At the Heart of Confusion

 

Depending on Memory

—Poetry and Photos by Joyce Odam

Sacramento, CA

THE CELL OF FORGIVENESS

I enter the pure white square. It is a room. It has
no patterned walls. Its windows are night
with a fluctuating brightness.

                      ========

I enter the pure white square. It is a repetition—
a confusion of memory—a puzzle of mirrors.
It contains many others like itself.

                     ========

I enter the pure white square—veils hang like
partitions—like curtains—like folds of enticement,
long white sleeves that flutter and cling.

                     ========

I enter the pure white square—the dying eye of the sun
still melting all around—sorrow upon haunted sorrow
locked in the ecstasy of surrendered bliss and pain.

___________________

SELFNESS

Here we go hungering after life again,
despite certain hallways and dark-hung
mirrors where we continually walk toward

and through ourselves
as if the walls never taught us
anything. The least structure failure

and we lose who we are,
depending on memory to recreate us.
Each day is like this,

created and uncreated, life after life,
learning the maze of resistance
which is our illusion of difficulty.

We have not been here before,
though part of it seems familiar.
We trust anew, and mistrust eventually.

Why are we singular and not blent
as the smug words say—part of
a single consciousness?

Though I try to enter your space of being,
I feel my difference. I am blocked by my
selfness. I can only imagine you.

Our thoughts combine, and what was
confusion is now love, though we destroy it
with our inability to know, and be known.

Hungry for touch, we reach
and recoil. What is that sensation
that it devours us with such desperation?

 

 

 

 Self at Self’s Intersection

SELF AT SELF’S INTERSECTION

It is a long, slow street—buildings lean toward
each other in shadowy confusion—windows
breathe suspicion—faces pull back as I pass—  
long rows of doorways stay tense as shoulders.

At the corner, under a sullen light, a pool of
apprehension spreads itself open, lonely as a
victim waiting for release, waiting to confront
the evil of itself as Evil happens.  Echoes fall

into the darkness behind me—I know what they
say and I will not turn back to them or to my own
lost speech—I will no longer listen to the voices
of begging and promising—ahead of me a wide,

blank intersection, a lone car careening forward into
its own speed and urgency, its headlights blurring
through a sallow fog that is drifting everywhere.
Inside that car I am breaking into fragments—

held together only by great sobs of frustration. I see
the figure at the curb whose sharp, long shadow
distorts in all directions under the corner light.
I feel that person grab the handle as I pass.  
Once more I am at the mercy of myself.


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 8/2011)

___________________

SLIPPING THROUGH                       

Oh for the glow of revelation to the
frustration of those who try too hard
to comprehend—who need solution
to their dilemma—though explanation
falls apart at once—and reasoning
is too muddy for dire situations,
with all its empty promise,
in return . . .

if
only. . .

does not fit the power
of the withholders who pacify,—
who preach and speak in beautiful
confusion—who would rather put their
pretty shells in your letter box, or leave
their glossy literature on doorknobs—or
slide furtive notes under the door that say
they really care for you . . .

 

_________________

TELEPHONE BOOTHS

Here we are,
disconnected in glass reflection
where images collide
against competing voices and eyes

and a sense of urgency
deflects
the glass-captured sunlight
that is lowering down the walls

and a certain confusion prevails
made of the shifting light
and the overlapping snatches
of twilight conversations.


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 10/2013)   

   

 

 

The Key

                       

THE CONFUSION
“Zero Plus Anything Is a World” 
                      

           —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
by 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. 

 

 

 

 Notice: Lost Clown

THE NEVER-ENDING CONVERSATION
After Never-Ending-Conversation (Claudia Bernardi)

and Broken Death (Carlos Cartagena) 

I   Ghostly . . .

They speak in voices audible only to each other.
A glow of flame fills the distance, a glow of blue
falls upon them from the day in its ending.
They are a mixture of pigment and clay,
a red sun rises through the dark, or is it the moon?

It is the moon.
White scars of old wounds show through the liquid bodies.
They speak without animation.
They are trimmed down to shadow.
Their voices are hollow.
They love each other—still—and in spite of.
All difference is gone.
All sameness remains the same.
They speak of this together. They do not touch each other.

II   One frees the other now . . .

And in the otherness, a black horse is without its rider.
It is tethered to the red moonlight
and frightened by the flow of gold light it stomps upon.

        --------------------

It is a chasm of decision the rider cannot make.
He has fallen into one dimension from another.
He is separate from everything known.
His confusion is an anger—what can he do
but yell and raise his weapon.

        ---------------------

The black horse whinnies. One frees the other now,
half in gold fire / red fire,
they struggle to live the only way they can :
apart : horseless rider : riderless horse.

III   They appear as art . . .

In the third finality, which is finished, they appear
as art : pigments on paper, fragment and whole,
still-lives caught in mid-motion, still connected
to the other, effort and failure, effort and gain,
nothing is lost of them—again and again—
visual and audible, without emotion.


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 1/6/15)

 

 

 

 Notice: Lost Pony

NUANCES

We who have been close and separate
now face the mutual mirror of regard
and look hard at the memory :

What has gone between us is a river,
deep and deeper
with the changes.

What a strange metaphor . . .
one of us always drowning here and there,
in the difficulties . . . in the confusion . . .

The river is always behind us
and before us,
hypnotic with motion and energy.

No stillness here—no turning back,
though we do—grasping at all these
beginnings, caught in the currents.

 

 

 

 Nuance

RECONCILIATION

It was for poetry we made these ruins,
colored them white for distraction,
marked on the calendar the disappearing days.
So many, we sighed. Not enough, we amended.
There is no death, said the words.

In the church of love, we gazed
at the artifacts that adorned the walls.
So many, we sighed, and shifted our eyes.
You wore an aura of red. I deflected you
with a confusion of resistance.
Our hands almost met.
I could not remember the words.

Someone played a guitar in the doorway
to block our going. We sang with the others.
We decided to forego black for the mourning.
Whatever was left, we divided.
Strange to be halved, we marveled,
folding our wings. Oh, Angel, I cried.
Oh, Angel, you answered.

 

 

 

Languages

 

THE WORDS

For-
getting
the words
of the poem
of the song
of the prayer—
so needful now,
so in and out of
everywhere, and
everyone who strives
to remember what slips away—

the heart that spills its blood
in grieving—but the heart won't
let go—it loves. And the mind loves,
but cannot remember the words.

Oh,
faux
prayer
help us
in our unrest
in our reality
in our confusion
in our turbulence
somewhere through the reeling.

______________________

Today’s LittleNip:

A DEATH TOO YOUNG
—Joyce Odam

What has death to do with us,
old child,

you are old.
I am almost young.

Your life is sung
in my memory of you.

Where are you now,
so full of your own confusion,

taking my sorrow ever deeper…
that impossible region…?

_______________________

Today Joyce Odam writes about our Seed of the Week, Confusion—though there is nothing confusing about her poetry! Thanks to Joyce for today’s music, including her photos.

Our new Seed of the Week is “Courage”. 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.

For Jane Hirschfield’s poem, “Zero Plus Anything Is a World”, go to poets.org/poem/zero-plus-anything-world/.

_______________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

—Courtesy of Public Domain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For upcoming poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
in the links at the top of this page.

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.