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento

BLACK JELLY BEANS—

their subtle
gleam,
their perfect size
and roundness.
(Aslant of perfect
for the word’s sake).

How they
taste—
unusual and singular
So many candy-fans
have no taste for them.
(I’m glad.)

It makes me part of
a minority—
epicurean and selective.
Halloween treat-bags always got me
plenty of black jelly beans
from the generosity of children.

_____________________

THE DAUGHTER OF THE MAD
WOMAN

The daughter of the mad woman
is an arm-wrestler.
She gives away boxes of candy
to visitors who
come to test her strength
against their own.

She wins, of course.

She is the child of brilliance
and pain,
the one who knows how to be
complicated,
the one who has inherited
all this talent from her mother.

                
(first pub. in Small Press News, 1988)

___________________________

THE LIGHT-FILLED FLOWERS   

Sweet cups of brimming light—and should we drink
from all the goblet-flowers of this place,
would we, like Alice,  grow in size—or shrink—
lose our senses—feel ourselves erase . . . ?
Oh, careful one, how pale you turn to think
I’d poison you by urging you to taste  
such heady light—intoxicate your soul—
risk some addiction you could not control.

                                                      
(first pub. in Hidden Oak, 2003)

___________________________

GUESTS FROM WINTER   

Old as children, they
come touching at all my candy,
leaving uneaten bruises upon
my fruit and spilling the
cheap fermenting wine of Sunday.

They sit close together in one
chair, his long beard greying
into her long blue hair.

She wears a flea market coat of
real fur.  He wears a ruined hat.
They are dressed for winter.

He tells her
what to do with her mind.
She adores
and gives him the purest sighs
while he looks at her
in his brooding manner.

And they cry when I laugh
and they laugh when I cry.
They are restless and lonely,
afraid to go
and unwilling to stay
where the rooms are long and
the hours are many.

                            
(first pub. in Chaminade Literary Review, 1991)

ORCHARD       
     (after “Tree Rhythm” – Klee)

lollipop trees dot the landscape
a child’s depiction\
dimensionless with simplicity
the far ones           the same size
as the ones in the foreground
round-topped      with trunks
straight as arms and legs of
stick-figure people going
tilt…     tilt…
over rolling ground-lines
no birds     no sky
this orchard is too abstract
has no relative significance
to the logic of
the mind’s perspective
is simply      there
plunk…   plunk…
artless     but somehow art
each round tree
leaning at a slightly
different angle
about to fall     or dance
strut…   strut…
to a child’s horizon
happy as candy

______________________

AFTERNOON TEA
(in amphibrach dimeter)

She’s smiling, she’s smiling.
Best watch her, she’s smiling.
Her eyes are not turning
away from your face; and

she seems to be touching
the sleeve of your sweater—
as if to delay you.
You’ve waited too long now.

You find her beguiling.
She offers a drink, and
you take it—a teacup,
too tiny and fragile,

with rosebuds—real china.
It’s empty. (You try not
to spill it.) She pours you
another, and offers

a candy. She chatters
and chatters, insisting
you answer the same way—
pretending—invited

to afternoon tea that
she pours, and you share
with Teddy, the Bear, and
the doll named Marie.

_________________________

LIKE A STARVATION

I ate my life like a starvation.
It was not enough.

I was hungry for sorrow.
It was good.

Now hunger lives in me
like an addiction.

I taste the edges of tomorrow
and am obese with yearning.


(first pub. in Thorny Locust, 2007)

____________________

STANZA

Yes, it is true. I am in the loss—spaced far
between it; my hands cannot find the edge.
I housekeep, but the dust wins. Balances
surround me. I accept my gravity, fall
through the television where the silence is.
I reward myself with candy, stuffed in
my starving mouth. I ignore the bottle—
my last strength, drown among cups of
coffee and diet Pepsi. I cannot mend the
holes in my love, though I praise it with
birds that can sing. Ah, season, full of the
right weather, fill me with maps.

____________________

Today's LittleNip:

RUBAI

I’m even now—my life and I in rhyme—
I’ve climbed life’s lonely mountain. What a climb.
My birth and death lie balanced on the scale.
I’ve satisfied the gods that gave me time.

                                             
(first pub. in Poets’ Forum Magazine, 2003)

___________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Joyce Odam for today's photos and Seed of the Week poems that are like jelly beans—you can't eat just one! Let's take our new SOW from her, too: Like An Addiction. What is it that you can't leave alone? Candy? Love? Writing? Send us your thoughts about those things to kathykieth@hotmail.com. No deadline on SOWs.

Flickering Candles

—Photo by Katy Brown

Did you see the video?
—Katy Brown, Davis

Somewhere in Turkey
a white cat

and a winter-grey fox
are best friends.

On a stony beach
beside a distant lake,
these two share food
and sun
and a romp on the shore.

Startled magpies
look on—as if waiting
for an impending kill
—surely, the fox
will kill the cat.

Surely, they will both
turn and kill the gawking birds.
But, no.
Like a pair of tourists
from vastly different backgrounds

meeting on a foreign shore,
these two find something exotic
and compelling in the other.
Like Dutch and Lithuanian,
the languages of cat and fox,
no longer matter.

The lexicon of attraction is spoken
through expression in the eyes
and in proximity of body to body.
One can parse the intransitive play
in all its forms
and never uncover the full affection
shared by any two divergent souls.

Somewhere in Turkey, along a lake
where tourists watch the fishermen,
a white cat and a winter-grey fox
prove the unlikely paradox of attraction.

____________________

DUSK ON LAKE HURON
—Katy Brown

The lake is flat as far as I can see
— flat like foil, crumpled
then smoothed out again: slightly crushed.

Light and shadow dice in waves
— draw the eye toward
a dead-level fading horizon.

Once in a while, a tanker creeps
— glacially-slow across the line of sight;
and the water seals-up behind it.

That’s the essential nature of the lake
— water sealing pathways under the surface;
concealing even the trace of passage:

hiding where entire ships have vanished
— all hands clawing under water
and the water swallowing them whole;

hiding where a child slipped overboard
— off the family’s sailboat
and dropped to the bottom like a shell;

hiding where lovers lingered
— concealed by starlight on midsummer,
conceiving a springtime miracle.

So many small and major passages
— erased by wind on water and left
only as a trace in memory. . . .

_____________________

THE PURPLE HEART FLUTE

—Katy Brown

Aging wood darkens to lilac-rose,
fine-grained, satin-smooth.
The regulator, secured with a deer hide thong,
is a carved pine bear with turquoise bead eyes
positioned to watch the player.
See the beauty of the workmanship;
feel the rhapsody of wood.

Unmoving air surrounds the wood.
Inanimate air fills the barrel of the flute.
Without warm breath, this wood
is but a hollow branch, retaining the memory
of the sound of wind among trees;
the sound of water trickling through stones.
A simple breath re-animates the flute,
gives back the voice of the shadowed forest.

 —Photo by Katy Brown

DAY OF THE DEAD
—Katy Brown

They might be poets—
dressed with flowers under painted skulls,
attending the mass for the dead.
Fiesta music winds around gravestones.
The living dance among angles
—ghosts, silently listening.

Today, living metaphors speak in the forked tongue
of symbol and contradiction:

           I am the bounty of orange blossom  
           and the corruption of rotted fruit.
           I am skin
           and the marrow underneath.
           I am the flickering candle
           and the trail of smoke from a blown wick.

_________________________

BENEATH REMAINS

—B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA

(for Margaret Atwood's birthday Nov. 18)

The nightfall sky
fades by rain
where your nature
still reaches out to us
on our shadows
in an Autumn repose
of dissolving darkness
with your mysterious
presence of language
flies like the mourning bird
will return to us as new life
with its clairvoyant
voice by the woods
where wan memory
resides below
the earth-wise who read you.

_______________________

DOG MUSIC
—Taylor Graham, Placerville

Loki presents me with
a bone. A favorite old bone
from the butcher, honed by her
teeth. Quite hollow. Polished,
devoid of marrow. She rolls
her spine over it, and grins.
She stares as if it held
mysteries. She stares at me.
Look! See! The leg bone’s
connected to the
knee bone. I kneel to pick it
carefully up to my eye,
gaze through it. It’s a monocle,
a singular spectacle,
telescope to other worlds.
Cross-section of some creature’s
shank, this bone glistening
with stars. I blow through it,
exhale breath into wind
in her dog-face. Scent-music.
She has no words but wonder.

 —Photo by Katy Brown

                    

SPIRALS
—Taylor Graham

We’re following the way you went. My dog
chooses our path, a billion scent-fragments
scattered along rough dirt track; and then,
surprise, onto the new concrete ramp—an oval
spiral into sky. Such shining. A gateway
over-pass from main-street to the northern hills.
Four lanes of transcontinental highway cut
between. Falling is everywhere below. My dog
gazes over the edge at traffic. I gaze across
rooftops—courthouse growing smaller
as my dog gains momentum; ahead, the old,
odd frame houses planted among oak trees
on the hill. A hawk rising, wings bright
as angels. Everything shining morning-light.

___________________

CLOUDS AS WAVES
—Taylor Graham

Once I saw a picture of giraffes swimming
in waves of water, or maybe clouds—a sleep-
scape unreal as mind afloat in its unconscious
sea. I woke, remembering something I’d read:
horses driven into the sea to save a doldrum’d
ship, drowning in waves. No dream; a tragedy.
Was it historic, actual, real? On last night’s
news—as prophecy-for-real—a coastline
submerged in rising sea, beachfront property
dissolved in waves. Clouds as waves: when
will it rain? Waves of tiding, merciful heartless
weather, real/unreal as the endless sea.

__________________

A LINK IN THE CHAIN
—Taylor Graham

Morning’s less than half-light                                              
through a dream-door not quite closed yet.                      
Breeze-fingers on a fret                                              
of song outside; grass wet with dew.                                  
Your window waits for blue,                                              
for whatever’s not new, not old—                                  
time’s treasuries that hold                                               
a well of stories told again,
again. Here’s paper, pen,
and fancy. There’s the wren of song,
flicking her tail. What’s wrong 
with you? Come sing along, she says.  

__________________

Today's LittleNip:

IN NOVEMBER
—Taylor Graham

Light zings along the power-line
and sparkles live-oak leaves and dead
leaves on the grass. The air sings.
Who needs special effects?

_________________ 

—Medusa, with thanks to today's cooks, and a note that Taylor Graham's new book, What the Wind Says, is available from Lummox Press, www.lummoxpress.com

 Sad Old Ghost

—Photo by Katy Brown

As Best We Can

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock, Antioch

HALF PAST FOUR, OCTOBER

—Anna Hajnal (1907-1977)

Twilight.  By now the genial sea of dusk

is lapping at the window.  A rising tide

bears the plane tree aloft and far away.

Above these undulations of the sky

on silky wings the wild goose floats unseen.

His cries we hear, and hear again

until the waves of dust rise over him,

but where will he be then?  Where does he fly

southward with his strong companions?

How many planes and levels deep does dusk

hover in autumn?  Deeper than the sea

where the wild saffron, purple sea-star blooms,

down to the cellar where the silken mole,

hardworking and secure, lives with his brood.

It seeps where the snake is drowsing amid dead leaves.

The dusk flows past us, turns on wings

noiseless as fins,

the owl, his eyes like bulbs, drifts by, a fish with ears;

the bat's wings wriggle like a slowly-swimming skate,

we grow sleepy too but cannot hang

head-downward from the plane tree's hollow all the winter long—

we know what would be good,

we live as best we can.

(trans. from the Hungarian by Daniel Hoffman)

______________________

—Medusa

Apsara

Across the Rooftops

—Poems and Photos by D.R. Wagner, Locke

I PUT MY MOUTH ON YOURS

I put my mouth on yours.
There must be cities like this
Somewhere, with all the lights on,
People dancing in their rooms,
Music flowing from their pores.

Rain reflects a million rainbows.
Streets glistening like your lips.
I can feel your breath move over
My face.  It is like coming through
The clouds over a gentle country,
A landscape like your cheek brushing
Mine.  I understand this is a way
Of communicating.  What are we
Saying?  How do we know where
All these doors lead?  Here, come
Quickly, look...it is a heart,
Full beyond belief, unable to give
Itself away fast enough, so full it has
Become.

I put my mouth on yours.
There should be feasts like this
On every table, homes like this
For all the homeless, stars like this
For the night sky.  I open my eyes.
It is impossible to believe that
It is ourselves only.  When I say
Your name, you answer.  I put my
Mouth on yours again and again.

_____________________

APSARA

The language begins to hum.  It is some
Kind of prayer.  It has required our names
For a short time so it can tell us that we
Have become the universe for the purpose
Of explaining what it was our parents
Were saying to each other while we waited
In their loins, expecting at any moment
To be given a riddle about light and a ticket
For consciousness.  We became a critical
Thing.  We extended our hand and the hum
Filled it with a marrow made from dreams,
The deep, inside pages of an apsara spilling
Upon us as the purest of water, as the naming
Clouds gives to the beautiful.  They dance
Before us as forbidden pearls of heaven,
Spreading flower petals, poising us
For the dance even before we are able
To step with any elegance.  There are lines
Of us in sculpture.  We appear on cave walls.

I will move my hand in this particular way.
It will become a perfect architecture.
You will realize it just before you fall asleep.
Your mother will lean over to kiss you.
She will say your name and your heart
Will fill with a most perfect joy.

Perfect

THIS IS NOT A ROOM

This is not a room.
I touch the road into Lhasa with my right
Hand.  I grasp a leaf curled to accept
Water, in a pygmy village, in the Congo,
With my left hand.  My right foot slips
The edge of Niagara, inches from the edge.
My left weighs the air between myself
And the bottom of the grand Canyon.
No question, falling is everywhere.

This is not a room.
Kissing you again and again, fully present,
With no regard for altitude, memory
Laced between our mouths.

This is not a room.
I dress myself in colored lights,
Accept a name I have never
Heard before, acquire powers
That allow me to spin water
Into a fabric, texture of skin,
A weft of sound, sliding along the bias.

This is not a room.
History dressing in a back room,
Introducing dances unknown
To this time.  “This happened,”
History says.  We learn the movements,
Dance the dance.  It seems contrived.

This is not a room.
When you make the song yourself
There is a certain rhythm
That evidences itself.  It acquires
Traits and manners.  It will not
Allow certain activities.  It says
“This thought does not belong right here.”
It reaches its hands out to you,
Catches your hair, then your arms,
Gathering you in, kissing your mouth,
In such a way that for an instant
You notice the face before you
Has never looked like this.
Will it do this thing again?  One waits.
A background of bird chatter fills the room.

_____________________

HEAVEN DARE NOT LOOK

Heaven dare not look too long
When, soft, my darling says the moon,
The stars, the whirling balls of stone
That are the planets, to their sleep.
For soft is the song that rises, clouding
Those towers that are praising in those
Fell halls full of angel wings and dawn.

Heaven dare not keep the night long
From around her shoulders where she
Wears it like the cloak it is and
Brings it to our bed, still full of stars
And singing, such shining is herself.

I gaze upon that which angels fear
May tear them from the face of God,
Even for a moment, such is my darling
In her sweet good nights before we sleep.

 Dragonfly

THE DEATH OF TUT

There were chariots.
Not that we would pay
Them mind.  They lined
Up the bank of the Nile
And lined their gaudy selves
Into vast parades of power.

Even in the 18th dynasty
When lovely young Tut got
Hit and flew from his own
Rig and hit the track:
"The Pharaoh is dead.”

I find myself walking in
The Western Lands long before
They have chosen my own ride
And still I pay them no mind.

I rest.  I watch the white
Flocks of egrets and herons,
The beautiful pronouncing
Of names of all the gods
In a sunset litany.

Blood pouring from the mouth
Of the young Tut.  His eyes fixed
On the beauty of the horses
Bearing down to crush
His golden body.

______________________

IN THE TIME BEFORE THE MOON

In the time before the moon
There were men who are now
Not men as we know them.

They could walk beneath the sea
And they had fangs in the palms
Of their hands that could retract
Or rise to pierce the flesh of others.

Water too was different then
And came apart so easily
That breathing was possible
Anywhere one walked
On land or in water.

The great ship that carried night
From place to place every night
Did so with men who held poles
Topped with stars of fire at their ends.

They would thrust them upward
Through the water from below
The ship, where they would blaze
With colored fires and spin
High above the greatest
Of the ocean waves.

        *

There was no doubt about anything.
All things tasted of grapes and honey.
This place had rooms for eternity
To occupy as it needed them.
This did not seem exceptional
To anyone until we found the moon
In one of eternity’s rooms.

It was involved with time.
They touched one another.
Suddenly we knew the precise weight
Of the moon and everything changed.

All of water thickened and no longer
Could men walk below the seas.
We found sleep inside yet another room.
The night abandoned its beautiful ship
To surround the moon in the sky.
All we have left are these storms,
The huge memories of stars still exclaiming. 

 Nest

LINKED RINGS

What if we had chosen night?
What if night wore a thousand
Different rings?
And what if there were no moon
And one had to find the correct
Ring to wear by feeling the patterns
On the outside surface of the ring?

Then things would become simple.
One could easily see the jar in Tennessee
Or the white chickens next to the red wheelbarrow
Or the best minds of a generation.

I choose to watch Grizzell
Drive his car in spirals
Until all the roads lose their names,
Until I could no longer
Remember her name or why
We had come here in the first place.

        *

The door moved slightly.  It was close
Enough to dawn to allow some
Thing that resembled light
To slide across the rings of days
Linked by the great darkness of the night.

        *

He recalled a smile that had found
A home upon her face.
It had been less than half-light.
A door not quite closed that shafted
The light into the bedroom,
Across her thighs and between
Her breasts to cross her lips
That way, just as she was falling
Asleep.  It looked enough like like
A smile that he leaned over
And kissed them.  The door closed.

It was still very much nighttime.
He could hear the linked rings jangle
Against one another as he searched
For the keys that must be somewhere near.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jelly beans.

—Ronald Reagan

_____________________

—Medusa

The Walk Home

Spiral Seas

Clouds as Waves

—Photo by D.R. Wagner, Locke

TO THE SHORELINE
—B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA

A mad dash to the shoreline
after picking blackberries
row by row by dewy fields
and with the tips
of your fingers
find jelly beans
in a baseball jacket
the stillness was kind
in daylight's affirmation
stopping for a drowsy rest
and beachcomber's meditation
on the cloudy grey breakers
near the slippery stairs
of the waterfront docks
by a hive of bees
along the muted home harbor
except for sea bird voices
near their new bath lighthouse
by several crags and trees
a poet is shaking a tambourine
he finds at the gazebo
by geranium flower pots
wishing to plunge
in the vast coral ocean
if only to believe water sings
out his deeply aired breaths.

___________________

SAN FRANCISCO ECHO
—B.Z. Niditch

San Francisco hears
and watches a young poet
since he was a charitable saint
helping the lost,
here in the sunshine, 1988
from my open windows
in transit at this motel
restored from a poised light
of the sun's
flickering along the walls
of the faded Corot prints
casting shadows
on this safe house wall
by my soundproof studio
ready for music and body
exercises here in the attic
to get in shape
for an intense gig
trying to feel alive
from muffled sax notes
in an Autumnal welcome
covering a shrill-voiced night
of tiny birds in their feeder
from the frothy sea air
reading Davis' poem
on jelly beans
near the backyard aspens
unlocking my eyelids
fiercely waking me
in a familiar tone
after a brass sounding dream
wakens my passages from sleep.

___________________

THROUGH SPIRAL SEAS
—B.Z. Niditch

It was an exciting day
when I bought it
for practically a song
from a retired lobster man
when he heard me play sax
at the seacoast gig,
asking me if he could
ride aboard my maiden voyage,
which put our legs through oars
teaching me at my first attempt
all the wistful hints at rowing
on cold waves of starriest escape
with his suave cool invitation
seeming younger than his age
quoting Whitman
through spiral seas
with his indomitable optimism
never quenched with worry
and offering me
out of his tattooed arms
Boston baked and jelly beans
from discreet darkness into noon
as a whispered wind
by a tufted wondrous Bay
alights on the long island sound
with an encore of lighthouse birds
by the largest shore around
scampering by us with tiny voices
now a seagull calls out to us
over grey clouds floating
we are now in a subdued speed
so a poet can spy on
all of dawn's creations,
an owl on an elm at shore's edge
a love letter in a green bottle
washed on the white sand
a lost red birthday balloon
caught in the tall Cape dunes,
a fish-hawk emerges
in ditch waters of a remote island,
as my new Greek sailor's cap
my once old navy friend gave me
almost falls off by the skiff
near the roller coaster waters,
amazed at the curving harbor
in the luminous soundings
drawing breath by the lighthouse
of being in adolescent wonder.

 Fall Morning Glories

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

NATURE'S WOODWINDS
—B.Z. Niditch

Deep down
at the crag's edge
the leaves tumble across
the great blue hills
as portents of your solitude
knowing the path to climb
up the shadowy mountain
and deserted peaks
will be clear
for a lone traveler
with his backpack
full of pure poems
walnuts and jelly beans
the shadows blush
at first light
expecting the woodwinds
to sound near the saxifrage
with blackberries all around
as I spy a mapped trail
shielding me
from the quivering trees
a birdsong in the distance
with an echo of capturing
a passage from this moment.

___________________

SURPRISED
—B.Z. Niditch

Surprised by the anonymity
of a veteran hunger
digging for clams
trembling by the frozen shore
in the shameful staring eyes
of distracted tourists
eager for a ride on duck boats
who toss pocket money
and jelly beans
for good luck in the ocean
watching for Leda
the last swan
who must have known
my visits and not kept away
since we are childhood friends
dripping with memory's exposure
now wrapped up in a jacket
with pocket poems
of my last collection of words
on breathless wind swept air
I'm always carrying notes,
new and sundry on my sleeve.

___________________

ANTIQUE STORE
—B.Z. Niditch

Through veiled mirrors
and ancient candelabras
here in Los Angeles
old white statues
littered with enlightened
bric a brac, dark urns
object d'art
paintings of knights,
ladies of the royal realm
plastic faded flowers
kitchenalia,
jars of jelly beans,
costumed pins and hats
pirated goods off the ocean
on silvery magic carpets
acquired, acquiesced
and accessed with price tags
some written in Creole French
by green embossed string
easy for the touch
under satin less fragrant
covers a sill of cloth
feeling I'm in a hollow world
of a dizzying Poe universe
wondering why my friend
brought me here
to view with suspicion
the long-unknown past
by these shells of the baroque
when the proprietor
in a solemn whisper
spoke in his domain
as if in a shipwreck
we're feeling motionless
as in a nightmare
or grade b movie
as if time disappeared
by these dark doors
wishing for the salt air
along the Pacific
telling the connoisseur
to take it easy
when the earth rattled
for a second
and we escaped.

John Deere

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

BY THE THIRD PERSON
—B.Z. Niditch

Without having much
of an employment résumé
slumped out all day
eating jelly beans
on the sun shined city bench
and as yet not yet shaving,
red-eyed at the moment
in the uncertain noon,
hearing of a male model job
and an actor's workshop
both in the same building
on a flattering part
of a San Francisco street
and when you are a teen
not knowing much
of the world's vague talk
linger with open hope
and observing gestures
as your soul beats wildly
for any work with words
eager to stumble
on a seaside conversation
leading to changing roles
from this fast-pacing student
and going to the address
with a heavy suitcase
yet willing to try anything
within reason of expectation
as I meet the director,
looking consumptive
at the pool table
asking me with book in hand
to do him a favor
by reading the lines of Coriolanus
and he tells me
he also runs the model agency
and I would be a perfect fit
for his new tennis ware
if I would walk the plank
where nature is my own mirror
along the red carpet
and offering me a salary
yet wondering
if there was something
to all this rumor
not reported
by the third person.

____________________

WANTING TO SING
—B.Z. Niditch

When walking in Frisco
eating a fortune cookie
and jelly beans
in blighted khakis
and a torn cowboy hat
with a pitch of torment
every moment
as any young thespian
trying out for a part
lugging my alto sax
and a lost golden retriever
encased with a hangover
from an actor's sheen
trying to remember his lines
and to wear boots
and that kooky white frock
for the bummed-out rehearsal
at nine P.M.
and hearing a random squall
and the earth move
in a crosswise rumble
here in a solid shady shadow
a poet's traveling delirium
entangles me by heated pavements
away from storefront mannequins
glimpsing the airy Bay
dusk waves and departs
with a loner's insomnia
over a cable car sleep
wanting to sing
on musical chairs
to electrify my acting roll
on stage all in lights
yet I'm reticent
as there are so many stars
and starlets above me
here by the metal rails
that only life's hammer
may strike any rock of ages
motioning the fireworks
of a rekindled existence.

____________________

Today's LittleNip:

Life is like jelly beans, and sometimes you get your favorite color.

—Anonymous

___________________

—Medusa

Michelle Kunert reading at Shine last Wednesday, Nov. 13

[Michelle has a new photo album on

Medusa's Facebook Page, featuring the readers

at this week's Poetry With Legs reading at Shine Cafe. 

Check it out!]

Succulent Spices

Marcene Gandolfo reading at Sac. Poetry Center

last Monday, Nov. 11

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

RASTA
—Rhony Bhopla, Sacramento

A stranger put a poem in my braid
I carried it to the mountains where
I prostrated
I waited
I wailed slowly in the night calling as
I unraveled everything, and loose
became the words that he had spoken.
Silken words that embraced
ahimsa.

The wild did not speak
The water did not speak
The minerals in my blood did not speak
The afterthoughts in my imagination did not speak.

My hair rose to the sky
My bosom became full with the milk of leaves
My teeth chattered a code to the dead
My eyes became zeros

The poem hung in the air
speaking one syllable
fraught with polarity.
It simply was the man’s last wish
that I had carried with me
in my brimming arteries.


(rasta = path, ahimsa = non-violence)

_______________________

HANDS LIKE THE HANDS OF CAVAFY'S SWEETEST BOY
—Tom Goff, Carmichael

Look past the sweet bare bodies,
the soft odalisques you have made love to
or simply, painfully desired. Look past
the naked skin and into their souls. Brush aside
the velvet door of each woman’s spirit
as you’d part the lace or beadwork or gauze
at the door of the sex-chamber. See through
each transparent avatar of passion—the Italian,
the Mexican, or (foremost of all) the Latvian—
and you will penetrate to the Inward Form:
youngest yet most immortal, she
whose Greek dark hair brushes over you
in an eclipse of shivers. Her sensuous mouth,
for all her tall shining grace, is the charm
bracelet spanning the slim wrist of
a three-year-old girl of Thessaly; those
rose-quartz bracelet stones melt and merge
in a kiss. Her hands, blossoming large and fair
on her slender wrists, might belong
to the sweetest of Cavafy’s beloved boys,
warm, strong, agile. Their caresses,
gone as soon as they’ve touched you,
are the tenderness of the last dawn
the heavens will ever steal.

_____________________

ELIZABETHAN
—Tom Goff

Come greet me with “Sweet sir” at my door again.
Your voice then was daybreak in a sunlit night.
What was it we were talking, Elizabethan?

Your dark eyes coin starshine to the power of ten.
Mèlisande, you’ve run to dark forest, out of the light.
Tell me you’ll call me “Sweet sir” once again.

I’ve seen your cinnamon mouth on the cheek of a man.
Boy, really. You need the desire you have to fight.
Why don’t you come and talk Elizabethan?

At finding and mating you’re still in your earliest matins.
Might you need a knave with knowhow to set you right?
Come greet me with “Sweet sir” at my door again.

So long a twilight year it’s been, and so lone.
Held in where your soft, fraught words touch, I take fright.
When will you speak again, my Elizabethan?

Yet you have the right to wrest from me my own.
Please bid me speak or bottle-stopper it tight.
When will you come and intone “Sweet sir” again?
What is it I want to reply, my Elizabethan?

John J. Bowman reading at SPC last Monday

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

I couldn't stand seeing it at the traffic light

a black man lying down on city street sidewalk

right next to a turned-over shopping cart

and people walking by like he was garbage

I couldn't let him be

So I turned around my car and parked

or else I'd be no better than those who ignored him

I thought to God he's somebody 

and it could have been me

I prayed 

and it was answered when a white guy came to help

We were both relieved to see he wasn't unconscious or dead 

but merely sleeping in the hot summer weather

could just give him some money before going on his way
  

—Michelle Kunert

_____________________

BETTER BEANS

than lima or butter,
the jelly makes the tedious time
between the end of office hours
and start of a resistant class
much sweeter than the deciding
if a question on prepositions
or Sonnet 118 should
be addressed by example
or exploration.
The black, blue and orange orbs
are succulent spices on this
mid-November day
the edge needed
to keep the extra hour
of imposed darkness
a bit longer
away.

—Michael Cluff, Corona

____________________

BEANS AND JELLY
—Michael Cluff

They have never mixed well
into Julia Child and Martha Stewart's lexicons
as they did not seem to  mention
their comingled existence
in this sort of state—
except maybe
as a garnish
alongside an upside down
pineapple cake
or the edible eyes
of some simpering turkey,
Santa or weak-willed ghost.
Red or black
or white
were too gruesome
to place on any of these
innocent three.
 

___________________

Today's LittleNip:

Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin works, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!” 

—Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

__________________

—Medusa

  Andrew Kenton reading at SPC last Monday

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

Dreaming in Colors

River, Grand Canyon

—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis

ALL THE REALLY COOL GUYS HAD NICKNAMES
—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove

I wanted one too.
Decided I wanted
To be called
Jellybean, like
Kobe Bryant’s dad, or
The musician
Jellybean Benitez.
Mentioned it
To the guys.
The guys
Had another idea.
Called me Jerk.

______________________

THE APOTHECARY JAR
—Kevin Jones
 
Every year when school
Started, a huge jar
Appeared in the drug
Store window. Was
Full of jelly beans.
There was a sign:
“Hey, Kids! Guess
The number and win.”
Always thought
I should have. I mean
How wrong can
“A lot” be?

______________________

FAMILY RESEMBLANCE
—Kevin Jones

Have always been fond
Of jelly beans. Could be
Because I sort of
Look like Mr. Jelly Belly.
If Mr. Jelly Belly
Had a beard
And a black t-shirt.

_____________________

JACK AND NEAL AND THE BAG OF JELLYBEANS
—Kevin Jones

“Jelly bean?” asks Neal.
“Give you a quick rush of energy
For traveling.” “What flavors?”
Jack asks, eyeing the bag.
“The usual, licorice, grape, lemon.”
“Why don’t they make them in
More adult flavors?” wonders Jack.
“Don’t think there’s ever gonna be
A Muscatel flavor,” says Neal.

On Top of the Clouds

—Photo by Katy Brown

HOLDING HANDS IN AUTUMN
—D.R. Wagner, Locke

There was no need to make arrangements.
It was possible for a very large number of people
To dream collectively and make events occur.

He was walking down the Ramblas in Barcelona.
The human statues were flashing colors yet remained
Perfectly still.  There was a low hum but it seemed to come
From deep inside the earth.  No one seemed to notice.

There were only a few days left.  This afternoon might
As well be gold.  The light in the woods.  Voices
Filtered through centuries of gospels are carried
By our own glistening bones with their stardust
Flashing as it holds the meat of our bodies aloft.
We see the ships approaching and climb as high
As we are able to see how many of them might
Be coming toward us here.

They are of such bright colors in this light.
The size and color of jelly beans from a distance
Such as this.  And perhaps as sweet.  “Sweet dreams,”
Everyone said, and rising from the tops of the cliffs,
An updraft that compels us to exactly that.

______________________

BEYOND THE BARRICADE
—Taylor Graham, Placerville
 
The scent of a missing girl is carried off
into the woods, strewn thin on air
and tangled into scrub, litter, blown leaves.

My dog leaps ruts intended as a road.
Wind has erased every track in the dust.
Here’s a mattress-bridge over a ditch;

olive-drab drape of old canvas, once
a tent. Working against the sun, we pass
No Trespassing signs by a worn couch

and easy-chair, three empty buckets
astronaut-blue. No one’s home. Tonight,
extra rooms in the stars. Where

could she be? In a clearing a torch
flares gold-crimson leaves November cold,
her scent keeps leading us away.

_______________________

AUGURIES OF WEATHER
—Taylor Graham
 
Under the pot, the flame burns electric-
blue. Inside the pot, a hen with two hearts.
Seven months since rain. The sky
sparks heat-lightning at night. It sizzles
like the absent song of birds. The chicken
stews in the pot, having given up
on pecking hardpan clay. Even that prince
of the free atmosphere, the sparrow-
hawk, has flown, its scream diminished
to a low boiling on the stove.
The grass is clay, the sun a shadow-stain.
Birds gone from our dreams except
for this one hen in the pot, her double-
heart perhaps a sign for the mercy of rain.

_______________________

WHAT DOES COLOR TASTE LIKE?
 —Taylor Graham

Pale pink light pink
dark red orange
jewel orange and yellow
light green bright green jewel green
dark blue light blue and blue
purple off-white black licorice
she dreams in colors
cheaper than oil paints less messy
on a gray day in sensible
shoes in a square room her mother
says candy’s nothing
but sugar and bad for the teeth.
But oh the colors.

_______________________

Today's LittleNip:

YOU NEVER KNOW WITH HYBRIDS
—Kevin Jones

Planted a handful of jelly beans.
“If this works, I’m fixed
For life,” I thought.
Gum drops came up
Instead.

_______________________

—Medusa, with thanks to today's contributors for an auspicious beginning of sweet and tasty poems for our Seed of the Week, Jelly beans; to Katy Brown for these photos of the Grand Canyon taken from the plane as she traveled cross-country recently (click on them to enlarge them); and a reminder to check out Medusa's blue bulletin board (scroll down past the green board) for all the poetry events this week—an embarrassment of riches!

Grand Canyon

—Photo by Katy Brown