Artistry
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA
THE OLD LOVERS AT SUNSET
The old lover faces into the sunlight and sees his old lover in
last silhouette, and thinks how this blindness fastens beauty
to an old regret, and notices how his own arm is still attached
to some failing gesture as he reaches for a word, and how her
hair is wild against the sky as she turns away, and how his
eye—through a blear—sees how far the dusk is from the dawn,
though how similar the tone of light is, just as a thought is re-
collected in time to fill a conversation.
And she, in her dark grope of vision, notices how he wears an-
other rage of dying color on his face, and how his eyes burn
through her as he lowers his arm and finds another silence, and
they stand for a moment, like this, full of time and lack of time,
and some shadow crawls between them, like a dog, and licks
their shoes which blend into the grass, and a bird flies by, oh,
just in time to save them.
Allure
THE CRACK IN TIME
How do I not give you rhyme now,
suspend in the moment, a direction.
I guide you : words, time between
words, attendants attending.
I, at the measurement of this,
write slowly, do not waste
or lose a word :
word, word, come to me,
love permeates, spills over,
grief before grieving,
oh, love, help us, help us,
you, focal point—receiver and giver
of yourself, hold my hand now
as I am holding yours.
__________________
when winds of time converge,
and time is spent in some old saw of nothing new,
only the peeve of shadow-memories that collect
in negative confusion, contrary to desire—how
else seek explanation for so many sadnesses—
sink back into memory and lose yourself again,
no need to return—it’s all still there :
the old perfections, dimly memorized—
waste nothing this time, unraveling as slow
as you want, to why and when it changed—
no matter how you pulled the strings
or see it all in retrospect, clear of eye and mind,
and let this not be postscript to your sad reality.
Witchery
WHO GOES THROUGH OUR RUINS,
picking through the stones, tearing out the shadows
by their sleeves, uprooting the broken windows that
have lied about their views?
Who goes through—sadly and softly—without per-
mission, begging clues from everything? What can
be found now after all the dying of the hours and the
years?
Who goes into our rooms and calls and calls our
names, and why do we answer to the habit of those
names, though we are not there?
How can we live in memory like that? Those doors
are closed. Who opens them now—this late, this
early—expecting more than ever of us?
Pizzazz
OUT OF THE RUINS
Cry
echoes—
infant’s mouth
—wide open in
raw howl, in debris,
in awareness of life—
of hunger, of loss, of fear—
everything shattered around him:
poor broken world, offering its last
living being—howling here in distress . . .
___________________
RUINS
I have met myself in the broken mirror—watched how
I cracked when I barely shifted—marveled and marveled
at how I held together—eye to eye, and mouth to mouth
with my fissured smile that admired such a countenance.
~~~
Today I go where the violets are rusting in the rain. I carry
an umbrella for them, but it is all too late. They droop and
bedraggle, and even the yellow ones seem beyond hope.
I feel like a yellow violet rusting in the rain.
~~~
I thought I would never wear silence again, such sobbing,
such screaming, lost down endless corridors on clumsy
reverberations—only to bounce at the end and go silent—
that is what I mean. Oh, silently, that is what I mean.
~~~
Found an old manuscript in the rain today. Wept at its
words, so lost. Wept at its words, so blurring together.
Mourned at its meaning—words and meaning, their ink
dissolving. I am an old manuscript blurring in the rain.
~~~
My anger comes slowly now through the long endurance,
of reasons, of old patience spilling over into that hopeless
rage against all that is so unfair. The anger—the anger—
is here—and how can I lose it, my anger that comes slowly.
~~~
Violence came up to me and said, “Hire me. Hire me.”
I am cheap. I am good at what I do. I haven’t eaten in three
days. I’m down on my luck.” And violence gave me such a
look, I considered—considered—what would this cost me?
Dazzle
STACKS OF LETTERS
We are left loose now, out of our envelopes,
escaping the long journeyings back and forth—
letters across words, across need for words,
needing the silences to be redundant in.
Stacks of bills and advertisements surround us.
We are being overlooked in the shifting-ness of things.
Slipped apart…slipped apart. We are separate cities.
I write to you; you write to me. We are out of our
envelopes, face up on table surfaces, both talking
at once. My envelope drifts away…slips to the floor…
finds the wastebasket. Yours does the same.
What does it matter. We will never answer.
We think in thirds. Time pulls by with a heavy sigh,
with a closing eye. Time goes by. We fake to the
calendar, but its page has been turned. Someone
comes in, neatens around us, puts us away—
notices the date, remarks that it’s too late now,
anyway. No RSVP. Solution’s sigh of relief.
Winsome
THIS HOUR, FULL OF OLD TWILIGHT
Mark you, my love, this hour—dwindling
and slow—full of old twilight,
heavy with summer.
How certain we’ve been of everything we know
which is only what we sieve
out of pour and clog,
how we waste what we want
out of squander. Note how easily
we’ve become our own shadows, lacking detail
and substance, assuming the thoughts
of darkness, how silence expands and surrounds
where we are to each other.
How easily we say what is true
and untrue, though we mean them differently.
We are through with our sadness.
____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
THE DRY SUMMER
—Joyce Odam
I crave the blue rain in this dry summer.
I yearn for the falling of the leaves.
I pull to the force of shadows
that remain on the lake of darkness.
I pray to the gods of beauty where
they preen into their melting mirrors.
Wherever the light has lingered
with its radiance, I long for the blue rain.
____________________
A big Tuesday thank-you to Joyce Odam for her fine poems about our Seed of the Week: Beauty in Devastation, and her lovely photos to cheer us up in this time of late-summer doldrums.
Our new Seed of the Week is Sandcastles. 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.
—Medusa, celebrating the poetry of castles, wherever they are!
—Anonymous Photo and Builder-of-Castles
for the fanciest of sandcastles!
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.