Counting Tears in a Bottle

Glad Day, c. 1794

—Paintings by William Blake

—Poems by B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA
 

HEARING

Hearing, like me
seagulls off the sea
by window gardens
opening in springtime
from secret signs
that only nature disguises
from sparrows over branches
once filled with ice
from March's muffled breeze
flooded by scintillated light
when our early clouds
of shrill loudspeakers
from bird feeders rise
in sky-bright reports rejoicing
when anticipation
of the time moving
forward with a lost line
of an unnoticed seasonal change.

Ancient of Days, 1794

ON THE MARCH WIND

On the March wind
bonded on a memory train
full of recollected words
to hear ringing chapel bells
above all roofs
and people's barricades
to make a faint way
near the rainy branches
with a kinfolk of lovebirds
who wish like me to soar
whistling for us in a chorus
above a chirping mundane earth
in space of a motorcade
to be welcomed by angels
in tents as combatants at war
have spoken on Blakean wings
in an Apocalypse of revelations
upon islands of outer space
from his telescopic observations
as an observer in his Southern sky
scatters about chattering
as Orion's constellations race
from its huge monster brightness
we are sensing the eternity
of his watercolor paintings
as thousands are enlightened
and waking to watch at attendance
his crayoned red dragon pictures
from his Songs of Innocence
and Experience archive plates
in this sorely dissonant time
over his muted melancholic lips
as rouge faints and fades
on a transparent creative face
in coverage of a bard's forgetfulness
along tumbling towers of the sun
existing on a showering metamorphosis
of a token cultural blessedness
as attendant spirits and pundits
breathing out from Blake's
cowering and captured gorgons
dramatic demons and epic dragons
in a narrative of courageous poets
from our Jacob's ladders' surveillance
of dark blue pigeon-clouds
over a stars’ air traffic third heaven
as poets miraculously sing out
on white tufts of clouds
replacing all those who run
across the bells of sky and shade
to swing at all shrouded nights
of many-sainted hours
under a famous eternal light
of a king of whom you have heard
from the presence of a flamed sun
flowering from citadels and pits
in the absence of day and night
not ashamed of these few hours
having lost your repentant name
to chant for a wonderful new one.
 

 Cover, Songs of Innocence

ANSELM KIEFER'S WORLD

Orange dancing chaos
of fingerprints from a painter
in the tuft of a visionary
from a sunlit studio
trampling colors
with wounds of hands
in images of spotted language
from angles sleeping
in his fiery eyes
about an abandoned history
besmirched with wounds
of war-dirtied faces weeping
in a sponged cauldron
from a mortuary of the voices
in an iconic shadow
recognizing the spells
of elemental rootless journeys.

___________________

RUBLEV'S ICONS

Fifteen centuries
go by Andrei Rublev's paint
the lashes of art watering
in yellow, blue and red
to scrub your Russian icons
with wounds of exhaustion
on back breaking long ago
in the fifteenth century
with the suffering God
buried in prison camps
with angels alighting
on their windy
wings on riverbeds
of the people's penury
awakened blood of snows
with an artist heaving echoes
to answer the breathless
river at the monastery's dust
in the nights of panic
and pain at the steeples
of the church's sun's glow
saints still on gold ceilings
wander by forever
counting tears in a bottle.
 

 The Giant Albion from Jerusalem, 1804
 

THE ELIXIR OF LOVE

Listening to the opera
of Donizetti
not to part
with The Elixir of Love
which I was acquainted with
since taken to the Met
as a child relives his joy there
thrilled with the combination
of a staged play,
music from an orchestra
with voices from a libretto
the elixir has not aged
drinking in every melody
of my young daydreams
linked by time, eye gaze
tongue and trembling notes
knowing there is someone
young in the audience
taken by the hand today
to the balcony of the house,
who will experience
a glimmer of artistic vision
for her or his memory
which will last in silence
every time they drink
from a resonant glass
of ethereal depths of fun.
 

HANS HOFFMAN IN EXILE

You breathe salty lines
of portraits of your era
rubbing paints
in a visionary chamber
exposing photographic colors
from a terrifying fate
out of an astonished painter
of the modern era
as an improvising revolutionary
of a poetic expatriate
in later sanity of expressionism
changing the stolen years
among the immortality
of banishment and sorrow
squeezing out in exile
behind the iron doors
with tomorrow's pure flashing
in red fingers and footprints
of disconnected times
covering interconnected images
surprising a deranged flame
of light dilated in his studio
staring on a pale canvas
which lingers ’til our time
into the night's signature
when storms are raging
in a destined discovery
from resentment of madness
transfiguring our flesh
into disobliging disguises
from memory's adventure.
 

The Angels Hovering Over the Body of Christ

in the Sepulchre, 1805
 

IN THE LAND OF NOD

No one expects Cain
here in the land of Nod
for Abel is slain
but all realize now
it is more than a fable
to be in exile from God
not even honorable Abel
expects a good sacrifice
as far as one can tell
who speaks to angel Michael
in this chapel and neighborhood
as religion passes to Nimrod
now in a tower of Babel
each telling their story
in their suspected private Hell
full of purgatory and trial
waiting for His glory
and the rising of the dead.

 The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve, c. 1826

GOING BEYOND TIME

Embracing tomorrow
after reading parts
of Julius Caesar
on the Ides of March
remembering in Italy
the newly baptized red sky
turning blue
going beyond time
as several birds in columns
arriving like Pasolini's
opening words to greet us
who after all is our brother too
as laughing tourists by the gates
and student princes
now starry-eyed
read you out loud
at a Roman bookstall
remembering my first Latin lessons
in recognizing the roots
of these ancestral pockets
in a thin paper mâché collection
from your knotted
own post-war faces
those poetry pictures
from a rejected childhood
as tiny snowflakes
appear on the beach
rippling into a diary
of writing Thursday on a page
my hand stretched out
to touch the branches
now white with much joy
that the long winter
may be over my palm
in a third-month finger of fate
from the stormy Bay rain
which drenches the Coast
walking on the sand
the sun flickers
its first light of sailing
and intoxicates the day
which shapes our tongue
of verse's vulnerability
asking for wisdom
to make it through.

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

—Wm. Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

***

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

—Wm. Blake

___________________

Our thanks to B.Z. Niditch for his fine poems today! For more about poet/painter William Blake and his angels, go to britsattheirbest.com/creative_brits/cr_blake.htm/.

—Medusa

William Blake, 1757-1827

Like Mums Humming

Romella

—Poems by Romella Kitchens, Pittsburgh, PA

EMOTIONAL GROWTH
                                                   
Like Mums humming (and Zinnias) to be understood.
Like the spilled seed of the sunflower to not be
rebuked.
Come Status and Clematis and St. John's Wort.
Loved Aloe and the abandon of sensual vine.
"I stand replenished by those who say yes instead of
no."
The Marigolds look brighter in this light.
Spiritual marigolds reaching up and out towards the sunlight
suddenly, like hybrid, long-armed dancers.
It doesn't take an army to create an emotional revolution.
It doesn't always take the masses to make things right, to right the
wrong; it may only take YOU.
Making love is not always physically intimate, it can be not about the
body at all, but instead about the heart.
Growth comes with compassion.
Look at the living in your "Garden Of Living”, respond.
The wilting plants grow with care, as do the submerged and hurt
human beings.
It is only necessary,
but "Necessary" is the center of its own constellation.
It is a truth we face, then face again.
Without it, we are empty-handed gardeners without tools.
They wrote one evening on a tiny slip of paper:  "Please do not
work back all of the way into the wild plants and flowers. They have
won over my heart. They are so maverick. The wild and the uncultivated
need a place to remainder to, too."
And, We understood.
                                      
_________________

WHEN MAYA ANGELOU DIED,

I was at work and a woman who knew I believed in poems
told me, told me gently as if she were painfully speaking out about
a beautiful, older aunt or a loved relative of mine who had passed respectfully
in her arms unbeknownst to me.
And sister, I stood still.
The clock of my heart made to mark the millisecond you reached out
and took God’s hand…
Made to stop there, still, then be covered with black cloth.
Sister Maya, I stood in the room of my understanding, you were
gone, draped in Black—the windows shuttered.
Your poems, as if to fleshen offspring, bowing their spilled tears and heads in
deference to you only to you…
Your words standing up like peaceful preachers proclaiming you into the eons.

 Maya Angelou
 

FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE

Family should be a creation.
It should be sculpted, painted passionately.
There should be tapestries of family.
Family should fill the walls of truth.
It should have breath from the first ribs of mankind and on.
It should have admissions of the dark, the deep,
even the suicidal...
But yet that saving, that heroic, that wanting to be and
maintaining that spiritual meditative.
Like certain arms or heights or ways of walking, its
tangible characteristics of family should include homage to God.
Family, whether rich or poor, the proud estate.
To welcome into the family walk should be to welcome
into spirituality—not into the lost and the
addicted unless family helps create healing.

___________________

“PLEASE DARLING, EAT!”

When I was a little girl, I had been watching
Gandhi on television.

I became upset about a small household matter of
freedom to come and go as
I would please, and decided to go on a
“Hunger Strike”.

So, I wrapped my little, naked body, in a white sheet
toga-style, listed my demands and then refused to eat
accept for juice and soup for seven long, summer days.
Meditative thoughts as my only solid “food”.

Yes, it took seven days of Tang.
But, I tell you, a stubborn, rebellious body is
a wonderful thing….
I won that one.

FAMILIAL(S)
                                                      
Maybe it is the sound of the train or the worn houses so heavy
in their backs and knees.
Maybe sorrowful people all seem the same, and tomorrow
and yesterday are all of equal confusion and complexity.
But for some reason we laid down and closed our eyes
as the thoughtful Pennsylvania sky turned evening orange
and purple.
You laid next to me, afraid of the illness in your body
as only a person just told by a doctor they would die would
do.
Yet beyond sympathy and the paternal line,
I could not trust you not to need and to hurt me for it.
Not to form your victories on my defeat and blood because
enmity is taught in a family as well as love.
But still I laid there, willing to risk, comfort and love you.

The adder snake of mankind is borne sometimes of fear,
violent competition as well as sharing.
Yet, the sharper side of any blade will always be more
direct than the gentle.
But, gentleness prevails.  It holds out its hand.
It forgives and, in doing so, learns the tender joyfulness
of caring, even past the body, of never letting go.

_____________________
                                    
FOR YEHUDA AMICHAI

                                               I.

As I sleep and in my waking hours, I hear the poems of other people.
I see the prophetic and the prophet—sometimes in the earthly heaven and
sometimes in the lands of famine, war and loss.

Throughout the shrapnel of violence, there has always been the flesh and
mourning of the disciple, asking the world for more.
The soul takes no side.  It sees conflict as the general infliction of suffering
and longs for resolution.

What is this poem?
What is this season?
What is beyond this darkened killing field?

                                               II.

Saddles switch and the apocalyptic rides into the turmoil of time.
The twilight sky is orange with fire.

                                              III.

A tree in Israel cries out.
The courtyard of its birth a societal womb.
The arm-like branches multiple.
Go to it beyond the fig trees.
Witness the most yellow, sweetest lemons, shaped not unlike a
Woman's breasts.
The land is fecund, surreal in its worth.

Yellow peel like the sunlight, like a saffron-hued woman's skin.
Bite.
Taste the days if ever the conflict is no longer.

                                              IV.

The lemon of spiritual worth falls to the ground through the dark
Green leaves, far from the redness of strife and blood.

 University of Pittsburgh

 

THE DENIAL OF WHAT IS ESSENTIAL

The letter written of life should be one concerning love.
For we have borne the burning cross of hatred too long.
We as human beings can amend the pejorative rules of hatred
again and again.
Thus, I have amended the rules of genocide, self-genocide,
separatism repeatedly.
I have searched the tree of life for forgiving, non-bitter fruit.
So have many others.
This is the most difficult thing, with neutrality and cynicism
taught to us as intellectualism.
Customs change but love stays, even though banished and pushed
away.  We must not deny it.
We should instead break the custom over our knees and seek
solidarity in the battle to be caring human beings.
We are built on what we believe, foundationless without that.

___________________   

Today’s LittleNip:

THE CONTINUANCE

I am finding poems everywhere today.
In the still waters of the Monongahela River.
As a lost seagull flying overhead and in the bottom of
a death-white coffee cup…
In the wine of summer—in the syllabic of city heat and inching
metal car-hulls pushing force against their own tired, aging engines.
What was it that you said to me?
That this world was without hope?
Yet, the “divine high piping” like that of David
seems to deny and defy that.
And we as birds have but a little way to fly.
But we do and we do, stealing through the
“dust under the inverted bowl we call the sky” everyday.

_________________

Our thanks and welcome to Kitchen newcomer Romella D’ore Kitchens, who has been writing poetry for over 40 years. She is a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania native and has poems published in anthologies, online and, in poetry journals including: Chiron Review, The California Quarterly, Brevities, Caprice, MUDFISH and others. She has performed poems in public for many years and is an Autumn House Poet. Pittsburgh has an eclectic arts community with a very strong, large core of poets who have been born or lived there over the years. They include Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Jan Beatty, Ed Ochester, Terrance Hayes, Ross Gay, Gerald Stern, Li Young Lee, Judy Collier and countless others of literary merit. For more of Romella’s poems, see www.poemhunter.com/romella-kitchens/poems/.
Thanks for stopping by, Romella, and don’t be a stranger!

________________

—Medusa

 Romella’s chapbook, Hip Hop Warrior, 

may be purchased from Main Street Rag at 

mainstreetragbookstore.com/?product=hip-hop-warrior/.

 

Wanting to Know Green

—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW GREEN

I, too, am this
odd music
drawn out of time
like a reluctant sound
as far away as Eden.

I am timbered free for the
first time,
for the first free time.

I am as old
as you think I am.

I vibrate for all the love
that is in me.
Do not be afraid of
this wild sound
in all your quietness.

I am not a usual music.
I am thin and far.
I am heavy with new pregnancies.
I am diagonal like the rain.

Loneliness is
as brutal as love,
but not as tame.

It walks in the self
like a brooder
in the night-time of his garden.
It mutters in the gray wind
in the oldest trees.

So send me back along the leaves
if you want to know green.
If you want me to be real
bring me a silence to fill.

I will not be kind.
I will be sung
from your deepest listening.
You will love me then.                                


(from The Hearkeners, Charas Press, 1973)

BECOMING THE IMAGE

I am a water lily, floating upon a dream,
my petals breathe,
the air is green    the light is cool,
I feel little touchings of love

~~~

when I was a reflection I felt the separation
from self,   sinuate,    textureless,
when touched, I broke

~~~

now you ask why I keep floating
in peaceful imagination
content and enough

~~~

my petals breathe,
I feel little touchings of love
the air is green    the light is cool,
I am a water lily, floating upon a dream

 

_________________

BEHOLDER  

He stares at her through an open window—
which is to say—the night.  She is always
nude.  He is always green shadow.  A tree
of darkness conceals him.  Her room is
yellow.  She turns abstract—becomes cubes,
blushes with praise for his eyes.  He speaks
to her in a hollow voice . . . wind-whispers . . .

she listens without answer;  she is absorbed
by all the turning and arranging of the light;
the way the room magnifies; the way the night
enters; the way the tree wraps its branches
around the mirror.  He cannot close his eyes.
She cannot make up her mind about the glass,
which is about to shatter.  She turns out the light.

FOREWARNED

Jealousy looms—
personified with outspread wings
and wearing a green mask.

You will feel him at your window—
pulsing the air like a dark hummingbird.
You will feel his eyes
which are hidden;
his thoughts
will inform you.

You belong to him.
His energy will enfold you
until you are a suffocated thing
that cannot breathe without his permission.

_________________

THE GREEN WOMAN

How serenely she wears
the art of the painter’s hand
who painted her all green—

or is it the deception of light
turning her into
a numinous map of the sea

that follows her contours
with shapes and symbols
of intricate design—

even to the closed mouth
and eyelids, the hair sculpted
into deep waves: how

ever swim back now
to the real
and lose all this… how

ever clothe, and hide
the breathing design of her body,
so perfectly stained…

__________________

ON CATCHING AN IMAGE OF WIND AND
RAIN IN UNMOWED GRASS

The rain is in love with the grasses.
It touches them with wet, green kisses
and they glisten in its windy murmurs.

Love, come again to all such places
where I have lain, the inner weeds
insinuating, the small, tame flowers

around me dying.  Love, come as rain.
When my mouth can know such bruising,
soft is the pain.

                                          
(prev. pub. in Retrospect, 1969)

_______________________

HER EYES IN THE MIRROR

Now she will praise the child for its eyes upon
her eyes in the mirror, their faces identically
serious, her eyes controlling their eyes in the glass.

Her hands stroke the air—blending their auras.
The child is soothed by the sensuous movement
of her hands. A warm glow suffuses the room.

The mirror grows envious—feigns dimension . . .
pulls her . . . pulls her . . .but the grave child
holds to her lap and stares through her eyes

to the pulling eyes of the mirror. The mother
admires the child for its attention. Their eyes
burn together in the glass. The mirror pretends

to love them too. It softens its surface—forgets
it is glass, suffers the warm perfusion to alter its
depth. It, too, is under the power of the mother.


(prev. pub. in Tiger’s Eye, 2003)

THE STIMULUS OF THE DAY

Did he not walk with utter nonchalance in the misty rain,
not hastening a moment for his saunter through the green
light, his white hair lifting slightly at his step, one hand in
pocket, his face lifted into the late afternoon, which was
slow—slow enough for us to watch him pass before the
stopped car with his singular gait, his long gray raincoat
tied at the waist, his steps at rhythm with the length of
the light that changed and broke the spell of our watching.

___________________

NOTHING-STREET BRIDGE   

The bridge is for
old men walking

the long way back and forth
from sleep to drinking

over the gray-green water
lisping— lapping—

silvering in the wind’s
constant deeping.

Cold is the shiver of time
in the daily passing.

Hot is the sun’s bright pressure
in the pale eyes, glassing.

                         
(prev. pub. in Driftwood, 1972)

BITTER IN THE STEM

Time comes to me like
some long whisper out of death,
sounding from the stem
of its own flower,
opening
to where I bend
within the cold voice
of my mind.

Death, then, is tubular
and green,
a dreaded dandelion
flocked finished seed
like all spilled language
on life’s closing sky.
My particles give up their
bursting cry to silence.
Winds come darkly to the quiver
that defines in them.

My energies unwind.
The whisper
listening for my earth against
its winter root . . .
the milk lies bitter in the stem.
                          

(prev. pub. in Kauri, 1996)

_________________

Today’s LittleNip(s):

AH-NESS

the blue man
holding his hand out
to the soaring bird

    _____

in the air, alight
with fire-eyes, the phoenix sings,
feathers still burning

         _____

winter in the park
a seagull frozen to the lake . . .
unreachable

    _____

wind ripples
bending grasses, the air
green with sibilance


(prev. pub. in Poets’ Forum Magazine, 1996)

____________________

Many thanks to Joyce Odam for helping us think about green, our previous Seed of the Week. Our new SOW is Topsy-Turvy. Send your poems, photos and artwork about same to kathykieth@hotmail.com. No deadline on SOWs.

—Medusa

Green

Many Greens

—Photo by Taylor Graham
 

JUST GREEN
—Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

Too spring-early still for pied colors—
butter-yellow cups and purple vetch,
lupine in every shade of sky. The fields
are charged with green—dewy clumps of elf
umbrellas, chickweed sprays spiked by
tiny stars. Mottled mosses on oak

open-mouthed to catch the last raindrop
joining just-sprung rivulets in meadow
twined with laceweed. After all this blessed
rain, all we’ve got is green, the leaf,
the hope, the seed.

____________________

THE HEART IN SNOW
—Taylor Graham

You told me of those people buried
by avalanche, surviving more than a month.
Were they together in a house, looking
out the windows for so many blank white hours;
hearing, far above them, footsteps as they lay
in the heart of snow? Did they imagine music?
What quality of light? Could they tell Time
passing by the moon filtering through smashed
crystals, changing from waning to dark?
Don’t speak of claustrophobia or a nagging fear
that the village was dancing, having forgotten
them utterly. Did they dream of the butcher’s
dog shoving its nose into hard-pack cracks
in snow debris; inhaling deeply; then
digging for the cold heart of mountain,
their living scent rising like prayer?

 March 14 Green

—Photo by Taylor Graham
 

FAR FROM THE NEW YORKER
—Taylor Graham
 
Here in Drought Land, in the season of March
along the dry creek that breaks our fences
after rain, we’ve got a whole vocabulary
of green, enough to fill a biologist’s notebook,
a botanist’s journal: the steeplechase of squirrels
over neon green of leafing oaks, and titmice
gathering bottle-green moss for a nest;
lambs deciphering the verdant script of lana-
vetch lacing humps of native bunchgrass;
thistle-green and mustard-green; blue heron
punctuating marsh-green of a soggy field,
deer that lose themselves in green
shadow—so many shades and textures,
who could name them before they’re gone
by the Ides of May?
 

 Spring Old and New

—Photo by Taylor Graham
 

DRIVING IN THE RAIN
—Taylor Graham

Through the farm-gate, weather or high water.
Days of rain, fields flooded, driveways mudded
with rivulets mining their cursive ruts. Dry Creek
on the loose, a low gray beast leaping willows,
widening to river, extending its range. Overflow
the bridges? We humans aren’t good at gauging
depth. Edgy life in these foothills, bedrock under
the heavens. Again it starts to rain. And there
in a sodden swale, ghosts of wanderers in search
of familiar ground—more wild turkeys than
I’ve seen in one place. No time to count, already
I’m past. Minding the curves, wipers full blast.
Look, in the rush of March, hush between down-
pours—creatures from a dream, a dozen deer
taking shelter near a house. Bucks and does,
fawns of all sizes. Not much farther to go.
Here’s the meeting place—no one there.
We’ll take our walk anyway. All of the lost
and found, I and my dog and the turkeys,
the deer and the storm.

 Fox Den in the Green

—Photo by Taylor Graham

A BIT OF THE GREEN IN COUNTY CLARE
—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove, CA
 
I lived in an old church
A few years back,
Had been St Mel’s
In Fair Oaks, CA.
Mel was the nephew
Of Patrick.  Can’t get
Much greener than
That.  Mel Lived on a farm
With his Aunt Lupait,
Story goes.  We’re
Talking Irish history
Here, can’t get much
Greener than that.

They talked, we Irish
Always do, about
Suspicious relationships—
What’s Ireland without
Them?  Patrick plodded
Off to County Clare to
Investigate.

Plowing his field
To prove his virtue,
Mel turned up rows
Of salmon in his wake.
Aunt Lopait juggled burning
Coals from the smithy’s
Fire to the kitchen—no
Burns, no scars,
No drops—important
For a juggler.  And
They all had a nice lunch.

Patrick, satisfied with the
Greening church in the
West, wiped his mouth
On his monk sleeve—polite,
The patron of the Emerald Isle.
Told his relatives to carry
On, but to keep to the sea,
What was to the sea, that
Which was to the smithy’s
Fire to his fire.

 Thistle and Mustard

—Photo by Taylor Graham

RETROSPECTIVE INSIGHT
After “Insight” by Joyce Odam
—Caschwa, Sacramento

Joyce wrote “what else is there to note 
and lose before the loss is realized?”

When I awakened from a 10 day coma
After a motorcycle crash
My right thumb was all
Wrapped up like a mummy
Hard to bend

In my boredom I picked at the bandages
Moment by moment
Hour by hour
Day by day
Working them loose

Until someone would have to
Come over and wrap it up
All over again, which they did
Like it was written so
In a bandage bible

Sometime later the bandages
Were intentionally removed
And my thumb tested OK
No explanations were offered
I was just sent home

A chance encounter with a first responder
Who had attended to me at the crash site
Informed me that my thumb had been
All but completely torn off
And then reattached

So I never got to know
The sense of loss
From not having a thumb
That I had had before
When I awakened

 Apple Blossoms
—Photo by Taylor Graham

GRAY
—Ann Privateer, Davis, CA

The lady in gray
Still sits at her window
Sipping from a cup
Bends to the floor
For a fallen object
In the gray building
Across the street.

 —Photo by Ann Privateer

WALKING ON SUNDAY
—Ann Privateer, Davis, CA

It is so cold today
The brilliant sun
Must be far away,
As I walk, I hug
The buildings, honing
In to the stone's heat
As knees freeze and ankles
Go numb, a collection
Of colors in the street.

 —Photo by Ann Privateer

OLIBRIUS
—Ann Privateer

The padre says
It describes someone
Unusual, an odd ball
A braggard, what less
Then someone
      being them self?

—Photo by Ann Privateer

Today’s LittleNip:

ERASURES
—Taylor Graham

Every day you write in the journal someone
gave you, a blank volume far too beautiful
to soil with ink. At times your hand shakes
to inscribe your day on the page. Sometimes
you dash your doings off with wild flourish.
Nowadays, just pen-ticks of letters, phrases
held together by ellipses. You close the book
at bedtime and night washes it clean. Eternal
tiding of dreams, waves eroding your shore.
Next day, you write in the journal, the same
page overwriting the day before; effacing
your own name; a palimpsest of mistakes
still shining through, patina of words
rubbed by cuff of shirtsleeve to a sheen.

______________________

Many thanks for this morning’s fine, fine buffet of poetry and photos! Be sure to scroll down to the blue box (under the green box) for details of this week's area readings, including Dianna Henning at SPC on Monday, plus two coming up for Saturday (Sr. Readers Speak and the Soft Offs' SPC benefit).

—Medusa
 

 Spring Chickens

—Photo by Taylor Graham

Hope Is...

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS
—Emily Dickinson

'Hope' is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

_______________________

—Medusa

Laced Together By Dreams

The Beautiful Blue-Green Rock

—Poems and Photos by D.R. Wagner, Locke, CA

“I SIMPLY STATE WHAT WAS

TOLD ME BY THE CHINESE PLATE”
                           
                     —Eugene Field




The fog has closed the garden.

It used to be just across

The gravel road, bound by

A wooden fence.



Now it is entirely gone.

Even the oranges, bright

As ideas yesterday, have

Disappeared.



Everything has become a ghost.

Nothing has feet.  The fence-

Posts float in and out

Of sight, part of a morning vision.



I drink hot Jasmine tea, stay

Behind the window, looking out.

_________________

THE HEART IN SNOW



Finding the footsteps

Of the heart in the snow.

Miles off the road.

Not a light, not a spirit

Going to call me on.



I remember quite well.

I remember quite well.



Looking in the windows
,
We were dancing.  I couldn’t

Hear the music but we

Looked happy for a moment.



Tonight the moon through snow.

Wind, not even bothering

To cover its tracks,

So very few anyway,

Follows the heart.

 White Quince Blossoms

 

THE SOLDIERS



And I thought of the flowers

That held the guns

And opened the yellow moon

To conflagration 

As they marched

And marched

And marched

Giving the single

Gift of their death

As they were picked
For bouquets.  The pretties
Given to the short edges

Of the memory of death.



Spirits all.  Clouding 

The skies with 

Tumbling light 

And thunder

And rain.



Day after day of rain,

Fields in flood and mud

All memory now.



And memory itself

Has so little self

Or, from our brief

Waking, none at all.

__________________


SHIPBUILDING 



They have opened the deep mines.

Places we can no longer remember.

We call them by the names of time awarded

Them when their dreaming was marked by

Footsteps, ochre and quiet yellows.



We keep them in our rivers, guarded

By drums and clarinets.  If we can listen

We can hear their songs filled with lavender.

Here, you are welcome to walk once again.



She spreads her apron and recites some

Songs she remembers from her grandmother’s day.

Perhaps you will recall when I loved you?

You have forgotten my name so many times.

I have been your lover for over two thousand years.



They have built towers to us but you no longer

Recognize them as ourselves.  We have given 

Them to history, an old woman walking up 

Long steps to find her home above the sea.



I am of the mines.  I live in your blood.

All these visions are sailboats to notice,

In the evening, from your bedroom window.

I will call to you with the voice of the stars.

You will only notice the waves touching the shore

Under a moon that somehow seems to know you alone.


 Don't Recall

OTHERWORLDLY



I say to myself

These are the faces

Of people from dreams.

They are constantly surprised

Like drunks suddenly

Seeing themselves in a mirror.



Not a single event here

Has any kind of order.



The sky is a scrim

Overprinted with unreadable

Characters, important

As lucid dreams and

Worth about as much.

When I lifted the bedcovers

All was embalmed and preserved,



Waiting.  I walk up to your

Door.  “This is what happens

Tomorrow.”  You are reading

This now so as not

To be alarmed when

It dissolves before

You while you are having

A morning coffee.



I soon will be dead

Or, perhaps, it is you who

Will be mistaken for 

Someone else and tomorrow

Evening I may still be here,

Telling this same story

As if it were an entirely

New and wondrous thing.

_________________


IMPERATIVE



Of course you are everything.

Otherwise I wouldn’t

Love you, would I?



The ghost of the 

Wandering days.



All I have is this

Sweet little dance

To give you.

All has been taken.



Wait.  Oh here, I have a rose for you.

You can take it home

With you tonight.

I’m ready now.

I’m ready now.

What’s your plan?



Did you ever have one?

Was I always alone?



You cannot take me home

Tonight.  I’m going out to

Walk under the stars.



What is left?



You can feel this.


 Onion Coming to Flower

FOR MY FRIEND E.R. BAXTER III



An empty room

But still full of lupine.

I have ceased to notice

The walls disappeared

Long ago.  I can see 

You walking with Loraine

Around the curve in the path,

Toward the barn.  I can still

Hear the lowing of the cattle

In their indoor enclosure.



Loraine is gone now, much,

Much too soon and you sit

Drinking tea and smoking

Cigarettes.  It is hard to move

Much or very quickly since

The tractor came over on you

A few years back but it has 

Managed to construct a room

Outside the house where I can 

Still see you both together,

Young and beautiful, laced

Together by dreams and something

Amazingly as beautiful as your love

For each other every time I saw you.

____________________



A LETTER FROM THE EVENING



The window in the bedroom is only slightly open.

Enough to allow the silence, should evening care 

To bring it.  Tonight it is carrying rain and perhaps

That is a perfect silence.  The cold and damp 

All but stopped the roses from opening.  The many

Colored brooms blow across the gardens, some get lost

In the bamboo.  I think the perfect poem might still 

Be in there somewhere.  Maybe it was there only 

In the morning and for a short part of time.



I’ll sit here looking into the gathering dark, feeling

That tiny breeze through the bedroom window.

I will continue to listen, to look at this letter from the evening

And trust the perfect poem is still there despite all

That is impossible and unpredictable.

 Apple Blossoms

Today’s LittleNip:

MISTAKE


That’s not a memory

You’re holding, sweetheart.

It’s a gun.

___________________

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

 Prayer Flags on the Garage

Someone From Home

—Poems by Donal Mahoney, St. Louis, MO

—Anonymous Photos

SOMEONE FROM HOME

When I was a child we always went to church but only once a year as a family.

My father would rise every Sunday and attend the 6:30 Mass, then come home and read his Sunday paper, every word of it, section by section, saving the obituaries for last.

My mother would stuff my sister and me into our Sunday best and send us off to the Children’s Mass at 10. It was a short walk to the church and times were different back then. We were children but safe in our little neighborhood of brick bungalows where neighbors kept an eye out for strangers or anyone or anything that looked odd. The south side of Chicago in the Forties and Fifties was blue collar, little villages teeming with immigrants and very peaceful, except for the occasional fight that might break out in a neighborhood bar.

After sending my sister and me off to church, my mother would put the roast in the oven, ask my father to keep an eye on it, and she would go to the 11:15.

This was our family pattern, even on Christmas and Easter. I recall not one variation.

But there was that one day a year when the four of us as a family went off to church together. And that was on Good Friday when we walked to the church, my sister and I in front, my father and mother right behind us, to attend the Stations of the Cross at 3 p.m. Not a word was said as we walked those few blocks. But I was impressed by this family event because if it was important enough to get us to go to church together, I figured Good Friday must be a pretty important day.

The only other time we went anywhere as a family was an Irish wake. Chicago back then was not only home to the Stockyards filled with cattle, swine and sheep. It was also home to large groups of immigrants. And my father would always want the family to dress up and go to an Irish wake, hoping, as he so often said, to meet “someone from home.”

AN IRISH CHRISTENING

Thomas said
you can’t go home again
but I did for my sister
and the christening of her first.
Everyone, on folding chairs, against
the whitewashed basement walls, was there
for ham and beef and beer, the better
bourbons, music, argument and talk.
Maura came; she hadn’t married.
Paddy, fist around a beer, declared
I owed my family the sight
of me more often.
Hannah, thickset now,
gray and apronless,
rose beside the furnace,
wolverined me to the coal bin door
and asked me in the face,
with sibilance and spittle,
who or what it was
that kept me anywhere,
everywhere, but there.

STROKE

      Ireland to America, long ago

In this Kerryman’s eyes
big ships sail
and lighthouses flicker
light years away.
He’s 70 today and sits
tombstone-straight
in his caneback chair,
waves at a flake
hanging from his nose,
misses and curses.
It’s his first curse of the day
and he’s ready for anything,
an ancient ram braced for the British
climbing through the mist.
His children, parents themselves now,
sit in his parlor, silent around him.
When they hear his first curse,
they know it’s 20 years earlier
and Father is calling
a meeting of the family.
They shift in their chairs
as his eyes and his words
whiz around the room
like bees liquored up
looking for something to sink into.

 Dingle Town

DINGLE, IRELAND

The bathroom carpet,
wall to wall, is blue,
the lightest blue,
to complement
the bowl and ceiling.

Apropos the moment:
I bend the waist
and heave the gristle
from last evening's steak.

Tomorrow I shall row again
to see those ancient men
in caps and coveralls
stand like statues
while they talk
and tap gold embers
from clay pipes
forever glowing.

I'll go there
at the dinner hour
and see them once again
fork potatoes,
whole and steaming,
from big kettles filled
at dawn by crones
forever kerchiefed
and forever bent.

At dawn you hear
these women
sing their hymns
like seraphim
a cappella
as they genuflect and dip
big black kettles
in the sometimes still
sometimes foaming sea.

 Dingle Peninsula

LEPRECAUN’S CREED

The thing of it is,
says Johnny O,
none of us knows

whether he is
while others announce
after looking around

they beg to differ.
The thing of it is,
says Johnny O,

some would say
he’s here, he’s there,
he’s everywhere

while others would say
after looking around
no one can see him

anywhere--so how
can he be everywhere?
The thing of it is,

says Johnny O,
he’s right over where?
Let’s look around.

 Leprechaun

For more about leprechauns, see

 www.fairyist.com/fairy-types/leprechauns or

holidays.thefuntimesguide.com/2009/02/the_leprechaun.php

CONSUELA AND SEAN

Through the nursery glass
Carlos Montero peeks at Consuela,
his twelfth, in the arms of a nurse.

Pink as a peony
with brilliant black hair,
Consuela is raw, bawling.

The nurse takes Consuela
away to be washed as Carlos
digs deep in his denims,

locks elbows, gleams,
turns to me. I feel odd
in a suit and a tie as I

wait to see Sean, our first.
When the nurse brings Sean to the window,
Carlos Montero whips off his sombrero,

makes a bullfighter's pass and beams.
"Señor!" he booms like a tuba. "Ole!"
Suddenly I'm as happy as he.

THE WIDOW MURPHY SETS HER CAP

Mrs. Ryan keeps her cat inside at night
but lets it out at dawn to go anywhere it likes
while she's at work. Every day the cat

crosses the road to call on the Widow Murphy.
Mrs. Ryan doesn't know her cat calls on Mrs. Murphy
but she has told the widow twice her cat is on a diet:

a little kibble in the morning and a little water at night.
Nothing else. When the cat arrives at Mrs. Murphy's,
the widow lets him in and gives him warm milk

and a dollop of salmon on a porcelain saucer.
Afterward the cat takes a long nap on a Persian rug till
the widow lets him out in the afternoon

to cross the road and wait for Mrs. Ryan
to pull her Lincoln into the driveway.
Mrs. Ryan's husband, Paddy, now retired,

has never called on the Widow Murphy.
He doesn't know the widow's waiting.
Paddy likes his tea strong, his wife once said.

 Tipperary Town

THE ONLY PLACE TO GO IN TIPPERARY

Father Kelly has always claimed
the only place to go in Tipperary
once you're dead is Eagan's Mortuary.
Father Kelly says Eagan lays a client out
as if a body were a mackerel from the sea
glistening in the bottom of a boat
once the mad thrashing is over.
Father Kelly has always claimed
a dead mackerel deserves a nap
before the flames of hell take over.

The late Tommy Dugan arrived at Eagan's
a day or so after he'd been shot
and Eagan laid him out perfectly
with both eyes open and a plastic
booger peeking from his nose,
a cosmetic touch Tommy had requested
when he came to Eagan's the week before,
chomping on an unlit panatela.
Tommy came that day to make
final arrangements, as they say.

That same day Tommy asked if he could be
waked in Eagan's finest casket upside down,
his pants pulled down around his knees
and a sign across his arse saying "Kiss this!"
as a final salute to his mother-in-law.
But the law in Tipperary specifies
no sign of any kind in any casket so
Tommy settled for the plastic booger in his nose.
He knew his mother-in-law would curse it
at the family viewing prior to the wake.

At Eagan's you can make arrangements
years before you die and Eagan guarantees
he'll lay you out the way you specify
provided everything's within the law, of course.
But Tommy Dugan's widow swears
Eagan must have been possessed to put
a plastic booger in a dead man's nose.
Rosie Dugan can't believe her sober Tommy
would ever ask for anything like that.
But after Mass on Sunday friends remind her

Father Kelly has always claimed
the only place to go in Tipperary
once you're dead is Eagan's Mortuary.
Father Kelly says Eagan lays a client out
as if a body were a mackerel from the sea
glistening in the bottom of a boat
once the mad thrashing is over.
Father Kelly has always claimed
a dead mackerel deserves a nap
before the flames of hell take over.

__________________
 

PADDY MURPHY’S WAKE

The priest had been here earlier and the rosary was said
and relatives and friends in single file were offering condolences.
"Sorry for your troubles," one by one they said,
bending over Maggie Murphy, silent in her rocker,
a foot or so from Paddy, resplendent in his casket,
the two of them much closer now than they had ever been.
A silent guest of honor, Paddy now had nothing more to say,
waked in aspic, if you will, in front of his gothic fireplace.

But the hour was getting late and still the widow hadn't wept.
Her eyes were swept Saharas and the mourners wanted tears.
They had fields to plow come morning and they needed sleep
but the custom in County Kerry was
no one leaves a wake until the widow weeps.

Fair Maggie could have married any man in Kerry,
according to her mother, who almost every day reminded her of that.
"Maggie," she would say, "you should have married Mickey.
His limp was not that bad," but Maggie wouldn't listen.
Instead, she married Paddy, "that pestilence out walking"
as her mother often called him
even on a Sunday but only after Mass.

Maggie married Paddy the day he scored the only goal
the year that Kerry took the trophy back from Galway.
That goal was no small thing, Paddy would remind us all forever
until one of us would gag and buy him another drink.
That goal, he'd shout, was something historians would one day note,
even if they hadn't yet, and every time he'd mention it,
which was almost daily, Maggie's mother would remind her daughter
that she should have married Mickey and had a better life.
The final time her mother praised poor Mickey,
a screaming match ensued, so loud it woke the rooster
the day before her mother, feverish in bed,
gurgled like a frog and died.

This evening, though, as the wake wore on,
the mourners grew more weary
waiting for the tears the widow hadn't shed.
Restless in his folding chair, Mickey put his bottle down
and rose to give the eulogy it had taken days to memorize.
"Folks," he said, "if all of us would holler down to Paddy now,
he'd holler back, I'm sure, and tell us,
despite the flames and all that smoke, that Kerry
winning over Galway is all that ever mattered, even now.
We'll always have cold Paddy over there to thank for that."

The Widow Murphy hadn't moved all evening,
but after hearing Mickey speak, she began to rock with fury
as she raised a purple fist, shook it to the heavens
and then began to hum her favorite dirge.
The mourners all joined in and hummed along until
midnight pealed on the mantel clock and then,
as if released by God Himself, the mourners one by one
rose from folding chairs and left in single file, freed  
by a hurricane of the Widow Murphy's tears.

__________________

NIGHT LIGHT

The last visitor before I sleep
is always the old priest
puffing up the stairs to my door,
a wine cask under each arm,
a loaf of pumpernickel in his teeth.
He’s always too late to give the last rites,
and even though I’m usually dead by then,
it falls to me to console him.
So I say, “Father, Father,
you don’t have to hurry.
Faith is no longer a klieg.
It’s a night light left burning all day,
and its bulb is hissing.”


(first pub. in Commonweal Magazine, 2009)

ONE OF THE HA-HA’s FROM OLD STABALL HILL

                  Ballyheigue, County Kerry, Ireland
 
That man over there
with his head in the well,
his thumbs in his ears
and his arse in the air
like a zeppelin at moor,
if he can write poems
the Ha-Ha’s will read,
all of the Ha-Ha’s,
no matter the breed,
even the Ha-Ha’s
from Old Staball Hill,
if he can write poems,
then poems he will.

_________________

Today’s LittleNip:

SONG FOR BALLYHEIGUE

        County Kerry, Ireland

Twig fire limn
eight fairy
in a lour cave mouth

Four of whom
a tabor thrum

Four of whom
breathe zephyr
through wee fife

All of whom
leap star,
the joy of life

All of whom
sing lark,
the yet to come

___________________

—Medusa, with many thanks for sending us poems for our extended St. Patrick’s Day!