Of Our Loss & Of Our Finding

 When The Moon Is Full

 —Poetry by Joyce Odam and Robin Gale Odam,
Sacramento, CA
—Photos and Original Artwork by Joyce Odam

 

 

THE FATEFUL MOONLIGHT
Fateful Moonlight (Celtic folklore)
—Joyce Odam

You hear a cry and sense a shadow—a falcon in
the torn hands of a girl as if one of them is hurt
or in danger from the other, and you note how
the moor gives rise to a swirl of low fog and small
circles of whirling light that enhance the mood—
something like a warning.

But you are intrigued, how you simply emerge
when the instant is right. It is night, deepest night,
when the moon is full, but waning. The trees
scratch the sky as if this were the winter edge of
the year. You sense a change as of something re-
membered long ago—there was a night like this
when your guard was down and your memory was
faulty.

But you are driven, and she stands here now—
holding the falcon—grown twice as large as before.
You blame the chill of your mind and go toward her—
but the falcon stays hooded—and her eyes say no.

                                                                 
(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 7/9/19; 3/8/22)

 

 

 

The Dark Green Leaves

 

 
THE DANGER
—Joyce Odam

The trees tell lies.
They are scribbling
terrible green secrets
before my eyes.

They are beckoning
and sending away
the green-songed birds;
they are frightening the skies—

they are making such a
violent agitation within
the carefully-held breath
of the still air—

what do they mean!
what do they mean!
what do they know of green
that I can’t remember?
                   

(prev. pub. in Driftwood, 1969)

 

 

 

Spectre of Daylight
 

FRACTAL
—Robin Gale Odam

Another night will be better than
this one. It will be glassy, like stilled
ripples on a pond.

Tiny sterling metaphors, dreams
that I believed not to be mine, will circle
back to nip at starlight shining in my
reflection. It will be better.

                              
(prev. pub. in Brevities, February 2020)

_____________________

OVER DANGEROUS WET ROCKS
—Joyce Odam

Once you led me over dangerous wet rocks
into the sea-edge of a dwindling summer.

We were not there
to honor time or its commitments;

we were there for something
of our loss and of our finding.

The world was loud that day
with distorted size and rushing foam.

I wanted to go back.
You wanted to go on.

The rocks were gnashing against the high-tide
power of the water.  ( . . . if we should slip

to drown in gripping crevices
no one was near to save us . . . )

It was a contest . . .  
some way of deciding.

How strange, even now, the pulling
of our difference.  Could we have known?
                                                   

(prev. pub. in Whole Note, 1997; and  
Medusa’s Kitchen, 5/14/19)

 

 

 

 Memory

SANS BACKGROUND MUSIC
—Joyce Odam

Balboa, c. 1941

You were still a stranger, as I was to you—two
strangers pretending to love each other, walking
out on the long pier on a hot summer night to stare
down at the water and feel the perspectives of
danger. You stood behind me, the world so real
just then with some young anguish felt for what
was not : I wanted us to be like in a movie—the
waves crashing wildly—shuddering the night.

It was the emptiness that turned us back at last—
the end of the pier reached, the way we had nothing
deep enough to say—the night stayed deep behind
us, the pier swaying with its long motion, jutting
out over the sea-edge that gushed and swirled and
broke its waves under. We wandered back to the
lights and simply disappeared from each other.
Only now do I reach back to tell you how sharply
I remember this.


(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 3/18/19; 9/3/19)

_____________________

WAKING TO YOU
—Joyce Odam

Yes, it is for you I dream and waken—
the dream scattered into fragment parts,
half remembered—the dark water of it,
the slippery rocks we struggle on,
the horse in danger;

what does the horse mean :
the eerie terrain of night,
the panic, the strangeness—the mental wall
of those whose mercy we beseech
who struggle near us in their own displacement;

and the edge that is always at the leaning,
the unsafe balance, the night caught
in the complicated landscape of the mind
relinquished to sleep—
the awful things that happen to it.

I awaken just in time again,
refusing to go back
to have to finish the danger—
knowing
it is all locked in place :

you still there—
waiting for my reentering,
the night-water sloshing against
the wet rocks—the horse
still dissolving into our inability to rescue it.

                                                  
(prev. pub. in Medusa’s Kitchen, 8/29/14)

 

 

 

 Waiting For Something

 

THE LIONS IN THE SNOW
—Joyce Odam

I would prefer to write
a poem for August,
but winter is now
and too far away from August,
and your calendar
is full, you say.

So I'll take down
all my cold thin words for you
and make them do.

“Silver danger,” I will say
and twang its string
and you will vibrate to the chill
that twanging makes
and turn your thoughts away.

I will think lions in the snow
and make them purr
and you will have to pass them
as you tell your sadness
on your way to find
that real and tensioned woman
made of such perfection
she will have a twilight name
and eyes that blend
with all your points of vision.

The lions in the snow
will eat the days you left for scrap
because you had so many. Later
you will have to pass them all again,
will have to step
between the paws and breathing, the
eyes that open after you.

“How did you like that winter?”
I will ask,
and you will shiver from the
different cold I mean, pull back
the icy sheets of our
vast bed
and crawl between.

                            
(prev. pub. in The New Salt Creek Reader, 1975,
Editor: Ted Kooser; and Medusa’s Kitchen, 8/26/14) 

 

 

 

Twilight Time

 

 

DO NOT PERFECT ME
—Joyce Odam
                                        
Safely I tell you
the rose is real
and the morning
and the night
and me in my sadness
and you in my joy
and I am not to be taken sensibly
I am to be held.

Do not make words upon me
they wound my mind.
I must reach out to touch
the shadows and
the form of light I
see against darkness.
Do not make danger for me.
I have a fear of what I do not know.
Do not explain me.

When I am the morning
I know many things,
most of them true,
these are the things I tell you
when I am night.
I take flight in my stillness.
I go where it is easy for me to be.
Come with me and we will be together
and I will always return you.

                                                                    
(prev. pub. in Red Cedar Review of Colorado
from Nocturnes by Joyce Odam, Frith Press, 1995)

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

JUST A LOVE POEM BY A GUY
After The Second Kingdom by Richard Brautigan
—Robin Gale Odam

The fingernails thing—ohmygosh.

But the snow coming down the
Stairs of the wind, now there’s something.

He could be mine.

____________________

Many thanks to Joyce and Robin Gale Odam for their enchanting poetry and visuals today on our Seed of the Week, The Dangers of Winning. Our new SOW is “Enchantment”. 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.

Be sure to check each Tuesday for the latest Seed of the Week.

____________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

 “Silver danger,” I will say…

 —Public Domain Photo Courtesy of Medusa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A reminder that
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry
will feature
Susan Cohen and Lenore Weiss
in Modesto tonight, 7pm.
For inför about this and other
future poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
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