Medusa's Kitchen

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Limbs A-Kimbo

😖

We are not amused!

Yesterday I fractured my left arm with a fall onto concrete

while walking my dog. It's in a splint

(the arm, not the dog),

and typing is hunt-and-peck with my right hand.

I think I'll need at least a day to recover

enough to sort-of use the keyboard.

So no Kitchen today, but I'll keep you posted.

Meantime, stay safe!

😷

–Medusa

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Two Rivers

—Poems by James Lee Jobe, Davis, CA
—Public Domain Photos Courtesy of James Lee Jobe

Snowflakes first bless and then join the swift river. First snowfall on the upper Yuba.

________________

One river is birth and the other river is death; look for me at the confluence. I’ll be there; passing time, enjoying the water, and scribbling down these ridiculous poems.

A homeless man at the shelter, his mental illness causes a rage to boil over, and he ends up back on the same hard street. Again. I know it has to be, but how long, I wonder, until his sunrise? Where is his warmth and his tiny comfort?

_______________

A young man on the downtown sidewalk. Homeless, alone. He appears to be the age that my late son would be. So cold, this wind of January.

______________

A foggy morning. The wisps float over the cold and empty field.

Entering their 70s, my wife and her high school girlfriends, class of 1967, still love to gather together. Their love for each other is a warm wind across the sand, a sunny morning. Recently I told them, “You all get lovelier every year,” and it seemed to me that they thought I was being silly or flirtatious. I wasn’t. Truly, each of them is beautiful. Golden. A warm breeze across the sand. A sunny morning. Time is merely the jewelry that adorns them, it is their lives that shine.
 

—for The Elites—

______________

Winter dresses in gray and blends in with the chilled clouds. And shivering in their grayness, the clouds bless the winter sky.

When I die, let me sleep in the rain that falls on the trees, in the rain that falls on the ocean. Let me sleep easy in the wetness that brings life to the earth.

__________________

Today’s LittleNip:

Does a life have color? An identifying sound? Passing geese honk in the gray winter sky.

—James Lee Jobe

__________________

—Medusa, with thanks to James Lee Jobe for these poetry and photo jewels this morning!

A few of our Earth-Pals
—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of James Lee Jobe

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.

Friday, May 22, 2020

Outside of Time

—Poetry and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

NORMAL SHADORMA

1st day of
the 10th week since all
events stopped.
Everyone
knows what it is to shelter
in what oneself makes.

Call it home—
walls against a world
of human
contagion.
Zoom vs. Skype, Google Hang-
outs, Microsoft Teams.

My passwords
don’t recognize me.
What is face
to face now
without a mask? I keep my
hands washed and dirty

with garden.
I speak to two-leaf
zucchini
just sprouted
from soil. What doesn’t it know
of its perfect life?

ESSENTIAL GREEN

No need for a motel room.
Wonderland’s not far, 20 miles, a dozen
switchbacks to your target: small dirt pull-out.
Check off essentials: good boots, camera,
flashlight (just in case).
Below the headwaters, a pond—wading pool
for dogs to splash warp-spasm, lunatic
joy of dousing you with fur-shake,
scatter of wet stars, diamonds on mud.
Creekside paradise
for getting messy. Try to keep your bearings
in green-spell of willow thicket and alder.
Around a bend, surprise!
sequoia—lacy-green fairy-world
outside of time.
Stay too long, you may need that flashlight
to find your car, your scheduled but
postponed, reimagined life.

COVID FIRESTORM

If I stop, wipe my failing eyes and stare
across our fence to the adjoining field—
a wealth of wild grasses, a worthless yield—
I see the neighbor’s tractor, and he’s there
about to mow while green turns dry and brown.
Motionless—it’s not human. A log-heap,
live trees felled in fear of fire while we sleep.
Oak slaughter all along the road to town.
Life dies by seasons here, and still we live,
keep distances as virus mimics fire.
We mask ourselves against each old desire,
wash hands against the wish to hold and give.
I wave across the fence, a just-in-case
it’s my neighbor though I can’t see his face.

OVERNIGHT RAIN

Too wet for mowing,
my best plans knocked out of whack,
Nature must keep her
own balance, surprising me—
diamond-drops on grass.

MOON GHAZAL

A moon-faced pony and a horse white as moon-
shine recharge their luster under a crescent moon.

Yesterday it rained, morning’s field is wet—
grass-blade diamonds reflecting light of the moon.

Two pumpkins sprout from salvaged seed—
jack o’ lantern smashed under a Halloween moon.

She never consults a map, driving the back roads,
following that in-her-face-blinding full moon.

Workshopping by Zoom, abruptly his voice
transformed to guitar sweet as a Spanish moon.

This poet sleeps as ghost-light walks the deck,
sweeping a month’s mistakes with silver-of-moon.

Today’s LittleNip:

CAR SHRINK
—Taylor Graham

Fixit man lifted
the hood, heard terrible noise;
dropped hood, the noise stopped.
Can he help a car simply
by listening to its problems?

_______________________

Our thanks to Taylor Graham for poems ’n pix today, as she managed to work “Zoom” into a poem! As to the forms she’s using, she writes, “You may notice some old SOWs [Seeds of the Week] in ‘Essential Green’. For the rest, you've got a couple of Tankas, a Ghazal, a Shadorma, my first shot at a Sonnette, and a Lyranian Sonnet (‘COVID Firestorm’)”.

As for area online poetry later today and tonight, at 4pm we have a Sac. Poetry Center workshop, Writing from the Inside Out, with prompts by Nick LeForce. Then at 7:30pm we have James Lee Jobe’s video poetry reading on Facebook at youtube.com/jamesleejobe. For Nick’s workshop, you need to register in advance, so scroll down to the SPC section of Medusa’s Kitchen (in the blue box on the right of this column) for info, or go to www.sacramentopoetrycenter.com/.

_______________________

FORM FIDDLERS' FRIDAY!

It’s time for more contributions from Form Fiddlers! Each Friday for awhile, there will be poems posted here from some of our readers using forms—either ones which were mentioned on Medusa during the previous week, or whatever else floats through the Kitchen and the perpetually stoned mind of Medusa. If these instructions are vague, it's because they're meant to be. Just fiddle around with some forms and get them posted in the Kitchen.

Here is Taylor Graham’s Sonnette, this one about the noble turkey:

TURKEY SONNETTE (abbacbc)
—Taylor Graham

Two turkey toms beyond the deck
in slow and stately formal dance—
pavane or saraband—no silly prance
but fan-tail, breast-beard, snood & wattled neck
crimson & baby-blue in morning light,
they do this ritual of step and glance
with not a turkey hen in sight.

—Photo by Taylor Graham

 
This week, Joyce Odam has sent us an Ode (www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ode):

ODE TO THINGS
—Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA
(After "Ode to Bicycles" by Pablo Neruda)

As if Life remembers, as if real beyond itself—
continuance and static,
a useful toy or tool for each pretender.
        ______

Here is a footstool with no foot to rest upon it.
Here is a foot with no rest—but restless.
        ______

A wheel is ever ready to roll but no one
will roll it. How can it grow impatient,
when it is only a wheel in description of itself.
        ______

Diamonds are as useless as stones
unless one loves stones or diamonds.
        ______

Ah, here is the opposite of everything wasted
or used; here is the outcome : how
        ______

not be turned on, or off, but not by
volition in usefulness or need
or waste of creation.
        ______

Is anything useful to itself
or only to another,
and why the question?

—Public Domain Cartoon

Tom Goff has sent us an elegant Villanelle (www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/poetic-forms-villanelle). Don’t get tripped up on this form and its use of repetition:

SPINDRIFT (a Villanelle)
—Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA

The mind dies with the body down below
The god-cloud spindrift. What do we intend?
We practice all our lives to rise, to know,

Then hunker down in tundraholds of bone,
So fiercely do we determine not to end.
The mind dies with the body down below,

Just one more organ minced and pulped. What sows
This ardent muck with longings to transcend?
We practiced all our lives to rise, to know,

To ride swift updrafts to an afterglow,
Our swirls ourselves, but beaten into blend.
The mind dies with the body. Down below,

Beneath earth’s binding crust, both undergo
Grueling dissolve. Chop-logic Thought pretends
We’ve practiced all our lives to rise, to know

What gods extract from nerve-weave: call it Soul.
Torn from the raw flower, what blossom scent will it send?
The mind dies with the body down below.
We practiced, all our lives, to rise: but no.

(first pub. in Medusa's Kitchen and Falcon Scratch, Folsom Lake College)

—Public Domain Cartoon

J.D. DeHart has sent a Found Poem about the pandemic (www.writersdigest.com/personal-updates/found-poetry-converting-or-stealing-the-words-of-others):

THE PRICE: FOUND POEM IN THE NEWS
—J.D. DeHart, Chattanooga, TN

More lives
a pandemic now appears
            ready to pay.

A grim plateau
            despite projections.

Shift blame.
Death toll.

You have to be
            careful.

Infections and forecasts,
escalating the push.

Optimistic take
            challenged, point
fingers.

See how your state
            stands.

__________________

Caschwa (Carl Schwartz) has found a Chinese form, the Chueh-chu (www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/chueh-chu-poetic-forms):

FUNNY HOW THAT SEEMS (a Chueh-chu)
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA

muscles—tear down to build anew
chaparral—fires start on their own
children—continue what we start
elder—nothing but skin and bone

dating—feels like all kinds of fun
lovers—two tongues, one ice cream cone
marriage—a contract agreement
candles, fuses—out when they’re blown

____________________

Carl, too, has tackled the wee Sonnette:

HALF SONNET (also known as a Sonnette: abbacbc)
—Caschwa

the words are chopped and tossed into a bowl
then topped with fancy, virgin olive oil
collective thoughts are brought to quite a boil
forget to bow and surely heads will roll
there was a day when poets spoke their minds
when main roles shined their light right through a foil
but these days people opt to shut the blinds

—Public Domain Cartoon

Here, Carl uses a chain of Cinquains (poets.org/glossary/cinquain) to address our recent Seed of the Week, Betrayal:

CIN OF BETRAYAL
—Caschwa

lowly
runt of litter
property owner must
timely pay all the taxes due
because

there are
huge penalties
if one fails to honor
their obligations and not make
payment

beware
the temptation
to fall into this trap
you will feel good for a short time
before

G-men
knock your door down
to bring home the point that
nobody, NOBODY, escapes
taxes

you will
on second thought
undoubtedly see some
exceptions to this standard rule
which serve

to prove
your dangerous,
devious potential
to find a reason not to pay
your bill

—Public Domain Cartoon

And for his grand finale, Carl has gone wild with enjambment (literarydevices.net/enjambment) in a Sonnet:

ENJAMB PRESERVES
—Caschwa

those who start talking when there is no more
to say something that is known to be false
eyelashes complete the image we store
bought smiles that look so real but lack a pulse

is normal, blood pressure fine, pupils are
sitting in class, paying attention to
err is human, like failing the state bar
code readers will need to be dusted, too

many mistakes a success does not make
this the last round of drinks, because we’ve had
I but known how much longer this would take
over for me, I have to go real bad

dreams caused me to toss and turn all night long
division proves that your math skills are strong

________________________

We've thrown a lot of forms at you today; you may want to look some of them up online. Here is a list of resources—or just Google up the form you want:

•••Shadow Poetry: www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/wip/types.html
•••Poets’ Collective: poetscollective.org/poetryforms/example-index
•••Poets.org: poets.org/glossary
•••Poetry Foundation: www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms?category=209
•••Bob’s Byway: www.poeticbyway.com/glossary.html
•••Desolation Poets by Sacramento’s Jan Haag: janhaag.com/PODesIntro.html
•••Baymoon: www.baymoon.com/~ariadne
•••The Poets Garret: thepoetsgarret.com/list.html
•••Writer’s Digest: www.writersdigest.com/?s=poetry&submit= (just type in the form you want in the search bar at upper right) OR www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/list-of-50-poetic-forms-for-poets
•••Classical Poets: classicalpoets.org/category/poetry-forms (articles, but not in any order)

_________________________

—Medusa, with bravos to our courageous Fiddlers today—Keep up the good work and poetic adventures, and don’t be shy about trying any or all of these forms (or any others) and sending them in to kathykieth@hotmail.com for those ever-hungry snakes!

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

who says, “Quick—Spill some Diet Cokes on those critters!”

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.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Life Ain't Easy

Morning Gold

—Poetry and Visuals by Smith, Cleveland, OH

BUSY SIGNAL

I broadcast from my ground zero.

You receive from your ground zero.

Ground varies point A to B
assuming common ground at all.

What I transmit retrieved by you
may be garbled by flux and flow.

Or said right yet heard wrong—
wrong by chance,
wrong on purpose to repurpose say.

You may hear well and clear yet still unhear
because your here not my here,
your hear unsaid.

You may clear hear wrong song
or near hear err way.

I may not know what I say
but say I know.

I fall to ground.

You call ground home.

Accident

THE VALIDITY OF RELATIONSHIPS

Full moon

Dead
Moonlight drips
Drips down
Moistening
Dead realities
Dead realty
Dripping down
Motioning
Dead
Dead
Realities
Dread reality

The moon is moist in Autumn
Great, rotund.

Smokescreen

DEATH DANCE

Take one crisis forward
Two disasters back
Do the death dance baby
Spin the man in black

Don’t you mind the drooling
Or the puddles on the floor
I don’t care who you’re fooling
Death destructs the poor

And way before you’re dying
You creak and crack and groan
Then comes along the diapering
The one-way ticket rest home

Where drenched in piss and TV
You’re just one more peopled pod
I tell you life ain’t easy
With or without your God

Dead End

FUNGU STEW

Old piano roll’s wrong:
Slime can’t slide.
Hot crotch coffee time's
Limited clearance
For the effluent affluent,
The halfway whores,
The herd nerd cud kulchur,
And the old ass versus mass.

Psycho servitudes feed the fever,
Fodder optional.
Prime apes ape pre ape,
Mom's ashes my dust.
People getting fat.
Soft.
Old.
Luxury cushioned
Nurture negating nature.
Easy pickings.
Easy meat.
Easy feeding easy street.

Women leak.
Men bleed.
My country 'tis of greed,
Cleveland cop corruptus.
Onion nation bent on killing shame.
Sodom insane.

Cateye

FERTILE LIES

Small particles of truth lace love’s lies

Peeping one-eyed cat’s seafood stores
mount used two-love carnivore rides
cast past sated loss

Self-to-self slip service schemes for the day
emasculation Mama stiff with semen
screams dreams porta piss shit machine
messaged me to mine

Bile regenerative truth du jour:
loving spoonful’s pearl jam
nirvana to my hole

Rust Never Sleeps

ECO SYPHILIS

This earth rolls old through fading sun
as all partake of all
yet few return from feeder's lure or feathered palm
interest on said sin

Let other purse our sloth rehearse
refresh without refrain
for fascists flee from failed fight
to worshipped imagery
which doubted doubles pain

When tables turn
most mock concern
and ramble on in shackles
dogs of dust neglecting trust
entranced by past disasters

Since truth be known
by no known tome
until enhanced and factored
let's be done with rough rerun
membrane's sour remorse
pre-paid replies
defacto lies
return our lives to act/or.

Wetwood

DEATH BY CREDIT CARD

Her body old,
her weight gone,
frame down to bone and fur
her love for us still bright,
she was done,
had had it,
cancer,
pain.

She rubbed unsteady against my ankles,
looked up
and howled piteously for release.

I felt shame
because I hadn't loved her enough
to kill her yesterday.

Next day we lay her on vet's table
on a warm blanket,
pet her awhile,
and talked.

I knelt
and we locked eyes,
the tip of my finger
between the pads of her paw
as she held me.

When the drug hit
I saw no fear,
she just looked up and away
in brief startle,
and was gone.

Such a small creature
for so immense an impact,
blackhole of loss.

First time I've paid to have love killed
and we had to put it on credit.

1ststep

BIRD WALK TOXIN TALK, DIKE 14, CLEVELAND

We walked a bird walk guided talk today
on 88 acres of peninsula,
land carved from Lake Erie water
by 20 years of dredged river muck dumped
from the bottom of the Cuyahoga River,
silt and dirt and toxins and runoffs
from the industrial flats,
chemical poisons from steel mills
and coal and asphalt and salt and sewer
and chemist only knows what
taken from the bottom of a river that caught fire
and burned for two hours in 1969,
a river described by its 1880 mayor as
a sewer that runs through the heart of the city,
a river first fired in 1868 and then burned repeatedly
before its multi-million dollar 1952 inferno,
all ignored until ’69 when white national reporters
asked America's first large-city black mayor
just what he was going to do about it
so he cleaned it up
showing Congress and country it could be done
igniting the nation's clean air and water act
leading to boating riverside dock bars
and Goodtime cruises,
though I still wouldn't drink it, or even swim
(thank you Mayor Carl Stokes),
and today we walked river muck reclaimed
by grass and plants and trees and time
and seeds shat by birds and mammal
and blown by wind,
we saw loon, towhees, tree sparrows,
over a dozen great blue herons,
more redwing blackbirds than I've seen in my life,
egret, robins, mallards, crows, seagulls, tern,
flickers that used to be called yellow-shafted flickers
until they changed the names to sell more books,
song sparrows, blue-gray gnatcatchers, falcon,
fox sparrows doing their back ’n forth shuffle dance,
a yellow-rumped warbler, downy woodpeckers,
cooper’s hawk, redtail hawk, turkey vultures, cowbirds,
morning doves, and blackbirds
all amidst a constant chorus of birdsong
with solos by angel-wing butterflies, poison hemlock,
deer, wild cucumber, boxelder,
and a host of birds plants trees butterflies I missed
and I gotta tell you
it's a nice this

Skywatch

Today’s LittleNip:

There's shouldn't
and there's is—
some die so some live

—Smith

____________________

Thank-you and grateful to The Smith (Steven B. Smith) from cross-country for sparkling poems and visuals today—always glad to hear him pop into the Kitchen!

This is, indeed, the time of the Internet. Here is some interesting stuff to check out on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/?category=invites&notif_id=1589985453104751&notif_t=page_invite/.

In our area, two online readings tonight: At 6:30pm, Sac. Poetry Center presents a reading featuring Laurel Rayburn, Rick Rayburn, and Marty Rayburn (https://us02web.zoom.us/j/98450376585). And then at 8pm, Poetry Night in Davis presents Liliana Valdez, León Salvatierra, and Francisco Aragón via Zoom at ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones/. For upcoming poetry readings and workshops available online while we stay at home, scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa

Ozsmith

—Visual by Smith

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.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Worshipping God Apollo

—Poems by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Photos of LED Butterfly Ballerinas

BLACK MARKET, WHITE PAPER

“I’ll trade all these conflict diamonds
for two rolls of your toilet paper.”
What a tango of crook talk! Soft-
or hard-worded, touch. Not vapor.
White rolled-up paper. Brand?
No bother. Don’t matter.
Black-market currency,
prized by the urgency.

THAT HARMONIOUS COMPRESS OF ESSENTIALS
(Thom Gunn phrase)

Compressed? In me, who thought
the Desert Island Collection
a lie-land desert?
That I’d stick to what I’d bought,
not chase an imperfection
for some supposed fresh potential?
Yes, time to sift, to cull. “Keep or toss,”
no days left now for “talk about.”
Compress to essentials:
Bird on a plastic alto sax,
of a famous five at Massey Hall,
rips through “Perdido.”
Fluent, not florid late-style red-sealed, compact;
terse, clipped, sour Miles Davis note-fall
not the least Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue,
those grand but waystations
toward dances with Pharaoh.
Let Benny Maupin’s pine-resin-tipped-torch
light the pitch-black way,
Wayne Shorter select the prime instant to inveigh,
invest the soprano sax
with ellipses, tracers, robe the instrument metal
in whole-tone scales, enigmas.
All these iconic floating improv-notes
outstretched like saints’ hands
receiving the piercing, suffering
while Miles, a Vodun priest, hunts voodoos,
plays both Shaft-era hustler and neo-African messiah.
He is the boxer, jabbing and feinting,
the mouthpiece bang on the mouth punch,
He is the Abdul Mati Klarwein painting.
All rise, all feel the feel of the stigmata,
the nailed-hand stigma of vatic-visioned loners,
all hear the echo-tocsin, drink the Bitches Brew.

***

All hail the energy flow styled Dionysian,
recklessly cascading unalloyed,
unalloyed, overwhelming the arcade
we thought it confined to. Primal and artesian
geysering groundwater, sheer Artemisian,
from bent bow only as bends shoot arrowhead-
straight essence, concentrate, that on the sped
momentum builds momentum. Virgin, Elysian,
all flesh and blood the food of bassarids
who take the grape-wreathed, goatskin-clad god to follow;
but what of our parts responding less to kids
and wines than blanks like gusts through meadowed hollows,
Aeolian strings without lutes, eyes without lids?
Be sure if you purify to sun-scoured bones
with seashell tunes to whistle through or groans
at eye-holes in skulls, you worship god Apollo.
Mosaic, music, blade-clean Z-slash Zorro,
Dickinson’s marrowfinger touch of Zero,
simpler than opera-tunes of Giuseppe Verdi
though belike you’re dead as Hamlet to hear it, perdy.

EMBOUCHURE AND AIRSTREAM
(embouchure = the trumpet player’s set of the lips, teeth, and tongue)

Not-too-wide smile,
nor yet too much bunch,
rose cave of the mouth
high of arch,
yet paying out stream
slim and subtle
intake-outblow shuttle,
the skim-thin beam
ping-pong-ball-lofting
air-current-fountaining,
focused, freeplay. Film-lucent
dragonfly wing?
So gauzed, yet arrowed,
whistler’s-mother-narrowed,
strained through the lead-pipe.
Tend to the mouthpiece:
Two-thirds upper lip,
one-third lower.
Quiet, said my trumpet teacher:
mouse peeing on a blotter.
All the bodyworld’s an embouchure,
supports air column, constant push,
filling, not straining,
the gut’s sofa cushion.
Didn’t opera-great George London
commit self-harm
late straining hard at the diaphragm?
All sinews, lips, lung, stomach, allies
easing the throat’s arterial alleys.
Let it not be said
you fell and folded
on innards, parts the embouchure failed.
On notes brass-brawny, gold in their flow,
Heldentrompete Gottfried Reiche
died still trumpeting, old,
overblowing Sebastian Bach’s
Alpen-lord highs in torchlight smoke;
next day’s dawn saw him
fall down cold on his own doorstep,
collapsed on his own midriff,
not balancing wonted isometric
just-enoughness, lacking the letting-go
slight recompense, thus strained, he broke.

GRAVE-SPRUNG

We are also accustomed to clichés of time and space, often hearing, for example, that the springtime of life leads only to the narrow space of the grave.
—Helen Vendler, in Poems • Poets • Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

The narrow space of the grave led to springtime.
You, long-gone Calvinist grandmother, Scotch grandfather,
you both had to drop off the tree for me to climb.
Death was your bright talent, your gift; what would you rather?
Bargain with Jesus to stay, while I, unborn,
would come out stillborn? Well, how premature,
your hopes; and premature me, plus Jim, womb-torn.
All your natal defects, saved up to ensure
weak limbs, short breath, depression, delusion for us,
you stitched and basted into our genomes.
You sewed in some brains, yes, but—so sly, without fuss—
laced our bloods with toxins. We stole your homes.
If you should come back some day rebirthed, beware,
I’ll run you both down with walker or wheelchair.

________________________

Today’s LittleNip:

ESSENTIAL PAPER
—Tom Goff

The stuff that
reams are made of.

________________________

Our thanks to Tom Goff for today’s fine poetry! An inspiration he is, so get out your keyboard/pen/pencil tonight at 6pm for Write Night, a Zoom meeting with prompts and sharing, hosted by 916 Ink at https://zoom.us/j/328052844?pwd=UFF5Vi9YaWttaU1nQ092Y0hWdEJadz09/. For more upcoming poetry readings and workshops available online while we stay at home, scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa

Social Distancing in Canada

—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of

Joseph Nolan, Stockton, CA

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.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Pastorals of Self-Deceiving

A Phase
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA

AGAINST FINDING

Brooding alone by a marshy pond. Sitting among the
shadows. A strange position. No grief but hers. Made
of love, hate, her thoughts trapped. A thicket-bird sings
out. Then another. Openings of light through the trees.
Shadows tangle in the undergrowth. Dense. Like sor-
row. Who will come, if not love. Repentant. Something
holds her. Small movements in the fetid water. Spears
of water grass. Tiny nibbles of last sunlight. Water
circles pull at her foot. Her arms brace against falling.
The trees murmur, close in. Her body sags. Where is
the path? Does she care?

(prev. pub. in Nerve Cowboy, 2011)

The Depth of Now

AESOP: RETOLD

We were the grasshoppers,
lost in a summer fable.
We scorned the diligent ants
who bustled with temperate hungers
to chide
our transient appetites.

We
were all green translucence,
winged for each other.
And our ripe singing
chimed through days
filled with the squander
of all we needed

then,
but
when
a twang of blue wind
stiffened the grasses
and snagged on thistle,
we hushed to the song of winter
and learned the first gnawing
of our last hunger.

A Song—For All We Know

DIMENSION OF ILLUSION

They live in mirrors and they know
the glass is of one depth
but many—

and they keep the land of image
in their grassy rooms
in pastorals of self-deceiving,

while they go in and out of time
like Alices
through dark imaginations.

________________

THIS DIAMOND FISH

this diamond fish
with his one centered eye
and his other eyes
out at the rim

this fish
in my glass
looking at me
from his own distance

wine-colored mouth
transparent body
refracting
glitters
of cut light

his one life
is in my innocent hand
i twirl him to watch him grin

but he is sober-eyed
looking at me
melancholy
and from his little time
wanting to tell me something
from his mind

but i am watching him
with drunken eyes
and can only marvel
at his beautiful sad self

little mortality image
that i love
so holy and pure
created for the length of
a dark glass of wine
and one poem…

i take one sip
and cannot find him again

(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 11/14)

To Shine Inwardly

FROM A LOST SUMMER DAY

I sink back into tall green grasses.
A soft breeze bends the grasses over me.

Sky-clouds form,
and reform. Voices call my name—

my name that I do not want to hear.
I will not remember my name.

I am in my dreaming.
Awake. Floating in the sea of grasses,

I, and the motioning green shadows,
borne upon the width of forever.

I will never come out.
I am green grass and green shadow.

Even the sky makes room for me—
all energy—one wide presence

without form—
everything alive in my thinking.

A child wants to be alone with child-self.
No voice. No calling.

(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 9/11)

Easy Blues

RELATIVITY

In the waving of the grasses.
I sense the wind,
rather than the grass.

If movement is felt, then what
of stillness
that is not felt?

If I think in detail—ever in
a state of change, how can I trust
my own thinking?

In the waving of the grasses.
I sense the grass,
rather than the wind.

The Meaning of It All

THE FIGUREMENT

In the rich-blending odour
of the garden
where flowers vie for preference . . .

In the stimulations of the mind
for the immaculate view of white birds
ascending into a white sky . . .

In the icy feel of water on the hand
from a flowing stream where tiny fish
dart through your fingers . . .

How a taste will linger
beyond the
hunger for a food—as with a kiss . . .

How love only listens
for what it wants
despite the resistance of another . . .

How hard is this to realize
when all is nothing at the end of being
—a profanity to the mind

that cannot comprehend the sorrow
of the soul—or the figurement
of whatever god it needs and refuses. . . ?

_______________________

Today’s LittleNip:

A BREAK IN THE MONOTONY
—Joyce Odam

Each night they share the chocolate—after dinner,
when they claim their separate chairs and prepare
for the boredom of comfort, when their differences
bring them together in the ritual truce of sharing
something rich and sweet.

_______________________

Our thanks to Joyce Odam for her poems about our Seed of the Week: Diamonds in the Grass (love the lost summer days, the diamond fish, the green grass and green shadow), and for her beautiful blossoms with their priceless colors!

Our new Seed of the Week is Betrayal. 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.

This Thursday, 8pm, Poetry Night in Davis presents a short online poetry reading with Liliana Valdez, León Salvatierra, and Francisco Aragón via Zoom at https://ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones/. Info: www.facebook.com/events/381797729388139/?notif_t=plan_user_invited&notif_id=15898278024437/. Host: Andy Jones.

For upcoming online poetry readings and workshops while we stay at home, scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—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.

Monday, May 18, 2020

Gems

—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Sue Crisp

HIDDEN TREASURE
—Sue Crisp, Shingle Springs, CA

It’s May, that tween-time of late spring
and early summer. Today, perhaps our
last mini-rain of the season. Air fresh,
clean of nature’s pollen.

Jewels from the sky, now diamonds in
the grass, clinging to the thirsty blades.
The shower brings other diamonds in
the grass to the surface.

Keen-eyed robins, ever watchful for
its priceless jewels of surfacing worms.
A grassland treasure for the robin’s
pleasure. These wet diamonds in the
grass, more precious than gold.

—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Sue Crisp

GEMS
—Sue Crisp

I see them, the diamonds in the grass,
winking up at me, like faceted bits of precious glass.
Tiny drops of dew, sparkling in a rainbow hue,
they cling to grass blades and tiny springtime flowers.
All a gift from nature’s showers.

Oh, to view such a treasure chest,
when tear-like droplets show me their best.
A happening upon the diamonds in the grass,
a heartbeat, that to soon will pass.

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

DIPS FOR ALL
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA

here’s a bowl of tortillas and hot dipping sauce
you could have about all you could eat in one day
try the buffalo wings just to show that you’re boss
there is no ticking timer, you set your own pace
the cloth napkins are heirlooms, for stains you will pay
you cannot leave the table with those smears on your face

we are known to have earthquakes that topple the chairs
so be sure to grip hard on the edge of your seat
a big smile will so help you to mask all your errors
if the bowl is now empty you’ll need to get more
all the guests are assured they’ll have plenty to eat
there’s no shortage of wine, we have many to pour

here’s a bowl of tortillas and hot dipping sauce
we are known to have earthquakes that topple the chairs