Pages Turn
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento, CA
A FAVORITE BOOK
At last you come to this—the pages
turned—each poem read
and dwelled upon.
What comes next to feel—
the disconnection, something
missed, hard to replace . . .
It's hard to come to endings—
something dies—this, always!
But this one still resonates—
you want
to stay with it,
browse back through,
you could, and maybe do,
before you find another book—to love.
At last you come to this—the pages
turned—each poem read
and dwelled upon.
What comes next to feel—
the disconnection, something
missed, hard to replace . . .
It's hard to come to endings—
something dies—this, always!
But this one still resonates—
you want
to stay with it,
browse back through,
you could, and maybe do,
before you find another book—to love.
In Winter
STARING AT TIME
fluttering down from the trees
the little souls of leaves
the life that death believes…
the splintering of bird-songs
the little rights and wrongs
the way it all belongs…
the mental vertigo
the things that stay and go
the tercets in a row…
the souls that wait in stones…
the music in the bones
the casual undertones…
the threes and twos and one
the endings late begun
the black glare in the sun…
Another Book
ENDINGS
1.
This is where we take the different ending :
the walk on the beach
in that peculiar light—
the sea immense and lonely.
“Oh,” you protest,
“we can’t say the sea is lonely.”
2.
This is where we take the delicate ending :
the walk on the particular beach
at a particular time,
approaching some object
made of dark light
that seems to be moving.
When we near it,
it is the disheveled doll
left by our childhood
that seems to remember us,
for we pick it up and hold it.
It is so cold and wet and
featureless. It gasps like a kitten, and expires.
3.
This is where we take the difficult ending :
walking the roiling beach in winter light,
leaving the doll behind.
The sea rocks and moans over the doll,
retrieving it in its foaming arms.
4.
This is where we take the desperate ending :
You look back and tell me
what you see.
I don’t look back.
I am watching a seagull swooping and crying
into the sea’s defining loneliness.
HAPPY ENDINGS
How frail we were
falling like petals
into each other’s tearing love,
we only wanted
our miracles to happen,
our dreams to come true,
our fairy tales
to have
happy endings.
WIDOW
Memories contain us for themselves.
Life is full of ghosts.
We talk to their mirrors.
I was a mirror once :
life and its house,
its clock, its season.
I know how the mind
will select, distort,
forget.
I know how mystery unfolds itself
into different endings.
I know where I fit.
The walls of my life are hung with
faded photographs. I ask again
who they really are.
They answer what I think
and change expression
as I stare at them.
The Little While That It Takes
LOVE LOGIC
When it came time to love I took its machine
apart and checked for lies, which were vague
with disillusionment, but I believed them.
The machine lay disassembled,
in methodical order : the heart at the center,
surrounded by all the other parts.
I studied them for accuracy :
the nerve-endings raw and the mind
not clearly instructed.
Still, I knew it was
reliable : If it Ain’t Broke,
Don’t Fix It, came the old reminder.
When it came time to love I took its machine
apart and checked for lies, which were vague
with disillusionment, but I believed them.
The machine lay disassembled,
in methodical order : the heart at the center,
surrounded by all the other parts.
I studied them for accuracy :
the nerve-endings raw and the mind
not clearly instructed.
Still, I knew it was
reliable : If it Ain’t Broke,
Don’t Fix It, came the old reminder.
Simple Wonderment
ON EXPECTATIONS :
Signs that will take you
in wrong directions—
if you follow them
you will become lost;
the signs keep pointing out
places that have no destination,
like a town that is not there—
that was never there—
that was only a town of
your own making—and you
laid out the signs
you are trying to follow,
and the signs keep pointing
to the town that is not there.
Signs that will take you
in wrong directions—
if you follow them
you will become lost;
the signs keep pointing out
places that have no destination,
like a town that is not there—
that was never there—
that was only a town of
your own making—and you
laid out the signs
you are trying to follow,
and the signs keep pointing
to the town that is not there.
Sustaining the Vision
SIMILARITIES
What. Is.
The difference
between
meadow/shadow.
Two sounds
that interpose/transpose/sup-
pose/one is
the other—only in
sound-echo eye-glance,
page turning upon startle
of recognition—
/ /
Go back to be sure :
two words take on a likeness:
I see shadow over meadow,
long distortion of one
upon the other:
I see meadow under shadow—
sustaining the vision :
how alike,
how unlike,
except for trochaic sound
and word endings.
Why pull back to refine the difference :
word is word, each to itself, allowed.
_______________________
Today’s LittleNip:
END-STOPPED, LIKE A POEM
—Joyce Odam
Put this thought
with the other realizations
of simple wonderment :
even the moth—bird—shadow—
trapped within the area of no escape
is there but for the little while it takes . . .
_______________________
Joyce Odam has laid out the map of endings for us in her poetry today, “Endings” being our Seed of the Week. Check into the Kitchen on Form Fiddlers' Fridays for more of Joyce’s poems, as she shows us some of her work in poetry forms.
Our new Seed of the Week is “Misty Mornings”. 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
—Medusa
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.
