Photo by Katy Brown, Davis
WISH FOR THE STRAY WHALES
called Delta and Dawn
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
We wish you whales a swift return.
Your voices can evoke wayshape.
Untwist these channels. Please relearn.
We wish you whales a swift return.
These long fresh inlets, chokepoints, traps.
Speak ricochet, sculpt oceanscape.
We wish you whales a swift return.
Your voices, we invoke. Escape.
____________________
Thanks, Tom and Katy! Watch for more from Tom Goff and Katy Brown in Rattlesnake Review #14, due out in mid-June.
Send me a poem about whales by midnight tonight, Friday, May 25 (e-mailed or postmarked) and I'll send you a copy of Ron Tranquilla's new chapbook, Playing Favorites (or any other rattlechap of your choosing). That's kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. And think good thoughts about our recent visitors and their travels. [Sorry I didn't properly credit Colette Jonopulos' haibun yesterday on Medusa's early edition; thanks to Jane Blue for pointing it out.]
This weekend:
•••Saturday, May 26, 7-9 PM: "The Show" presents Rodzilla, Random Abiladeze, S.O.U.L.J.A.S praise dancers, Mario Ellis Hill, Angela Wilson, Hot Crew hip-hop dancers at Wo'se Community Center, 2863 35th St., Sacramento. $5. 916-455-7638.
____________________
IN A DARK TIME
—Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing mind.
Today, Theodore Roethke would've been 99 years old.
_____________________
THE RHODORA
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.
Today, Ralph Waldo Emerson would've been 204 years old.
______________________
THE COUGAR
—Raymond Carver
For John Haines and Keith Wilson
I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon
off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river
of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,
gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,
all the way to California. None of us had been there,
to California, but we knew about that place—they had
restaurants
that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.
I stalked a cougar that day,
if stalk is the right word, slumping and scraping along
upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,
one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid
under the best of circumstances, but that day
I stalked a cougar...
And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,
fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered
with the memory of it after you two had put your stories,
black bear stories, out on the table.
Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.
Something I hadn't thought about for years:
how I stalked a cougar that day.
So I told it. Tried to anyway,
Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,
then saying, You sure it wasn't a bobcat?
Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,
poet who had read that night,
and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,
even a drunk writer like me,
years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.
Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush
right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was—
jumped onto a rock and turned his head
to look at me. To look at me! I looked back, forgetting to shoot.
Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.
Today Raymond Carver would've been 69 years old.
_____________________
—Medusa
Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)
SnakeWatch: Up-to-the-minute Snake news:
Journals (free publications): Rattlesnake Review #13 is available at The Book Collector; RR #14 will be out in mid-June. (Next deadline, for RR #15, is August 15.) The new VYPER #6 (for youth 13-19) is in The Book Collector; next deadline is Nov. 1. Snakelets #9 (for kids 0-12) is available; Snakelets #10 will be out this month. Next deadline is 10/1.
Books/broadsides: May's releases are Grass Valley Poet Ron Tranquilla’s Playing Favorites: Selected Poems, 1971-2006, plus a littlesnake broadside by Julie Valin (Still Life With Sun) and a Rattlesnake Interview Broadside (#2) featuring Khiry Malik Moore and B.L. Kennedy. All are now available at The Book Collector. Rattlechaps are $5; broadsides are free. Or contact kathykieth@hotmail.com or rattlesnakepress.com for ordering information.
Next rattle-read: Rattlesnake Press will present Sacramento Poet Tom Miner at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, on Wednesday, June 20 from 7:30-9 PM to celebrate the release of his new chapbook, North of Everything. Also featured that night will be a new littlesnake broadside (Cominciare Adagio) from Stockton Poet/Publisher David Humphreys, plus #3 in the Rattlesnake Interview Series by B.L. Kennedy, this one featuring Sacramento Poet Jane Blue. Refreshments and a read-around will follow; bring your own poems or somebody else's. More info: kathykieth@hotmail.com/ NOTE: For June, and for June only, our monthly Rattlesnake reading will be on the THIRD Weds. instead of the second one. There will be no Snake readings/releases in July or August.
called Delta and Dawn
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
We wish you whales a swift return.
Your voices can evoke wayshape.
Untwist these channels. Please relearn.
We wish you whales a swift return.
These long fresh inlets, chokepoints, traps.
Speak ricochet, sculpt oceanscape.
We wish you whales a swift return.
Your voices, we invoke. Escape.
____________________
Thanks, Tom and Katy! Watch for more from Tom Goff and Katy Brown in Rattlesnake Review #14, due out in mid-June.
Send me a poem about whales by midnight tonight, Friday, May 25 (e-mailed or postmarked) and I'll send you a copy of Ron Tranquilla's new chapbook, Playing Favorites (or any other rattlechap of your choosing). That's kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. And think good thoughts about our recent visitors and their travels. [Sorry I didn't properly credit Colette Jonopulos' haibun yesterday on Medusa's early edition; thanks to Jane Blue for pointing it out.]
This weekend:
•••Saturday, May 26, 7-9 PM: "The Show" presents Rodzilla, Random Abiladeze, S.O.U.L.J.A.S praise dancers, Mario Ellis Hill, Angela Wilson, Hot Crew hip-hop dancers at Wo'se Community Center, 2863 35th St., Sacramento. $5. 916-455-7638.
____________________
IN A DARK TIME
—Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing mind.
Today, Theodore Roethke would've been 99 years old.
_____________________
THE RHODORA
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.
Today, Ralph Waldo Emerson would've been 204 years old.
______________________
THE COUGAR
—Raymond Carver
For John Haines and Keith Wilson
I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon
off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river
of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,
gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,
all the way to California. None of us had been there,
to California, but we knew about that place—they had
restaurants
that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.
I stalked a cougar that day,
if stalk is the right word, slumping and scraping along
upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,
one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid
under the best of circumstances, but that day
I stalked a cougar...
And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,
fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered
with the memory of it after you two had put your stories,
black bear stories, out on the table.
Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.
Something I hadn't thought about for years:
how I stalked a cougar that day.
So I told it. Tried to anyway,
Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,
then saying, You sure it wasn't a bobcat?
Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,
poet who had read that night,
and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,
even a drunk writer like me,
years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.
Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush
right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was—
jumped onto a rock and turned his head
to look at me. To look at me! I looked back, forgetting to shoot.
Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.
Today Raymond Carver would've been 69 years old.
_____________________
—Medusa
Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)
SnakeWatch: Up-to-the-minute Snake news:
Journals (free publications): Rattlesnake Review #13 is available at The Book Collector; RR #14 will be out in mid-June. (Next deadline, for RR #15, is August 15.) The new VYPER #6 (for youth 13-19) is in The Book Collector; next deadline is Nov. 1. Snakelets #9 (for kids 0-12) is available; Snakelets #10 will be out this month. Next deadline is 10/1.
Books/broadsides: May's releases are Grass Valley Poet Ron Tranquilla’s Playing Favorites: Selected Poems, 1971-2006, plus a littlesnake broadside by Julie Valin (Still Life With Sun) and a Rattlesnake Interview Broadside (#2) featuring Khiry Malik Moore and B.L. Kennedy. All are now available at The Book Collector. Rattlechaps are $5; broadsides are free. Or contact kathykieth@hotmail.com or rattlesnakepress.com for ordering information.
Next rattle-read: Rattlesnake Press will present Sacramento Poet Tom Miner at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, on Wednesday, June 20 from 7:30-9 PM to celebrate the release of his new chapbook, North of Everything. Also featured that night will be a new littlesnake broadside (Cominciare Adagio) from Stockton Poet/Publisher David Humphreys, plus #3 in the Rattlesnake Interview Series by B.L. Kennedy, this one featuring Sacramento Poet Jane Blue. Refreshments and a read-around will follow; bring your own poems or somebody else's. More info: kathykieth@hotmail.com/ NOTE: For June, and for June only, our monthly Rattlesnake reading will be on the THIRD Weds. instead of the second one. There will be no Snake readings/releases in July or August.