The Resistance of Words

 

The Sky Is Free

—Poetry and Photos by Joyce Odam, 

Sacramento, CA

 

 

 

CONTRASTS

My house, howling.
Sunlight in loose thin patterns.
The intense stillness of the curtains.
The cat in a deep sleep.
The air closing like fur around my thick breathing.
The motion and non-motion.
A future closing upon a warning.
Or maybe just a winter.
Simple as that.
No premonition.
No mystery.
The cat curled once around herself.
My intense listening.
Time pulled in all directions.
The sunlight giving up.
The wind like a lost voice.
My house straining not to answer.
The way all things resolve to some beginning.
The way a page holds words.
The way a door seems to want to let someone in.
Someone not there.
The way I brace for welcome.
The cat gone out of herself.
Her fur bristling.

 

 

 

In Mind And Time

 

CLUTTER OF TIME

Too late : a kitchen, abandoned to explanation,
no one here. Is today just another day or one
of your choice—

too much to do here—or to remember. Cozy
and dated. Colorless, except for ever-present
shadows, broken—turning—

footsteps are here—voices, words fading—
urgency or boredom—no one lives here—
now or ever. Sweep the floor.

 

 

 

In The Corner Of Light

 

CIRCLE AND SQUARE

Here : In the corner of light we speak again
and again of the circle and the square,
the containments in mind and time,
the pressures that lift when
the aim of thought solves the puzzle.

Items—
incongruous to meaning :
that old polished word—
shall I name them,
they have changed : experiment failed.

The borders of the square are blank to surround :
What source shadow?
It falls aslant without explanation.
The eye follows :
Aimless attention to unimportant detail.

___________________

MASTS ON A WINDY DAY

Crowded into intensity, bobbing
          in choppy patterns with the
mingled movements of the water.
          Storm coming . . .
Storm here . . .
          Such abstracts of imagery;
hugging the air; then of one force,
          colliding.

 

 

 

In Movements Of The Water

 

CROWS COME IN LIKE WAR

And now there are crows in the city,
cawing upon the telephone wires.
I can accept all birdsong
that comes trilling
to my morning windows,
easing nature into mind,
soft against the hard,
like sudden things I like to find
in strangeness.
I can accept all lilac-guise
in winter.

But crows come in like war,
startle of dark
that makes a ragged scratch
upon the clock,
that makes a frantic waking
into fright.
Crows break the flimsy cages
of the night,
half-lifting their black wings
against the thudding
of the heart.

                            
(prev. pub. in Imprints Quarterly, 1968)

__________________

CLOSET STRUGGLE

Oh, how this old dress longs to escape
the hanger—shredding with effort
toward the innocence of music,
the memory of dance,
its strap, refusing,
—its fabric
floating outwards—bodiless . . .   

 

 

 

The Simple Truth

 

THE CONFUSION
After “Zero Plus Anything Is A World” 
                

           by Jane Hirschfield

I am the world, as well as zero,
and I do not rue
or yield
the risk of this.

I always assign myself
to simple truth
lest I be stricken
to some ailment of the mind
in need of solace, if not love.

I only trust the self I can identify.
Why mis-perceive such matters.
I search the wonderings.
and find them vague.

I trust the way my mind is true—
true to my myth and not the rote
of absolute and only-proven fact—
faith is the haunt of everyone—
the war of difference ever lies between. 

 

 

 

The Aim Of Thought

 

CRISIS

hey now, the siren
hey now, coming for us

coming through the far-away streets
pushing dog-howl ahead of it

stirring up
the fog

sure of its destination
knowing its job

_________________

CROSSING THE LIGHT

Pure lines of blue moon shadows
on the road, crossing the light,
the dark.

Trees
imaging horizontal—
stillness moving in optical illusion.

Nothing unsettling :
this is road, mysterious;
here is silence made of beautiful light.

Dark remembers this—
is fortunate for timelessness
caught by moon-shadow on the road.

___________________

The resistance

of words
to my poem,
the subtlety of refusal—

what I obey of
small significance :
urge,    need,    appeal,

to the
unanswerable muse,
so I become my own :

a poem fighting itself,
choppy,     desperate—
this what results . . . .

____________________

COUPLETS AS TWO’S
After Psychological Morphology
                by Roberto Matta

The sun is the eye now
How it sees

Spilled jars of colors
Oil on water    Caught by the eye

A fold in the middle
A division    Two sides and an edge

Somewhere a signature    In code
An “N” and an “N”    No vowels

There is always a focal point
That shimmers    That has a center

There are knobs    And tryings
Too slow to verify

Let us leave this panel
Before it overwhelms 

 

 

 

We Are Sane

 

Today’s LittleNip:

CONTRITIONS
—Joyce Odam

Come back to me
when the envies are put away
like guilty death.
We have torn all the darkness
and found no light.

We are sane.
Forgive us.

                        
(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 6/25/2019)

_____________________

Gratitude to Joyce Odam for today’s poetry; food for the soul, it is, on the cusp of summer, as she talks about choppy waters, our Seed of the Week. Our new Seed of the Week is “Hope”. 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. And see every Form Fiddlers’ Friday for poetry form challenges, including those of the Ekphrastic type.

_____________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

Hope

—Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Joe Nolan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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