Circularities
—Poems and Original Artwork by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA
POETRY IS WHAT
(After "Winning His Way" by Gertrude Stein)
Halting speech. In. (inversion) hesitated
mind. Groping for.
Whatever. Word will come
next. Perplexed toward.
Silence. Gertrude in her.
Shadow. Playing with periods and.
Spaces. Enlightened toward light—
a whole sentence. She. Speaks toward me.
Her pupil. Our eyes. Meet.
Speak like this.
Interruptive. What is poetry.
One of us asks again. Which.
She. Not me. I echo. Duet.
She died. I revere. Make sense. Or.
Not. I pray toward. Halting
speech. Trying. On her words. As if.
They were mine.
Feels. Good. To talk like this.
Beginning
THE SEEABLE UNICORN
(After “To the Unseeable Animal” by Wendell Berry)
Camouflaged—in a natural setting—a unicorn;
blent in, as in a tapestry; safe in the colors
around him—almost seen, but only imagined;
unwary—and at rest—in the overlapping gold
and green—encircled by an aura of soft light,
you almost fully trust in his existence.
Alongside him, the whispering words of a poem,
speaking of him—making him real to another;
and you listen, all your belief in the unbelievable
restored—as in any fable, far back in memory.
Restrain your cry. Don’t let him know that you
can see him there, lest he—in truth—not exist.
__________________
THE POET AS MOTHER
the child in my body is round
it sleeps in my flesh
I am older than pregnancy
but my child dreams of being born
I sit with my hands upon its heartbeat
it opens its eyes
and smiles through my fingers
(first pub. in Philadelphia Poets, 1988)
Alternating
HOW I TAKE WORDS
then the letters
then the very shapes and curves
and straight lines of letters
then the thickness and thinness of them
to find the subtleties and
connotations
and find the looseness between them
and the stillness
and then the motion
then clump them back together
arranging
and arranging
into groupings
articulations into words
and their phrases,
sentences, paragraphs or stanzas,
the fragments, speeches, thoughts
poems
Theme of Yellow
KEEPING UP WITH THE MUSE
I settle down again to words,
those offhand things
that come to mind and urge me
to respond and connect my thought
to their presence. And in such disorder.
How to capture? Which one first?
They have such beautiful shapes and
meanings. And they mean—
and they mean—everywhere at once.
And I try to hurry my hand
with its scribbling pen that goes
illegible, while my mind
stays clear. Oh this is it! This is it!
And I must capture it. And off they go,
while I gather—frantically gather—
before I lose what is scattered there.
Patio
REVELATIONS OUT OF INEXPERIENCE
. . . so swiftly go the shadows of Time, the shifting of bal-
ances, the paths we took into the tangle . . . a wonderland
of unreality . . . the woods so soft in the filtering moonlight
with their tiny trees and diminishing distance, their curious
paths of strained light into another opening . . .
. . . it was the cure, the cure for silence and interruptive
sound, a moment out of such a word as Time, immeasurable,
such a word as, ‘lived by’ or ‘waited on’, and we lost it after
all, being too immersed in trying to realize the meaning, and
import, and how strange it felt, saying it, as if it were a miracle,
somehow that was believed in
. . . and it was so small we almost missed it, so real we almost
didn’t believe it, it was something we wanted to remember,
tell each other about, like a confession, it was that important . . .
and here we are, trying to conjure it again, as if our love
depended on it.
Dark Way
MOON SIREN
Why fight for sleep when the whole moon is
shining white and near through the window,
when words are waiting to become your poem,
the one you try to grasp out of such moments
as this—the clock anonymous with numbers
that mean nothing except how they trouble you
—move you forward into more of them.
How easily it is to give mind to such intrusion
of the spirit which strives to know itself.
A siren, and the moon shudders a little bit more
into the dawn; a siren, a little howl from
somewhere in the night—near or far,
it makes no difference, the trailing
echo swallows sound, turns it
into brimming silence;
a siren, more like the
pulling of distance,
both fading now.
A shadow blots
out the moon.
__________________
MUSE
Poet will stop here—will look down road
with long hard look. What here does bode
with word held back—does dark muse goad?
Poor poet. Dark mind. Lost word. Lost code.
_________________
Today’s LittleNip:
THE FOUND WORDS
—Joyce Odam
Here are some words
lying on a page
stuffed in a book—
half-read.
I wrote these, I think.
I think they’re mine.
I hope they’re mine.
___________________
A big thank-you to Poet Joyce Odam for her fine poems and artwork today on our recent Seed of the Week for National Poetry Month: Poetry. Our new Seed of the Week is Lost in Joy. 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.
Tonight, Sage Robbins and the Carmichael Public Library will host a poetry open mic at 6pm at the library at 5605 Marconi Ave. in Carmichael. Then head down to Sac. Poetry Center for an improvisational community sing (poems set to song) with Griffin Toffler, 7:30pm. Bring a single printed copy on one page in large font, either of one of your poems, a friend’s, or whatever, to sing in spontaneous song and harmony.
Keep one eye in the Kitchen for poetry events this week—new ones keep rolling in every day as we celebrate this National Poetry Month. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may well be added at the last minute.
—Medusa
Celebrate poetry!
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