On Snags of Time

—Photo by Joyce Odam

 QUEST

—Joyce Odam, Sacramento

To begin this odyssey, we gave away all 

we owned—kept our map in a secret 

place, and memorized what we could of 

it to dispel our growing terror at the 

thought of thieves. The Spirit of the Self 

seemed far away but we had to find its 

shrine which filled the empty place of 

our imagination and desire. The village 

faded behind us with all our old connec-

tions. I could not relinquish everything. 

I kept a souvenir-cup from when I was a 

child; later we would drink from it and 

use it to scoop and portion with. At last 

we reached the shrine of our long seek-

ing—a small place, really—not what we 

expected—set way back, with all its 

windows broken, the path to it over-

grown. But something told us this was 

it. Though worn-to-the heart with 

weariness and dried-up tears, we stayed—

content at last, to repair its damages, 

hack its weeds.

                                    

(first pub. in Poets' Forum Magazine, 1998)

_________________________

THE GODS DEPRIVED
—Joyce Odam 

Nothing here is familiar—

a land of whispers and sighing.

The sky has lost its color.

Rusty mountains guard its borders.

At night there is a crying.

Old dreams gather to escape from memory.

But memory follows them

like timeless travelers.

Giant flowers lean and murmur—

offer the gravity of answers.

Morning will be cold again.

The land will wake to loneliness.

The birds of sorrow

will return

but without their singing.

The spirits of love and loss

will resume their searching.

The moans will sharpen everywhere.

The mournful gods will say, not yet . . .

not yet . . . and speak of love to one another.

________________________

THE SKY INVISIBLE
—Joyce Odam 

seagulls drift in the white sky

and are not amazed that it is night

and my dream of them

they cry their white cries

and search for themselves

in the translucent dark

all night they make the sky invisible

and my sleep that harbors them

I am held in dream’s white soaring

 —Photo by Joyce Odam

ON SNAGS OF TIME
—Joyce Odam

What of the room of longing

that holds no lovers now.

Sad curtains tear the

dusty sunlight.

All day the old room-shadows

search for what is gone.

At night the voyeured window

brings it all back,

when the closed room fills

with ancient moonlight.
 

(first pub. in Poets' Forum Magazine, 2007)

_______________________
 

THE DISAPPEARANCE

—Joyce Odam

They turn away from what was theirs.

The long afternoon. The joy of yesterday.

No music follows. It is a quiet time.

A time of eloquence, with no more to say.

The landscape shimmers.

A small stream continues its thin journey.

The sky goes white.

They have no horse.

They have no wagon.

They have only their walking,

their same direction—

still resolute,

as though without regret;

they grow smaller

as though distance beckons them.

They dissolve together in the gathering light.

_______________________

Our thanks to Joyce Odam for today's treasures! Our next Seed of the Week is Unexpected Pleasures. Send your musings about the little (or big!) things that surprise us, like the cool breezes we've had recently after all that heat, to kathykieth@hotmail.com

_______________________

Today's LittleNip:

TWILIGHT MOON
(An Octo)

—Joyce Odam

Wandering through the mauve garden,

bending like old trees toward night,

leaning our shadows together.

Is it sadness that we feel—or

something unknown that we deplore.

Leaning our shadows together,

bending like old trees toward night,

we wander through the mauve garden.

 

______________________

—Medusa

—Photo by Joyce Odam

Inspiration Sans Confoundation!

Napa Sign

—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis
 

ODYSSEY:  Always Being Somewhere Else in Dreams

—Michael Cluff, Corona

Mr. Browning made love

to his image on the Internet

the photo in pin-striped blue suit

and blackest socks and loafers.

Many hours

were spent

in such an indulgent way.

Miss Lemon

three buildings up

shared the same experience......

They knew each one

by sight over in the grocery store,

the fast food lines

and the nursery

where she had a thing

for black-eyed Susans

and he babies' breath

but they

never

entirely

met.

_______________________

ODYSSEY THROUGH WORDS

—Michael Cluff

Arugula and argyle

ancestors fester ficus

pica typeface

travels transversely

towards toyon and impalas

implied imminent domain

governing bodies

buoyed by both pallid

partisan palindromes

the cough from coffee

creamed in bovines

balancing budgets

in terms only

a budgie

or begonia

in tinted topaz

would undulate

and then understand

ultimate spinners

of saltines

and brine shrimp

continue on cue

from either Edgar,

Coriolanus or Coredila.

Leer and roam

e-male until

the tilled tillerman

tumbles

brown wingtips touching ties

into Cupid's cumberlanded

cupcakes

cussed and cursed

doggerel and dogma

intermixed and

then tensely

interspliced.

____________________

BREAKING THE CODE

—Caschwa, Sacramento

From all appearances, I am a full-fledged detective

Not academy graduated, certified, or accredited

But there is no other logical explanation

When I’m given a task to perform

I don’t get tried-and-true instructions, I get clues

Questions bring no answers, just more clues

As if all it should take is a fragment of information

To trigger complete recognition and analysis

A precious clue … take it from there …

And then there’s all that good advice about

How to process clues:  use common sense,

Don’t embarrass me again, just do it

I work in a laboratory and take silent orders

From brains sitting in jars on the shelves

Bring me exactly what I need right now, just do it 

____________________

THE RICH POET SOCIETY

(Yeah, right.)

—Caschwa

Surfing the Internet can be terribly fun

But it rubs the Dead Poet Society in your face

There is one sure way to reach that place

Imaginary, like the square root of minus one

The advice of people in high places is

Don’t look down, whether poetry or prose,

Window washers, mountaineers, CEOs

Or women in saunas with towels that read “His”

Practice makes perfect, MacNeice knows that truth

Two short marriages from five flickering flames

Booze, lectures, books, more sickening games

Not knowing who or what is in the kissing booth

____________________

A GIFT FROM THE SEA

     “[Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute] estimates it will 
       take at least a year or two for the radioactive material 
       released at Fukushima to get across the Pacific Ocean.”

                                          —Huffington Post, April 3, 2012

—Brigit Truex, Placerville

Cradle of life, this vast blue bowl,

convexed water, reaching from pole

to icy pole. First just dimpled,

the familiar surface rippled, wavered. Our sole

home, familiar blue ball,

hewed a monstrous sea-wall.

All crumbled, as an ax to coal.

Now those diamonds and doorknobs roll

in deep sea-currents. Foam marbled,

roiling fishnets, trawlers, riddled from reef to shoal,

begin to cast a pall—

deadly cues, radiant scrawl. 

____________________

UNDER THE SHADOW

—Taylor Graham, Placervlle

This refuge in the live-oak shade

past sun-gold on a meadow laid—

a lightning shadow overhead

with flash of copper, broad wings spread—a hawk on raid.

How many larks must die

to spark that cold red eye?

Hushed songbirds in the nesting spring;

each feather-flit's a fearful thing,

ellipsis in the skitter-shade—

a hawk? even the wren's afraid to fly or sing.

No breeze to break the sky,

an ache as wings soar by.
 

____________________

 

LIMITLESS

—Taylor Graham

In my dreams I saw them coming

from the back rooms of

hunger—sheep opening doors gates fences

ripping dry stubble with their teeth,

gathering dusk in their fleece

invisible as twilight

as the void no fields of clover fill,

the belly of oblivion.

Am I responsible for drought?

For all the hay bales and grain sacks

they ravage unbounded

foraging dry brush to cutbank,

helmeted in their skulls

without horns or swords but

raw famine they march

out of those speechless realms

older than history. I wake

to sheep hungry beyond my dreams.

____________________

REGIOMONTANUS

—Taylor Graham

Still peering from the frontispiece

armillary of your book, 576 years past

your birth, do you float now

unlimited by symbols, rules of theology?

Born in June, died at 40 in July.

Regiomontanus, Königsberg. King's

Mountain below the Almagest.

A cool shower of meteors streaks the sky

above this island dark beyond the reach

of city lights. I shiver without a jacket,

blind without telescope or trigonometry.

Infinity, unflinching night

of prayer. They say you died too soon.

What could you discover

with the naked mind, the observing

eye? God unhidden more

than imagination-high? They named

for you a crater of the Moon.
 

____________________

Many thanks to today's poets and photogs! Brigit Truex writes: Ok, at Judy's [Taylor Graham's] insistence I'm sending along a new form/poem. I told her I couldn't leave well enough alone—we had a choice of doing "florettes" and/or "essences" as part of our T@2 workshop assignments. So I dove in and combined them—a "floressence"! Voila, "A Gift from the Sea" is born. Hope you like it—maybe it will confound and/or inspire readers!

I told Brigit that most of our readers are confounded, and hopefully inspired, too. Taylor Graham tried the floressence and came up with the fine "Under the Shadow". I asked her to describe the form, and here's what she came up with: As I understand it, it's a florette stanza followed by an essence; at least 2 of these alternations, although I guess you could keep going as long as you want.

Florette stanza: 3 8-syllable lines + 1 12-syllable line, rhymed aaba, with internal b rhyme at syllable 8 of the 4th line:

xxxxxxxa

xxxxxxxa

xxxxxxxb

xxxxxxxbxxxa

Essence: 2 6-syllable lines end-rhyming (a), with an internal rhyme (b) somewhere in each line. [I don't know if that's clear; there must be a better way to describe it.]

Anyway, there it is for your formsters out there, with two fine examples. You can catch both Brigit and Judy tonight in Placeville at Poetry in Motion; check the blue board for details.

As I mentioned last week, our blue board at the right of this is undergoing changes. I've done some sweeping and vacuuming and added what I hope is a full roster of area periodicals and publishers. Last to be cleaned up will be Medusa's inner life—the Snake on a Rod section in the green box which links to inside Medusa pages. 

One of the publications listed is Trina Drotar's articles for Sacramento Press. (She sends us a link to her latest, this one about the Crocker/Squaw Valley benefit reading last Friday:www.sacramentopress.com/headline/69916/Prominent_US_poets_visit_Crocker

Those of you who are reading this and are publishers should check over what I said about you. Hopefully it will inspire and not confound... 

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

—Ray Bradbury

____________________

—Medusa

Summer Sunup

—Photo by Taylor Graham

And Grateful Too

Sunlight on the Garden

Halfmoon Bay

—Photo by Kathy Kieth, Diamond Springs

THE SUNLIGHT ON THE GARDEN

—Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden

Hardens and grows cold,

We cannot cage the minute

Within its nets of gold.

When all is told

We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as freelances

Advances towards its end;

The earth compels, upon it

Sonnets and birds descend;

And soon, my friend,

We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying

Defying the church bells

And every evil iron

Siren and what it tells;

The earth compels,

We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,

Hardened in heart anew,

But glad to have sat under

Thunder and rain with you,

And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden.

_____________________

—Medusa

 

Written by Warriors

Door Ornament

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

THESE ARE DOORS

—D.R. Wagner, Elk Grove

Tonight I could see them coming.

I could see their embroidered waist coats,

Their high, polished boots that

Reached to the knee and their

Flashing helmets with strange

Designs attached to the top of them,

Designating something important

To them as they rode their

Memorable horses close against

The gates, a kind of vanity

Only discovered when one is driven

From the back rooms of the heart.

They didn’t like to be noticed.

They were without history,

Made of oblivion with no index.

We would always see them

Through another’s eyes,

Like poems written by warriors,

Nourished by heroes whose deeds

Were limitless.

Still we could hear them moving

As if they were mysterious trains

Remembering dreams, but unwilling

To unleash the multi-colored ribbons

Borne by such as this music is made.

They would have us understand

For a moment only, so we imagined.

They used up years and they used us up

As we tried to unwind their riding,

Back to the realms from which they came.

____________________

AN ODD ISLAND OF SWANS

—D.R. Wagner

They float so recklessly above the greatest

Memories and as an infinity of books

Might have, had there been

No symbols, no heroes, no rules governing

All the theologies witnessed

By water in its myriad forms,

Finally finding Adam standing in the cool

Shower we have come to call prayer.

All this pushed aside to reveal a particular

View from the room of a sorrowing

King to reveal an odd island

Spilled across the top of the morning

That has been required to be your last,

Without ever having been consulted by

A solitary God, unhidden in the voice

A prayer might hope to hold as it stalks

Along the paths beside the ponds deciphering

The wakes and the dark voices of the swans.

_______________________

WATCHING FOR THE CHANGES

—D.R. Wagner

We have lost count by now.

There have been many days

Where the things that happened

Were made of such similar cloth

That even death had to unfold

His list of names and loves and

Places fighting had taken place,

But not so much as a rusted steel

Blade remained that could

Speak to how important it all

Seemed in the heat of an argument.

And even death was forced to prop

Up what was left of memory

With tree limbs tied together,

Placed at the edge of a field

Now planted with corn and settle

Everyone down to hear a story again

That they already knew,

Made bright against the row

Upon row of corn stalks and the night

Excusing itself to go about its business,

All the language left to insect voices,

Wind over the landscape and a quick

Stream of hurrying water, hoping

To get past this place as soon as possible.

The Fabric of Rain

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

THE OPERATIONS OF THE MAGIC

—D.R. Wagner

You are my dreamer.  Today, I am

Without form and you must lift

My limbs and have me climb

The purple cliffs and high places

Far above the sea so that we might

See the glittering cities of the plain

Opened like jeweled boxes against our poor

Wonder.  These castles are never to be

Mine.  They are yours and yours alone.

You are my dreamer.  You are the vehicle

By which I am done and undone.

You are the seas, seas with the

White of the day, seas, here

To show both wolves and the

Soft thighs of a lover standing

By her horse contemplating what

I pray is a unique and untried future

Rather than the twilight of

A fading past.  You are my dreamer.

Give me the morning and the day

And the evening once again,

Standing in the finest of lights.

_____________________

THE SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR LIBRARY AT NIGHT

—D.R. Wagner

I suppose here a coolness

The imagination might insist

Upon, claiming years of adventures:

Dante and Quixote, Dunsany and Bradbury.

All shades this cool, unflinching

Evening that begs to know the night

Even more intimately through Patchen,

Hodgson, Clark Smith and Lovecraft,

Himself hiding behind a floridness of language.

I make my way down the stairs

Well past midnight to investigate

A sound purloined by supposed spirits

And find rows of books out of order

And awry and wonder if it was

Indeed the cat or just the crowding

That some imagination might do

Just to show me it is an attractive

A mistress as any sweet-fleshed body.

I will wait till morning to pick

Them up again and put them in order,

Reading the titles of the stories,

Feeling the cool of the evening

Sifting in and out of the very words,

Imagining everything but the perfection

Of their voices scattered throughout my life.

___________________

Today's LittleNip:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
             

—Czeslaw Milosz (from "And Yet the Books")

___________________

—Medusa

 Transparent

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

Wizardry of Words

Stan Zumbiel reads at SPC'S 

Hot Poetry in the Park, June 18

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento
 

ENCOUNTER
—Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, were are they going,

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

(trans. from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallu)

_______________________

DEDICATION

—Czeslaw Milosz

You whom I could not save

Listen to me.

Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.

I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.

I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.

You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,

Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,

Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge

Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave

When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save

Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,

A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,

Readings for sophomore girls.

That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,

That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,

In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.

I put this book here for you, who once lived

So that you should visit us no more.

_______________________

PREPARATION

—Czeslaw Milosz

Still one more year of preparation. Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book

In which my century will appear as it really was.

The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.

Springs and autumns will unerringly return,

In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay

And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies

Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse

In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank

Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk

Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.

I still think too much about the mothers

And ask what is man born of woman.

He curls himself up and protects his head

While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running.

He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.

Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.

______________________

A SONG ON THE END OF THE WORLD
—Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the streeet

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.

Winter, 1944

(trans. from the Polish by Tony Milosz)

______________________

Today's LittleNip:

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
 

—Czeslaw Milosz
 

______________________
 

—Medusa
 

 Neil O'Neill reads at SPC'S 

Hot Poetry in the Park, June 18

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento