Prayer
Painting by Chard Chénier, 1999
Painting by Chard Chénier, 1999
SIX-WAY BYPASS OVER COFFEE AT THE BOOKSTORE
—David Humphreys, Stockton
The MRI’s polymer mummy surrounding
claustrophobia’s air squeezes out in a thin hiss
From a plaque glazed arterial tube.
Banging like a jack hammer’s ping of sonar,
targeting small arms for anti-tank is how he put it.
The plaque is cracked is how they put it,
anesthesia dreams blowing by heavenly blue clouds
across the imaginary kissing of God.
Afterwards, he told his doctor
the surgery was like spot welding,
an image he’d found in a subterfuge
satire on infinity that had been cooked up
like a pan of sizzling verbal snails.
We both looked forward to
something exponentially next level
as if the bridge would stand without pre-stressed
turnbuckling cable in the concrete
and an F-16 could take off straight up in silent anomaly,
our ears not governing this particular occurrence
or this particular departure, our handshake
before we parted firm as a basal cell carcinoma
or the buffeting wind of a semi’s passing shudder.
_____________________
This week in NorCal poetry:
•••Don't forget that there will be no reading at Sacramento Poetry Center tonight, due to Labor Day. Next week will feature Sacramento Poet Laverne Frith.
•••Today (Monday 9/3, Labor Day): 33% OFF everything (except for food & drinks & special-order books) in the Next Chapter Bookstore, Main St., Woodland. One day only!
••Weds. (9/5), 7:30-11 PM (doors open at 7): On the Road… Again: Luna’s Café presents A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Readers include Matt Amott, Todd Cirillo, Josh Fernandez, Patrick Grizzell, Robert Grossklaus, B. L. Kennedy (reader and host), Megan, Jackie Schaffer, D.R. Wagner, Terryl Wheat. 1414 16th St., Sacramento. Free. [See today's Sacramento Bee for an extensive syndicated article about Kerouac.]
•••Thursday (9/6), 8 PM: Poetry Unplugged at Luna's Cafe, 1414 16th St., Sacramento. Featured readers, with open mic before and after.
•••Friday (9/7), 7:30 PM: The Other Voice in Davis is pleased to open its 2007-08 season with a presentation by the poets and writers from In This Quiet Light, a book of writings by the Worship Associates of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Davis. The group meets in the Sanctuary of the church located at 27074 Patwin Road. Along with other writers, the poets featured are Ray Coppock, Ruth Hall, Nancy Jungerman, Alexandra Lee-Jobe, Bryan and Rebecca Plude, and Carlena Wike. Refreshments will be served after the reading.
______________________
SEVERAL OBSCURITIES
—David Humphreys
"Let's be dinosaurs,"
"No, let's be Wendy and Peter Pan,"
"No, let's be in mommy's garden,"
"No, that's not an animal. It has big ears,"
Our first reaction is, well, haven't we heard this all before?
So where's that special quality that might set it apart,
redundant even more deadly than arsenic in the casserole.
The election was held last Tuesday in a cold garage,
squeak and rub of black felt pen
smelling sharp indelible ink.
The results are in and it is an almost perfect balance of power.
Of course, no one is really happy about it.
Somewhere else they're observing individual molecular reactions
in containment vessels one-fiftieth the size of the average living cell.
They're also trapping and storing frozen anti-matter
and a new theology was developed recently
that might reduce religious conflict.
No one's ready for it yet since everyone would have to accept
everyone else's mythology as well as their own
and that just pretty much takes care of that.
Returning to the toy box, big plastic bucket really,
filled with hundreds of plastic pieces,
little ladders, duplo segments, building bricks
with chain links of flexible snapping rings.
A Godzilla Starfighter lies nested with a slice of
pepperoni polymer pizza with a landfill's undetermined half-life.
An orange Jack'o lantern grins at a spy glass compass.
A doll house easy boy lounge chair cradles
a thermometer shot syringe,
the doctor's medicine bag long since lost and shredded,
melted and mixed in a vat of playtime fantasies
now turned into carpet padding for added resale value.
Wasn’t it Hegel who said that history repeats itself?
______________________
STELLAR DUST
—David Humphreys
Moliere's Tartuffe is linked indelibly
to Ionesco's Rhinoceros this dazzling day.
He suffers from ambivalence
while off to the side the Prince of Denmark
kills video Messerschmitts in virtually real time,
and responds to the arcane and difficult
question about what the Cardinal thinks
of mechanistic free will or illusion,
now and ever shall be, world without end amen.
As it turns out he doesn't trouble himself.
Animal husbandry is his most abiding interest
after all. The sense of awe once worn like
a cloak lives on in eroded stone.
Beneath vaulted ceilings columns are
compressed by the weight of stars.
Pilgrims cannot free themselves from
haunting symmetries, stark and stoic
as stained glass mandalas describe the thriving
vital combustion of super novas stacked
end to end to very end. Not close in time
or in any other way except in odd adhesion
these five or six or seven too many characters
share the same hilarious café table
with brevity's soul of staggering wit
wondering all the while and to oneself,
perhaps the subjective plum is grafted
to the forever tree of the incomplete
and so will be gobbled up by the
sponge bubble black hole anomaly
of the missing definitive mid-stride conclusion
somehow as if far too intentional and complicit.
Do you take sweetener?
_____________________
—Medusa (May your day be less-than-laborious...)
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.) For more info about the Snake Empire, including guidelines for submitting to or obtaining our publications, click on the link to the right of this column: Rattlesnake Press (rattlesnakepress.com).
SnakeWatch: Up-to-the-minute Snake news:
ZZZZZZZ: Shh! The Snake is still sleeping! There will be no readings/releases in August, then we return with a bang on September 12, presenting Susan Kelly-DeWitt's new chapbook, Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree. See the online journal, Mudlark, for a hefty sample of poems from her book; that’s http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/. And read more about Susan at her nifty new website, http://www.susankelly-dewitt.com/. Click on "Chapbooks" for a sneak preview of Cassiopeia's cover.
Also coming in mid-September: The new issue of Rattlesnake Review (15), plus a littlesnake broadside from dawn dibartolo (Blush), and a continuation of B.L. Kennedy's Rattlesnake Interview Series—including #4 (frank andrick) and an anthology of interviews to be released for Sacramento Poetry Month (October). Next deadline for Rattlesnake Review (16) is November 15.
—David Humphreys, Stockton
The MRI’s polymer mummy surrounding
claustrophobia’s air squeezes out in a thin hiss
From a plaque glazed arterial tube.
Banging like a jack hammer’s ping of sonar,
targeting small arms for anti-tank is how he put it.
The plaque is cracked is how they put it,
anesthesia dreams blowing by heavenly blue clouds
across the imaginary kissing of God.
Afterwards, he told his doctor
the surgery was like spot welding,
an image he’d found in a subterfuge
satire on infinity that had been cooked up
like a pan of sizzling verbal snails.
We both looked forward to
something exponentially next level
as if the bridge would stand without pre-stressed
turnbuckling cable in the concrete
and an F-16 could take off straight up in silent anomaly,
our ears not governing this particular occurrence
or this particular departure, our handshake
before we parted firm as a basal cell carcinoma
or the buffeting wind of a semi’s passing shudder.
_____________________
This week in NorCal poetry:
•••Don't forget that there will be no reading at Sacramento Poetry Center tonight, due to Labor Day. Next week will feature Sacramento Poet Laverne Frith.
•••Today (Monday 9/3, Labor Day): 33% OFF everything (except for food & drinks & special-order books) in the Next Chapter Bookstore, Main St., Woodland. One day only!
••Weds. (9/5), 7:30-11 PM (doors open at 7): On the Road… Again: Luna’s Café presents A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Readers include Matt Amott, Todd Cirillo, Josh Fernandez, Patrick Grizzell, Robert Grossklaus, B. L. Kennedy (reader and host), Megan, Jackie Schaffer, D.R. Wagner, Terryl Wheat. 1414 16th St., Sacramento. Free. [See today's Sacramento Bee for an extensive syndicated article about Kerouac.]
•••Thursday (9/6), 8 PM: Poetry Unplugged at Luna's Cafe, 1414 16th St., Sacramento. Featured readers, with open mic before and after.
•••Friday (9/7), 7:30 PM: The Other Voice in Davis is pleased to open its 2007-08 season with a presentation by the poets and writers from In This Quiet Light, a book of writings by the Worship Associates of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Davis. The group meets in the Sanctuary of the church located at 27074 Patwin Road. Along with other writers, the poets featured are Ray Coppock, Ruth Hall, Nancy Jungerman, Alexandra Lee-Jobe, Bryan and Rebecca Plude, and Carlena Wike. Refreshments will be served after the reading.
______________________
SEVERAL OBSCURITIES
—David Humphreys
"Let's be dinosaurs,"
"No, let's be Wendy and Peter Pan,"
"No, let's be in mommy's garden,"
"No, that's not an animal. It has big ears,"
Our first reaction is, well, haven't we heard this all before?
So where's that special quality that might set it apart,
redundant even more deadly than arsenic in the casserole.
The election was held last Tuesday in a cold garage,
squeak and rub of black felt pen
smelling sharp indelible ink.
The results are in and it is an almost perfect balance of power.
Of course, no one is really happy about it.
Somewhere else they're observing individual molecular reactions
in containment vessels one-fiftieth the size of the average living cell.
They're also trapping and storing frozen anti-matter
and a new theology was developed recently
that might reduce religious conflict.
No one's ready for it yet since everyone would have to accept
everyone else's mythology as well as their own
and that just pretty much takes care of that.
Returning to the toy box, big plastic bucket really,
filled with hundreds of plastic pieces,
little ladders, duplo segments, building bricks
with chain links of flexible snapping rings.
A Godzilla Starfighter lies nested with a slice of
pepperoni polymer pizza with a landfill's undetermined half-life.
An orange Jack'o lantern grins at a spy glass compass.
A doll house easy boy lounge chair cradles
a thermometer shot syringe,
the doctor's medicine bag long since lost and shredded,
melted and mixed in a vat of playtime fantasies
now turned into carpet padding for added resale value.
Wasn’t it Hegel who said that history repeats itself?
______________________
STELLAR DUST
—David Humphreys
Moliere's Tartuffe is linked indelibly
to Ionesco's Rhinoceros this dazzling day.
He suffers from ambivalence
while off to the side the Prince of Denmark
kills video Messerschmitts in virtually real time,
and responds to the arcane and difficult
question about what the Cardinal thinks
of mechanistic free will or illusion,
now and ever shall be, world without end amen.
As it turns out he doesn't trouble himself.
Animal husbandry is his most abiding interest
after all. The sense of awe once worn like
a cloak lives on in eroded stone.
Beneath vaulted ceilings columns are
compressed by the weight of stars.
Pilgrims cannot free themselves from
haunting symmetries, stark and stoic
as stained glass mandalas describe the thriving
vital combustion of super novas stacked
end to end to very end. Not close in time
or in any other way except in odd adhesion
these five or six or seven too many characters
share the same hilarious café table
with brevity's soul of staggering wit
wondering all the while and to oneself,
perhaps the subjective plum is grafted
to the forever tree of the incomplete
and so will be gobbled up by the
sponge bubble black hole anomaly
of the missing definitive mid-stride conclusion
somehow as if far too intentional and complicit.
Do you take sweetener?
_____________________
—Medusa (May your day be less-than-laborious...)
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.) For more info about the Snake Empire, including guidelines for submitting to or obtaining our publications, click on the link to the right of this column: Rattlesnake Press (rattlesnakepress.com).
SnakeWatch: Up-to-the-minute Snake news:
ZZZZZZZ: Shh! The Snake is still sleeping! There will be no readings/releases in August, then we return with a bang on September 12, presenting Susan Kelly-DeWitt's new chapbook, Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree. See the online journal, Mudlark, for a hefty sample of poems from her book; that’s http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/. And read more about Susan at her nifty new website, http://www.susankelly-dewitt.com/. Click on "Chapbooks" for a sneak preview of Cassiopeia's cover.
Also coming in mid-September: The new issue of Rattlesnake Review (15), plus a littlesnake broadside from dawn dibartolo (Blush), and a continuation of B.L. Kennedy's Rattlesnake Interview Series—including #4 (frank andrick) and an anthology of interviews to be released for Sacramento Poetry Month (October). Next deadline for Rattlesnake Review (16) is November 15.