When Did The Crickets Begin Singing?

Art Luna of Luna's Cafe, scene of 

long-running Poetry Unplugged

on his birthday, July 2013

—Photo by Ann Menebroker, Sacramento

LATE CONVERSATION

—Jeanine Stevens, Sacramento

Along my street this late July,
interior lights blink gold,
lights that brighten narrow walls.
Just ordinary houses
but how invisible filaments
ignite crimson corridors,
passageways that lead
to a simple kitchen where two

sit over evening coffee.
She picks at invisible threads
on her apron. He taps
a finger on the side
of the cold Formica.
They have agreed to wait
until the mist rises and reveals
moonlight across summer
statues, just enough
to hold this brief conversation,
so easy, so difficult.

____________________

INVERSION

—Jeanine Stevens

         ~After Charles Wright                   

Weak and weaker, moonlight
dusts morning’s objects, outlines
dawn’s frugality.

I sit with cup and saucer, a donut’s
multicolored sprinkles,
new typewriter ribbon in place,
and the presence
twin skunks left in blue air.

With rapid speed,
the spendthrift afternoon squanders
precious hours,
languishes in a half sleep.

Evening Osmanthus exudes its own
sweetness. Cut by saline tainted wind,
brackish tide slides toward the sea.

Yet, in another deftly stitched dawn,
I imagine a thing so obvious so
ordinary, so plain, a thing
unveils what was always visible,

the fiery stars of morning,
those erroneous myths
chasing the crescent moon.

___________________

WHEN I WAS THE INCREDIBLE HULK

—David Iribarne, Sacramento

I miss being five years old…

My parents both were strong, vibrant
They were not sick
their laughs were in sync.

I watched football with my father
He would become Howard Cosell
commenting on Montana and White
or Walsh and Landry.

I played Basketball
pretended I was Dr. J
putting the ball behind my back
as I went for a layup.

I loved Christmas
My sisters smiled
as my mother made rhubarb pie.
I would nap on my mother’s lap
she would run her fingers
through my cherry-red hair.

I was introduced to Star Wars and G-Force.
I imagined I was Luke
my brother was Darth Vader
or I was Mark and my brother was Zoltar.

My mother kissed me goodnight
My father kissed me goodnight

I would go to sleep
Fat buddy, Dexter, and my dog Dina
would be by my side
protecting me from the monsters
and whatever else
was lurking in my room.

The Incredible Hulk

California State Fair, 2013

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

DANCING WITH MY DAUGHTER

—David Iribarne

How long could I make that bliss last
You were so beautiful in your white gown.

I had thought of this day often
I would go over and over
what advice I would give you
as I gave you away.

I reminisced about you
in your younger days
when you fantasized and dreamed
about being a princess.

I smiled as you told me stories
of how you would spend
your fairytale days bathing
in the ocean as you swam
with other mermaids

I loved how happy you were
living in this world of make-believe.
No double shifts, no selling our souls,
no going to the food bank,
no saving our last few dollars
just to get through the week
or to buy enough food for the month.

When you were a princess
or mermaid your troubles vanished
you were able to dance in a world of frills
and where flowers bloomed constantly.

Going over memories in my mind
I wondered had I prepared
you for the future
for the tides that may come
the scrapes and falls that will occur.

You have been waiting a long time
for this moment
You are so happy
your smile infinite
your eyes so wide and big.

Now as I dance with you
and give you away
I only encourage you
to continue to swim with the fish
with other mermaids, dress up
as a princess, and to tell stories
as often as you can.

_________________________

THE SUMMER NIGHT
—James Lee Jobe, Davis

The back porch was screened in
and dark, and all night we made love there.
This was long ago in our youth, a hot night,
a bright moon and a dull street lamp,
a porch swing, an old sofa covered
with a white sheet. Naked, your skin
shining with sweat, you seemed to glow
above me. There was loud music on
inside the house. You picked up the beat,
pushing me down on the sofa. June bugs
on the street lamp made odd little noises,
then I, too, became a june bug.
I became a summer night.

_________________________

SUMMER SOLSTICE, 2010
—James Lee Jobe

3 o'clock in the morning. I can't sleep, and I'm sitting on a bench, tucked away in a corner of the big park across the street from my house. The park is silent and cool, like a river stone. I come here often when I can't sleep. Sometimes night after night. Just for a little while. No one will bother me, not even the police, even though the park closes at sunset. Why should they? A middle-aged man in pajamas, slippers, and a big bathrobe, with a walking cane, watching the stars and the moon. Sometimes I even nod off for a few minutes, right there on the bench.

This night, a friendly field mouse emerges from the perfect grass of the soccer field, marches right up to me, and speaks.

"Beg pardon, sir? You could save me a lot of work if you would look in the rubbish bin for me. Would you, please? I eat almost anything."

Looking in, I tell him, "You're in luck! Here's some french fries and most of a hot dog."

"Excellent! Oh, thank you! Could you set them in the grass, please?"

"Do you check these bins every night?"

"No, but you look like a friendly guy, and this is the shortest night of the year. I have less time for searching. Plus that owl might be about."

"Do mice celebrate summer solstice?"

"We sleep late, very late, and have extra little mousy dreams."

How sweet, I thought later, while staring at my ceiling; a field mouse telling an insomniac about sleeping late on the shortest night of the year. Mice can be cheeky like that.
 

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

SOFT SUMMER EVENING
—James Lee Jobe

Soft and easy, a summer evening.
A little breeze that makes the candles dance.
The purple stripes over the western hills begin fading to black.
Then night walks in as quiet as a grandfather.
When did the crickets begin singing?
When did the pale moon slip from behind the clouds, so lovely?

________________________

—Medusa

David Iribarne and Dina, a while ago...

Night Shadows

The Lagoon

—Photo by D.R. Wagner, Elk Grove

JULY NIGHT SHADOWS
—B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA

Air is wide by the shore
hovering breezes summon
a spiral sea high tide
outside my porch,
two bluejays lock
on rings of leafy trees,
as Tiger and Lily
cat walk obstinately
each so sure of themselves
as in an ardent fire dance,
quietly lost by dragonflies
and flaming lady bugs
under a smoke-cloud moon,
a fox is silently hiding out
near shadowy bushes
thistles and tall dunes,
the town cafe is closing,
a sax is heard
in the distance
and a motorcycle driver
in a James Dean shirt
with a poem in mind
moves the handlebars
along the ocean roadway
in the sodium last light.

____________________

WATCHING SEED OF THE WEEK
—B.Z. Niditch

Watching the deceitful comedy
film by Bergman
Smiles For a Summer Night
around a keg of beer
shadows of spiders
move on my warm skin
transcend the dialogue
for the fourth time
trying to concentrate
by repetition of the lines
translated in plain words
across the screen
nearsighted
with ragweed's dog day
carrying its hidden 

pollen in the night air,
hearing a few neighbors
closing an Asian umbrella
from untiring steps
on the roof
returning from the shore
with muffled voices
whispering in other tongues
I'm drifting away
by night's vocal chords
from actors on the remote,
sea birds disperse
with endless song
and chatter
toward the Bay
on a vacation lock-up
craving sleep
yet remembering
to shower water
on the ripened vines.

_____________________

SUMMER BACK-UP
—B.Z. Niditch

Night shadows
from a friend's letters
opposite mine
that have no answer
on the granite coffee table,
requests from poets
to write blurbs
for the back of their books,
old fan missives
sent back from Paris,
a love letter
incantating those phrases
you never forget,
a note with picture
from a torch singer
now doing backups
on television specials,
a Flamenco guitar play
invites me to his recital,
but I'm backed up for months
in words from this poem
translating me
to the heavens,
now up to the telescope
on the green hill
mounted for latitude bases
to view a full moon,
here in shadowy bodily light
to keep out mosquitoes
banished in fading quiet
to console the evening.

 Shoe

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

 

ON REMBRANDT'S BIRTHDAY (July 15)
—B.Z. Niditch

Only when our time
alights
on your self-portrait
do our eyes move slowly
in your gestures
you live again
a few steps
from us
no stranger to debts
hunger
and long suffering
for an artist's fate,
painted with charcoal
drawn inward
in a transparent silence
with a familiar soul
facing us
with compassion.

____________________

DALI'S "GIRAFFE ON FIRE"
—B.Z. Niditch

Nightly blue
of Venus de Milo
brightly serious
rimming the sky
on crutches
of a somnambulist
revealed though paint
huddled in softness
on evening water beds
in recreation from stone
the statuesque beauty
in modernism's idiom
drawing out myth
twin women awake
sleepwalking
through premonitions.

___________________

CASSATT'S "THE BATH"
—B.Z. Niditch

Cherishing warm waters
jutting out at her feet
in the tiny basin
for the delicate girl
as an extenuation
of a whispering speech
we never hear
only in the tone
of the painting's
quiet narrative
breathing in
at a pristine
Paris drawing room
of an exile,
shutters down
in a studio's solitude.

_____________________

A VIEW FROM THE CLIFFS
—B.Z. Niditch

Winslow Homer,
your marine colors
off the bluish Coast
oiled for our nature
breathing out in dawn
between deserted shadows
you frequently recapture
as waves to us
recounted in memory
to our human eyes
motioning on oaks
as well-dressed blue birds
soar over sea voices
of eagles and hawks
with a few gestures
to a consummate sun
we daydream
brushed back by high tide
from the earthy rocks
gazing at the open cliffs
by the light house tower
in the home harbor,
a mirror and patina
in range of a silken ocean.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

DEPARTURE (MICHELANGELO)
—B.Z. Niditch

Through the last
template of our memory
transcribed by genius
as poet and painter
in a search for words
transfigured by language
and drawing in colors
in moving patinas
on walls and chapels
sculptured by genius
hands enfolding clay
into our centuries echo.

_____________________

—Medusa

Sign in Building

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

Madness of the Season

Squash blossom folding up for the night

—Photo by Taylor Graham

"THE LEAVES ESCAPE THE TREES"
                 —D.R. Wagner

The weather's mad with heat.
I feel it already at dawn. Dead dry grass.
Oaks stand in the patience of trees
waiting out Summer.
In shady places, they hold memories
of when it rained;
of the white fogs after leaves escape
the trees. Birds are shadows
among the living leaves fluttering
their own memories without words or
sound. Without a breeze.
It seems like silence but it's madness
of the season. The day
may be too hot for wind without fire—
a flaming flurry of lost leaves
leaving just skeletons of the trees.
If I knew how to listen,
to understand this stillness, I might hear
the song of days and nights
counting out the months till rain.


—Taylor Graham, Placerville
 
____________________

MAIDEN AUNT
—Taylor Graham

As the sun goes down, July longing for August,
she wanders her perimeter of garden.
So much lush growth! Mid-life between sun
and soil, oregano blossoms buzz all day
with bees. Japanese cucumber twines tendrils
with pattypan, zucchini casts leaf-fan shadows
over everything. Today she picked more than
enough to fill her plate. Jars of preserves
weigh down her cellar shelves, replacing last
summer's harvest that saw her through winter.
Season on season, so much effort. Turning
and seeding, peeling and scraping. And still
the bounty comes. Nearly hidden among vines,
golden squash-flowers enfold the approach
of evening. She imagines a glowing in the dark
like un-mined ore.

Question and Answer Machine

California State Fair, 2013

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

MOTHERLODE EVENING       
—Taylor Graham    

           
An alley gold-mined into hills;
summer sun gleams its last light, spills
shadows into twilight,
periwinkle night.
By mind's sleight, gold-dust fills

shaded stone hollows delved between
wishing and getting. Living green
overgrows silence
to entwine each sense,
immanence yet unseen.

And still the sun flecks everything
with dust - gold dust - till shadows fling
ghost shapes in the dark,
each a question-mark,
a small spark glittering.


(a version of this poem was first pub. in Poets' Forum Magazine)

______________________

EASY GLISTENING
—Tom Goff, Carmichael

To battle the notions of the classical world,
redefine ‘‘great music,’’ is railing in chain-mail wind.
Dissent like friction turns the oyster pearled;
no sand will alter this repertoire anchovy-tinned:
endless concertos, themes and variations, rococo
See’s-box confections ribboned in figured bass.
True music burns as it shimmers: we get shadows,
flickers, of the rage that inhabits the grace.
Ironic: Hugo Alfven’s lush midsummer-
night vignette of Sweden, melancholic-ecstatic,
is all we hear from that versatile painter-composer.
What buries the rest of him, what keeps our tastes erratic,
while Mozart becomes a sponge we just keep on wringing?
What June-July Shadows, under a shadow singing?

Call the living roll of those declared dead, dated, spent:
Karol Szymanowski, Franz Schmidt, Arnold Bax the British
symphonist and ‘‘Irish’’ poet, Joseph Jongkind, not only Clara
but Camillo Schumann, William Schuman, Wales’ creator
Grace Williams, Nikolai Medtner, Pietro Mascagni,
Lili Boulanger, Walter Piston, Ferruccio Busoni, Amy Beach…

______________________

Today's LittleNip(s):

ANCIENT SOULS
—Olga Blu Browne, Sacramento

Tracking the passage of time,
where ancient souls dwell among
the stars and where silent ghosts
wander, waiting for a new moon.

 

(first pub. in DADs Desk)

            * * *

DEATH TAKES IT ALL
—Olga Blu Browne

Greater than reality, like water
frozen in the act of flowing,
Death takes it all.

(first pub. in Brevities)

_____________________

—Medusa, with thanks to today's contributors, and a heads-up to check out Medusa's Facebook page for some new photos of HOT HOT POETRY IN THE PARK by Michelle Kunert!

Macaws at the Fair

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

Words Under Stones

 

PARTICULARITY

Memory is thin as a shadow.
It wavers like a thought—
reached-for as it alters.
It transports
against
white—
that wall—
and offers
suggestion.
It is too shape-
less for recognition.
It does not connect, or
disconnect.  It is always part
of itself. Only memory knows what it
is—what it is capable of—all that telling.

_________________________

HER ALTERING MOODS

She prefers dim candlelight
in a flower-heady room
—a dark glass of bitter wine

with its shimmer—the night still
young.  She will play some old tune
over and over—resign

herself to night’s yearning wait,
all her tried-on dresses strewn
about, as if to define

her changing moods.  She’ll invite
the ghosts back in to resume
their place at her mood’s old shrine

—comfort her there in the blur
of all that’s tormenting her—
candles to soften her tears
—wine, her face in the mirror.

________________________

THE CONTOURING LIGHT

By the easy light of the north window
a woman reads to a goldfish
from a ladies’ magazine.

The attentive goldfish suspends
and slowly fans its tail.
The water barely quivers.

The curtains shine with such softness
that this might be a painting to light,
but it is a vignette to solitude—

that gathered pose
that women reserve for themselves
when they are biding.

Slowly the light alters
and outlines the back of the chair,
the lax position of her hands,

the quiet folds of her kimono,
and shines right through the
mesmerized goldfish glowing in the water.

ALTERING MONDRIAN'S COMPOSITION
IN BLACK, WHITE, AND RED.

Com-po-si-tion-in–lines:
Black (dark) White (non)
Red (with an and)
thus laid-out-lines

over empty canvas-space,
pure edge (cut-off point(s).
Exchange red for gray
(to ease from white-to-black).

Persuade black to be white
and white to black
Red is persuasive,
will not be less. Re-size

from the center out.
At each connecting point,
put a dot (.) same color as
the connecting point,

but smaller. 
Stare, until you feel
a block of blue
attempt to enter.

Introduce another
black, elsewhere
on the canvas.
Change it to yellow.

Now you have a balance of
intention. The art is itself
and needs no help
from you.

___________________

QUESTIONS AS ORACLES:

Opinions already established,
alternate meanings,
arguments well-hidden.

How do you answer this:
why?   and how?   and when?
So much for the long interview.

Skip the part about truth.
Truth is a banner.
It speaks for itself.

What heart is broken by stones?
Why water?
What has kept you so long?

Words are more dangerous
than stones under rain—
words under stones.

___________________

RIDDANCE

Replace it—exchange it
for what you prefer,
whatever whim or demand:

your boredom—
your feeling of loss,
no more to be healed.

Go at once to the mirror.
Step in.
And there you are.

____________________

Today's LittleNip:

PAWN SHOP

unhappy man selling old stuff
to dark shadows of people
who offer not enough

   
(first pub. in Brevities, 2004)

____________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Master Craftspoet Joyce Odam for today's poems and pix. Our new Seed of the Week is Shadows on a Summer Eve. Send your poems about that or any other subject to kathykieth@hotmail.com. The Snakes of Medusa are always hungry...

 

Medusaed To Be True

Ballet Folklorico, "Old Coots" Dance

California State Fair, 2013

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

THE BEAUTIFUL WALL, MACHU PICCHU

—William Bronk

Greek stones look as though they'd flowed

into molds of figures, fluting, leaf forms, scrolls,

a sensed and sensible world turned stony-hard

and durable, medusaed to hold and be true,

as figure carving holds an impress pressed

on the carver's eye by a visible form whose grace

and harmony his hand lays hold and holds.

This way of handling stone is to say of the world

it is workable, and yielding and full to the hand;

and their quarrying quarried a rich world.

Looking at stones the Incas laid, abstract

austerities, unimitative stones,

so self-absorbed in their unmortared, close

accommodation, stone to different stone,

exactly interlocked, deep joined,

we see them say of the world there is nothing to say.

Who had to spend such easing care on stone

found grace inherent more as idea than in

the world, loved simple soundness in a just joint,

and the pieces together once though elsewhere apart.

_________________ 

NOT MY LONELINESS, BUT OURS
—William Bronk

The most of men are all too much myself,

my shed externals, as feces, hair, skin,

discarded clothes, useless to me and dead.

From oneness, what should we say we hadn't said

before together? Nothing to say to them,

nothing to say. As they to me, so must

I seem to them. The human loneliness

is the endless oneness of man. Man is one;

man is alone in his world. We are the one,

even we, who whisper together now

closely, as though we were two, as children do,

knowing as much as we, and making believe, 

even as we believe, that another is there.

__________________

A BRIGHT DAY IN DECEMBER

—William Bronk

So much light in what we call the dark

of the year, a flashing and glittering of light—

it quivers, it flaps in our face like slaps of wind.

Should it surprise us, having known the holes

of darkness in the longest days?

                                                    I have done

with promises (or say I have) of things

to come: the all-light; the all-dark;

something slow emerging; the slow (or fast)

and final decay.

                            The thing we have to live

with, the last thing, is it is all 

here, and was, and will be, is all there is.

Nothing is coming but what is already here

as this light, now, in the darkest time

(and nothing here that ever needed to come)

at once, too much for us and not enough.

Sutro Clown made in 1911 for Sutro Baths/

Playland at the Beach, San Francisco

California State Fair, 2013

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

MY HOUSE NEW-PAINTED
—William Bronk

The splendor is not surprising; we expected it

and shine in the brightness of new paint. That the lines

should firm, though, corners sharpen, and the eaves

be reasserted, is more than we thought to ask

or look for. What is shown is a strength of the house itself

that it held in its underframing, still could hold.

We hold houses in a kind of contempt and give

them nothing, or say we do, as a way to despise

the kinds of things that houses are, all

such kinds of things, the measured entities,

that they should not be what was intended: they fail.

They burn. They fade and sag. They fall away.

We think of a time before we housed the world

or gathered things—spirits were all we saw,

spirit was real, was what there was, was all.

This was man did this, and thought to do well

when he turned away to say, on the contrary, all

the world was what we measured: houses, sums

and angles, vectors and smoothable curves. We turn

and turn again another way to find

some way to state the world, dissatisfied

none answers.

________________________

THE LAWN

—William Bronk

Doubtless, it is the complex of many things

that makes it; the green for example, the color alone,

fine as that is, so intense a green, yet bland,

mild really, no, the green alone

is not enough to do it, though it is true

that yellow would be impossible, brown,

red, blue, no. It has to be green.

But it has to be more than green. There is this for one

thing amongst the many, as though there were

one, more than another, that makes the effect:

looking from slightly above it, we see that, though

by blade after blade after blade it extends a far

distance, yet against the fence and the wild field

it does end, after all. It comes to an end.

And futher, in spite of small undulations, it asserts

a flat plain-ness, an assertion it carries off

with such bravura, it is as though it defied

not the curvature of the globe, only, but the curve

of space itself, went straight beyond the curve

enough to not follow, and just enough,

and hung there, overhung it. As though it did.

________________________

THE WORLD IN TIME AND SPACE

—William Bronk

If there is a shape to the world in terms of time

and space—our own or, by concessions to shapes

of others, received—if there is such a shape

—in part there is—note that the words we use

referring to time, as temporary for one

or temporal, admit our diffidence

toward any shape we give the world by time.

The shapes of space share less of this distrust.

We acknowledge chaotic recalcitrance

in space, its endlessness both ways, the great,

and small, and yet respect the finite shape

of bounded places, as much as to say they are true.

Some absolute of shape is stated there

which satisfies the need that makes this shape.

How strange that after all it is rarely space

but time we cling to, unwilling to let it go.

______________________

Today's LittleNip:

THE NIGHT WATCH
—William Bronk

That limpid mirror that wakes us in the night

and watches, breathless, beside us in the bed

before we sleep again, says nothing, has

no need to say, draws commentless

its images that stun us. We never reply.

Do we dare to? How should we say? Do we even know

whether we'd rather not have seen? We know

nothing of who we are or where; this

is something, is lucid anyway; it could

be what we are. Is it for us to say?

_____________________

—Medusa

Mexican Art and Pottery

California State Fair, 2013

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

Grass

—Photo by Caschwa, Sacramento

GRASS
—Byok Namkung

Grass, summer grass,
Dew drenched grass of Yoyogi fields,
Gently, as if kissing a lover's lips,
I tread you with my bare feet.
Are you not truly the lips of the earth?

Should this, however, distress you,
I suggest that when I die
I turn to earth and go beneath your roots
To make you spring up high.

Should this still distress you,
Then I suggest that you and I,
Animate as we are, each
Walking the perimeters of immortality

Shall meet again
On that eternal road.
Then you can become me and I you
And you can tread gently on me
As I now tread on you.

(trans. from the Korean by Kevin O'Rourke)

_____________________

—Medusa

Blue Checks and Bad Bourbon

Morning Glory

MAYBE

Maybe it was a flag.
Maybe it was a Spanish flag.
Maybe I was too far away.
Maybe I didn’t see it.

Maybe it was a heart.
It looked like a heart.
Maybe I was too far away.
Maybe I didn’t see it.

Maybe it was something unsaid.
I didn’t recall anything being said.
Maybe I was too far away and if it
Were said, maybe I didn’t hear it.

Maybe there were things I didn’t understand.
Maybe I don’t understand very much at all.
Maybe something like this had never happened before.
Maybe it had and I just did not understand it.

Maybe it was a dream.
It looked like a dream.
It felt like a dream feels.
Maybe I never woke up.

Maybe it was a train or a someone singing
Or a vision with angels or beings without bodies,
Or just cars driving down the streets at night
Without their lights on, or maybe it was someone
Praying and I never heard anything like that prayer
So I didn’t know it was a prayer or maybe it was someone
Telling me that they loved me and I could barely hear it.

Maybe I was too far away.
Maybe I didn’t hear it.
Maybe I did.  Maybe it was a flag.

____________________

“THE WEATHER IS SO MAD WITH WHITE”
                          —Lizette Woodworth Reese

And I will have no part of it.
I think of Borge’s milk-clouded eyes
That clawed at his destiny
And were ignored by memory.

For there was no oblivion that caught
At his sleeve, but a lasting image,
A weather made with white
That understood the rooms
Where memories might end.

We stand looking in the cool windows
At what was once a voice but has
Fallen from its horse, yet still
Can be seen trying to mount
Some other, newer steed
Which it cannot. 

It is a shadowed
Voice that called us here in the first
Place, a flurry of words coursing
Just before sleep would have us.
A game of days and nights once more.
The windows fog.  The world goes white
Again.

________________

HARBOR

I can hear people.  I think
They wish to touch me but I
Am snow right now.  They will
Not find me.
“We think we can see you,” they say.
I know they cannot.  I am snow.

I can touch you and I do.
They sleep with my body
On their own and do not know
It is me.  I will roll over their
Bodies, touch their sacred places,
Open my mouth when I reach the top
Of the hill.  I can see you upon
The sea.  The long shadows penetrate
Your sex, pretending they are the moon.

The leaves escape the trees.
No one comes near any longer.
I am upon the Winter as the Winter
Is upon you.

When you look into my eyes
You will see I am old, very old.
I watch the ships at night.
They come into the harbor like
My blood through your body.  

The Other Rose

GRAVEL

She was looking at the eggs.  They had a glaze over them that
reminded her of the Florida panhandle, same shape, same yellow
just below the surface.  She reached for the salt.

“You going up the store later?’ he said.  He was wearing that
same blue check shirt again.  He had had it on for the past three
days.  Last night when he came into the bedroom, he smelled
like blue checks, blue checks and bad bourbon. She wondered
where he had found the money for whiskey, but then he began
to handle her and, despite the heat, she was glad he made it
home at all.  She remembered falling asleep before it was over.
“He won’t remember,” she had told herself, and she had been
right.

His hands had oil stains on the back of them that reached up to
where he had folded the cuffs back. “Yes, I am,” she said.
 
“Well get some chicken and get me some cigarettes.”  He wasn’t
ordering.  He was just being as slow as the heat.  She could feel
the heat.  Usually she liked it.  Today her dress kept sticking to
her legs and for some reason she kept noticing that there were
those metallic-colored flies, slow flying across the kitchen, out
into the living room and back again.  They seemed louder than
the radio.  “I’m going now.” she said.  She didn’t want to be
there for the next couple of hours.  The car would be cool and
she wouldn’t have to listen to his half-singing and small talk
about how much work he thought he would get next week.
She didn’t want to talk about cars and that’s what he wanted to
talk about most of the time.

“Hey," he said.  “Say something pretty to me.  Something I’d
like,” he said.  His voice has a citrus sweetness about it.  She
was opening the screen door and turned back to look at him.
Her voice softened.  "Gravel,” she said.  “A whole load of gravel
just spread out near the end of the drive  You’d like the sound it
would make when you drove over it,” she answered.  Before he
could say anything else, the door was behind her.  She could
hear him begin whistling.

_________________

THE GLASS GEISHA

She pulled the shoji screen closed
Behind her and looked to the center
Of the room.  The light was perfect.
Shadows owned the room and moved
On the lacquer bowls, dancing.

She dropped to her knees, pushing
Her kimono off her left shoulder.
It was a palest white, almost whiter
Than her face.  She sighed and lit
The incense.  Tonight she would
Quote Basho and play shamisen.
The words were birds in her throat.
They fluttered in the room, more shadows.

It occurred to her that she was made of glass.
That her client was a shakuhachi and she wanted
To place her mouth upon the flute and coax
The soul of the wood into the room.  She
Was glass.  Her hands were magic as she made
Tea, explained she did not know what she felt,
Touched the dumplings with one finger,
Unwrapped them and tided her hair.

_________________

GOSSAMER

When the wind decides, it is where
To that hails its most intimate
Secrets and lays claim to a chance
To make them places.

Here I will sell you this wind
On a knotted string.  These are my
Angels who die as soon as they
Are born.  And we will be borne
While waiting atop a quiet post
In the middle of a field that long
Ago ran with black-faced sheep;
Their hooves leaving an indelible
Writing on the sides of hills that can
Be read one hundred years from when
They were steps ahead of the dark,
A list of primal fears as night
Twisted around them.

And yet here we are just before sleep,
Raising our silk high above our heads,
Heedless of whether we will go.  Awaiting
The wind and the wind only as it rigs
Our yearning and we do its will.

__________________

Today's LittleNip:

THE NEXT TIME

There will be a door here.
It will be raining outside.
I will open the door
And watch the rain.

It will be unlike any other
Rain I have ever seen.
It will have a voice.
It will produce sounds
That will seem like a language
Bit it will not be such.

Somewhere in the middle
Of that rain there will be a heart.
I will hear it beating.

__________________

—Medusa, with thanks to D. R. Wagner for today's poems and pix!

 Wind Sprite