Quantcast
Channel: Medusa's Kitchen
Viewing all 4467 articles
Browse latest View live

A Song of Poetry

$
0
0
—Poems by B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA
—Photos by Denise Flanagan, MA



A COUNTRY ROAD

We carry strawberries
in baskets of vegetation
by the frankness of nature
hiking for miles in Concord
near Walden pond
wishing to swim
or at least wade in cool waters
a poet with a hip pose
for the camera
refuses to forget those friends
buried near here
the Alcotts and Hawthornes
who rest on high grass fields
by orange and red vineyards
in an earth-wise woodland
near pine cones and nettles
with fragile memories
of those in childhood
who ride their horses
by your bicycle
along avid nature trails
near a deer park
abandoned in separation
of season and vines
dazzling in the sunshine
near the greensward hills
as honey and bumblebees
by yellow jackets
hum in a visited hive
punctuated by butterfly wings
in Sixties denim the poet
feeding red-wing blackbirds
who want to sing out
by a homeless scarecrow
where the now-city Beat poet
runs among sandy meadows
trampling among shadows
gives a reading from Thoreau
opening a bliss of advice
to his eager students
hoping his life will move on
beyond weary alder leaves
in another metamorphosis.

___________________

THE NIGHTMARE VERSES

While eating steak and eggs
rather late
on an arty tray
in a garden variety
of sweet peas and carrots
ordering a coffee cup
as night is breaking up
you overhear a tarot reading
as dark shadows embrace
a crevice in a bitter high ceiling
approaching in distress
devouring our time
as a once-silver corner mouse
watches a pale lady
in a purple veil levitating
in a black party dress
from her last supper
kicking her high chair
to impress a higher power
God is assenting to my prayer
to delay her pitch in case
of any daily crime's danger
by taking liberties
from an astrology's stranger
as a spraying odor by the door
rides over the wayward windows
brimming with seaweed kelp
sailors are shipping out in song
in a Moorish bridal lore,
gone is a suicidal nightmare
from a trauma
in a tell-all visionary drama
nothing more,
a sweet perfume suddenly emerges
behind the curtains for our benefit
and cool air again prevails
as a sacrificial conduit,
and all urges of life,
dreams of our two children,
games of parcheesi,
letters and joyful picture frames,
as an evening song of poetry
suddenly overtakes us
we're taking it easy
forgetting the lady's obituary
making her ways of the occult
in exclamations difficult
in the past tweet in her hand
she moves on her full cushion
to a reactionary discussion
someone asking about Germany
in the nineteen-twenties
near a shepherd's whelp
in a Yeatsian phrase
of explication
wondering to my self
is that madam Blavatsky's niece
or just a resemblance
to carry in your valise
as the policeman carrying
out his word of making peace
a rosary chant is heard above
the hum of a band of bees
near a distant firing squad
someone calls on
Mary's son and God
with no explanation
for a pardon and help.



 B.Z. at the Country Store



ROLFE

Rolfe, you were home-taught
James Joyce
caught you reading Ulysses
when you were eleven
by the doors
in the school corridors,
at sixteen on the highway
were a chauffeur
driving a Rolls Royce,
you started to sing
on the golf course
as you were discovered
by a impresario
as a bird on a wing
you were once a cantor
in your early days
now a tenor at the opera
with a lyrical song of praise
as long you are alive
in musical ways
beloved,
rejoice, rejoice.

____________________

SPIES

Spies are like flies
they are everywhere
like princes of the air
riding through our windows
dancing on our privacy
as daring shadows
taking any information
of person, place or thing
where they may locate it
by fingerprint or D.N.A.
through every plane's wing
even on our train of thoughts
as conduits of a higher power
beyond our control and realm
in their own compartments
carrying our luggage
and baggage in their helm
on their saluted arms
they wish us to cower
like moles on skinheads
reading our souls in bed
it is 'way beyond 1984
that Orwell prophesied
for they want our whole world
on their Hellish side
as they gather up
for any wars they decide on
but the lonely poet
once the champion
of a conduit of truth
may not let the enemy
hide from us
on our election day
for he is even camped
on ballots with bullets
in the voting booth
stamping us right or left
through the hallways
to select their candidate.






YOU ARE NAMELESS

You are nameless
to those who make war
for shameless profit
with their deceit off it
(you know,
as a friend of the poet)
who has wronged us
is the devil politician
whose mission
will offend you
to make you in submission
for a higher measure
who will cash in
at the end of days
all of his stash
for your treasure
and spend and suspend us
to another world
curled with a life-long sin
not of your value
holding an old receipt
who will try to cheat us
from a sectarian spirit within
calling on our guardian angel
needing our prophets
more than any profit & loss
who will win every battle
now at the crossroad
though all nations retreat
those who love will not worship
any golden cattle at his feet.

____________________

SCREENS

Man methodically
in this twentieth century
on this planet earth
began his day
with screens
swallowed his coffee
by a screen
turned on the news
by a screen
worked in his office
nine to five
on a live screen
survived a horror flick
of a thousand gory scenes
by screams on a screen
kicking wild sex over
riding to cover all orifices
once hiding on screens,
or takes a language course
of French poetry
trying to write an ode
on the park bench,
goes to his wave radio
yet mistakes Morse code
by discovering the force
behind money on the bourse
at ninety has an operation
on his turkey neck,
with one click
of a wide screen
even though he tried
every healthy diet
solely of green beans
now we have even picked up
his obituary cast on screens
with his last will
and envious testimony
about his dreams of divorce
in a society of jealousy
of course,
past his alimony history
behind the screens
now others watch religiously
catching his life of re-runs
where the wind now blows
over his T.V. reality show.






AGE IN WAR OR PEACE TIME

Age is not by number
drawing us in
a colorful painting
daily our heart palpitates
and we may refuse
to take take to bed
in slumber or fainting
nor does our life's fate
depend on the mind
but on the soul
as we search for sleeping beauty
to find a prince or pauper
when you were called to serve
nor does any army sentry
need a name-dropper
while on duty's call or roll
for he has his guard dog
to rise up from what is said
death will add to its scroll
in every bell of breath
to toll the dead in monologue
no strife need be preserved
in shadows of an outside wall
from a widow spider's dialogue.

____________________

ON SPECTACLE ISLAND

Contemplating the seas
at dawn by birdsong voices
here in the home harbor
wishing to be Melville
to travel by boat
and compose a novel Pierre
or at the crossroads
with fair St. John the Divine
on the isle of Patmos
eating love's Word,
with bread and wine
or in exile
as Ulysses sailing at will
and smile
given my liberty
in Boston exploring
the city's jazz scene
with a mean alto saxophone
will rejoice under the sun
every hair numbered
from every war zone
in prophecies' past wonders
and daydreams of peace
to be still and relax
for twenty-one centuries
awaking out of slumber
we poets will outlast time
as Picasso's doves increase.



 B.Z. Shopping



CHRISTO IN SONOMA
born June 13, 1935

That running fence
making us smile and relax
at your fabric art
you put on display
at Marin and Sonoma counties
at a funky array
of juxtaposing parts
of your abstract discoveries
that play over
in our imaginative objects
and tense situations
of contrasting metallic ways
in a new alchemy category
for our new century animation
in your monumental galleys
up twenty stories in heights
of a Babylon of 24/7
building all day and night
accessories as drawing us in
reaching a Babel tower
in sky-writing bubbles
to an awe and ode to heaven.

______________________

CONSTABLE
born June 13, 1776

Waking from a pale dream
over the Dedham Veil
framed by trees
inside your painting
feeling such beauty
in a landscape of a dale
as if we were fainting,
how you inspired me
with ease, and so many
from their sixth senses
to explore a rainbow
in a sample of color's use
as composed in Delacroix's
"Roe-deer in Snow"
and de Chirico turned loose
in his metaphysical part
Larry Rivers in the Big Apple
and young Balthus portraits
or in many samples
of bas-relief,
you allow us each dawn
to restore our belief in art
as critics
we wonder, Constable,
of our own sensitive shapes
how geometrically
are we drawn
from our tenses
to our own poetic landscapes.

_________________________
 
W.B. YEAT'S LIFE
born June 13, 1865

Who waits on seeds
plants imagination
remembers a discovery
of W.B. Yeats who rose
early in his life
to write for us
during Irish troubles
and political strife
he who still musically lives
as a poet in our heart
never decomposed
forgives line by line
in his lyrically divine art.

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

—John F. Kennedy

________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to today's fine contributors!












Piccolos in the Forest

$
0
0
—Anonymous Photo
—Poems by Donal Mahoney, St. Louis, MO



GUNS AND CELL PHONES

In St. Louis young blacks
carry guns like cell phones
and use them often

to shoot each other,
as we read in the daily paper
and see on local television.

Black adults now put signs
in parks and yards in
neighborhoods around the city

with this message for their young:
“We must stop killing each other.”
They want to stop the suicide.

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks
once wrote that peace
won’t come to anyone until

everyone is “tea-colored.”
By 3015 the world may know
if Gwendolyn was right.




 —Photo by Keely S. Dorran, Sacramento



WOMAN IN THE DAY ROOM CRYING

Lightning bolts in childhood
can scar the soul forever.
They're a satanic baptism
when the minister's your father,
mother, brother, sister,
anyone taller, screaming,
shooting flames from the sky
all day, all night.

The years go by
but the scars remain.
The pale moonlight of age
makes them easier to see
and scratch until they burst
and bleed again,
another reason I wake up
at night screaming.

When the daylight comes,
I talk about the scars
when no one is around
to say shut up!
I draw the details in a mural
on the walls and ceilings so
everyone can see the storms
that never left a rainbow.



—Photo by Keely S. Dorran



DAD

The two Gibraltars in the yard
never were delivered.
They have always been there.
The twenty years I lived there

the neighbors never said a word.
Their shrieks would shatter both
if they could see them.
The redwood fence my Father built

is tall enough to cover his.
It will be tall enough, he swears,
in time to cover mine.
My father says before he dies

he’ll sell his own Gibraltar
and leave the house, the yard,
the redwood fence to me
to guarantee that I keep mine.

_____________________

TOMMY IS THE MAN

Tommy is the only man
for miles around who can knot a tie.
Old farmers come to town on Saturday

and wave from pickups with respect
when they see Tommy on the street
out for a walk in his black suit.

Tommy is the man they know
their families will call to knot
their ties and close their caskets.



 —Photo by Keely S. Dorran


WOMEN WHO WALK LIKE MEN

They seem to be everywhere now,
women who walk like men.
With hair cropped in a paint brush,
bullets for eyes and knives for noses,
they walk long halls, hips so still
they can have no pelvis.
Then one day you meet one
and become her friend.
A week later you still wonder:
Are all the women who walk like men
wildflowers, really,
locked in a hothouse,
craving the sun?


________________________

MEG'S NEW WALLS

Sue phones the hotel around midnight.
Two weeks earlier, at her request,
I took a room there.
Three bags,

half packed in the corner,
are ready to go back.
“There’s been a fire,”
Sue says. I ask

“Is everyone all right?”
They are. “How did it start?”
“My matches,” Sue says,
“and one of the kids.”

Weeks later, I visit the kids
at the house and find
the workmen have finished.
From the top stair, Meg shouts,

“Dad, come up and see my new walls!”
Dad can’t come up there, I tell her.
“All right,” Meg says, “I’ll bring
my new walls down to you.”



 White Rose Petal, Capitol Park, Sacramento
—Photo by Keely S. Dorran



OMG

Seeing is believing
smart people
often tell me but

no one ever told me
believing is seeing
except this blind lady

I help across the street
who taps her cane
and tells me

you’ll find out
when you leave Earth
and whirl among the planets

and soar behind
the sun and moon
on the way to your place

believing is seeing
someone some say
isn't there. 

____________________

DANGLING PARTICIPLES

Every time something breaks
like the pipe in the wall
we heard gushing

this morning
my wife wants to call
a repairman because

I can’t fix anything
except split infinitives
and dangling participles

and I usually agree
but this time
I mention the kayaks

in the attic and say
why don’t we hop
in the kayaks

open the front door
and sail down the street
wave to the neighbors

cutting their grass
planting their peonies
worrying about crime

and shout best of luck
we’re tired of the good life
we’re sailing away.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

PICCOLOS

Walking in the forest
as morning comes
I hear piccolos

of wrens and robins
offer hymns to God
some say isn’t there

and isn't anywhere.
The piccolos, some say,
are simply fallout

from the Big Bang.
I tell the wrens and robins
but they play on.

_____________________

—Medusa, thanking today's fine chefs, Donal Mahoney from St. Louis and Keely Dorran from Sacramento!



—Photo by Keely S. Dorran







Like the Heart on Fire

$
0
0
Alfredo's Figurine, Locke, CA
—Poems and Photos by D.R. Wagner, Locke



A BLACK TICKET

The black ticket of their souls
Flying across the sky.
Packages of dreams.

Stars crumbling under the weight
Of their transformations.

The Avenues of the Dead.
Souls within souls,
Blown here in the form
Of flocks of birds
Coursing through shadowed
Woods.  Sometimes they twinkle.
Incomprehensible miracles
Across the rows upon rows
The mausoleums make
In this place.

They are the sentences of the dead.
Their language dispersed
Into the quiet of books.

The dark sweep of a library
Hallway reaching back further
And further into ashes.

___________________

A BLACK TICKET II

We see an occasional
Painting or, perhaps, our own
Reflection as we gaze into
The coolness of the cistern
In the middle of the garden.

We manage to stay within
Strict limits: If you are
Breathing, you can be here with me.
If you are not breathing
You become part of the deception,
This parade jingling through
The cemeteries.  All has become
Vague and seems to stand still.

I wish for the sky to slope
Down from the mountains,
Hold me in that calling
Of its dusk and glory,
Make me listen for eternity,
As if such a thing were even possible.



 Back of Building, Locke



 FAXING POETICAL*

Here one can read the sky like a book
Left open to catch one’s attention;
Words mount to heaven, mass at the horizon,
The afternoon heat spinning them to senselessness.

Stories once told to a child roll and scatter.
The air is filled with them, dust devils, clouds like ships
In full syllable; names of one thousand romances
Skip and careen through this language of landscape.

West winds compose new endings to old legends.
The stars begin to descend, winding the hair with the night;
Pale letters, fragments of the play of words, remain.
They are the names of the land, the places beneath the sky.

Small! Like a diamond, rests in
the palm of your hand, an amulet.

Warms to the touch of skin on skin,
Takes in the light of the sun, radiates
Outward like the heart on fire.


*Written 1/5/1993 in alternate lines from line one by Luan Fauteck Makes Marks and D.R. Wagner.  Last verse: first two lines D.R. Wagner, last line by Luan Fauteck Makes Marks. 



 Garden Fence, Locke



BREAKING THE TRANCE

Born white, a cloud
And without vestments,
Able to kiss the raven.

All is bowing and the sunrise
Tightening the strings to invent
Perfect tones; the kind
The Pied Piper used
To deliver children
To the mountain's door.

The skin falls away
From the bones.
Burnt by the passions
Day after day.  Every line
Bears witness to what?
Fragments of light?
Light striking towers?

Nothing came before the word.
More and more the days
Are erected beyond memory,
Beyond silence, beyond
Proportions.  They uncouple from hope
As fire does from the word.

We have always been in heaven.
High above the landscape,
Staring through the windows
In wonder before our own breath.



 Acanthus



BAD WATER

We didn’t realize the rage of the river
Until we climbed to the high bank.
Looking down we saw the rapids
Going on and on as far as the eye could see.

Why this insistence to hurry back to the sea?
A nightmare where one holds on with fingertips
To what is left of one’s mind while still
Being able to see shadows as belonging
To all other things but not to oneself.

A direction in the middle of the air.
An atrocious fabrication compounded
By perception and remembrances,
Not necessarily coming from ourselves.

Evening was very near.  Even from this height
One could hear the great waterfall leaning
Over the edge of its precipice, cursing
With its language of horror and splendor.
Crashing into the rocks far below.

The river was the only way to proceed.
All else was endless plains, rainstorms
Boiling in the distance, purple clouds,
Lightning and the calls of frightened birds.

Every step we took elicited more questions.
Our memory became crystal, then dust and years.
Which is life.  Which is dream.  Which is death…



 Morning Glory



THE POEM OF WATER

The story is unrepeatable.  It has no
Walls, but dominates dreams with its
Huge body so huge civilizations may be lost there.

Never finding their way, such a labyrinth
Undoing our tongues by refusing speech
As we open our mouths, no longer able
To breathe, lost once more on our journey
As Ulysses was lost.

I remember the last time standing
On the banks of the Niagara River,
The Upper Rapids.
The rocks seemed to be exploding.
The sound clear and loud, but still
We were able to talk to one another.

Then it happens: For over a mile
Eternity opens its mouth so wide
We swoon upon the river banks,
Gazing full into your body.

You are the element.
Oh water that is all things to me
From life to death, filling my body
With your flowing.  Am I in love with you
Or is it that you are in love with me?

I seem to speak as you do, drop by
Drop, some clear, some clouded.
I do not know what I am trying
To say.  My library pours from its shelves,
Filling all available space, pouring through
The windows, through the town and city,
Never stopping.  We hardly notice

Where all of language pours back
Into your element, washes itself
Within you and returns to our lips
As we sing endlessly to your mystery.

______________________

Today's LittleNip:

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

—Diane Ackerman

_____________________

—Medusa, with thanks to D.R. Wagner for this morning's fine way to start a weekend, including the Medusa painting below that he found for us, and a reminder that daily photos may be enlarged with a single click. If you do enlarge them today, you'll be able to see what those things sitting on the fence really are, and you'll also get the full effect of both the Medusa painting and D.R.'s fine photos.



    —Anonymous Painting











Like An Endless Meditation

$
0
0
Blue Buddha
—Photo by D.R. Wagner, Locke, CA



THE CANOEING
—Russell Edson (1935-2014)

We went upstairs in a canoe. I kept catching my paddle in the banisters.

We met several salmon passing us, flipping step by step; no doubt to find the remembered bedroom. And they were like the slippered feet of someone falling down the stairs, played backward as in a movie.

And then we were passing over the downstairs closet under the stairs, and could feel the weight of dark overcoats and galoshes in a cave of umbrellas and fedoras; water dripping there, deep in the earth, like an endless meditation . . .

. . . Finally the quiet waters of the upstairs hall. We dip our paddles with gentle care not to injure the quiet dark, and seem to glide for days by family bedrooms under a stillness of
trees . . .
 
_________________________

—Medusa






Everyone Should Have One

$
0
0
Annie Menebroker reading at Red Alice's Poetry Emporium
Wednesday, June 10
—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento
 


TROLLS.  REALLY?
—Katy Brown, Davis, CA

The house is infested
with a clan of trolls.

The elders have set-up
under the desk and work table,
stealing pens and paperclips.
They steal the jigsaw puzzle pieces
and swap them like trading cards.
They torment the cat and
startle the contemplating spiders.

Their Midwestern cousins,
in campy black and white vests,
sleep under the bottlebrush,
fling foul-smelling excrement
at the dog, and fade into the shadows.

They barbecue
the neighbor’s beetles
and sauté the sleepy snails
that hide under the gardenia.

We’ve tried commercial troll-spray,
turned the sprinklers
on the outside camp
and tried to vacuum
in all the dark corners.
The house trolls simply laugh
and tip over the kitchen trash.

We used to have ants.
We used to complain
about the neighbor’s cat
digging in the flowerbed.
We haven’t seen ants or the cat
since the trolls moved in.
Honestly, the trolls are worse.



 D.R. Wagner reading at Red Alice June 10
—Photo by Michelle Kunert



BUT EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE ONE
—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove
 
Got him at a liquidation sale.
They were relocating the bridge
And the trolls were moving on.

Got him for a good price though.
And they said he’d stay under
The desk and gnaw at my feet
When I was writing bad poetry.

He’s always under there with a
Kind of humming rather than
Trollish grumbles and mutters.
Doesn’t gnaw, either, just
Sometimes licks my toes.

Licks a lot actually.  I expected,
You know, a kind of troll-fetor.
But he’s always cleaning, paws,
Ears, whatever.  Come to think
Of it, the ears aren’t floppy
Troll ears either: they’re
Sort of erect and pointy.

Sometimes I think he’s actually
A cat and not a troll.  Maybe
I should have kept the receipt.



Josh Fernandez at Red Alice with Ezra, June 10
—Photo by Michelle Kunert



POEM 5 OF 5
—Richard Hansen, Sacramento

Original Star Trek Viewing Guide
Season One
Charley X
Dagger of the Mind

Balance of Terror
The Squire of Gothos

Return of the Archons
A Taste of Armageddon
Errand of Mercy
and
City on the Edge of Forever

OK now
Season Two
The Changeling
Friday's Child

The Gamesters of Triskelion

Bread and Circuses
Assignment Earth
Season Three
The Paradise Syndrome
breath
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Wink of an Eye
Elaan of Troyius
then
Requiem For Methuselah
(this is the single best episode of
Star Trek
ever!)
The Cloud Minders
and finally

Turnabout Intruder

______________________

MRS. OBAMA
—Richard Hansen
 
Girl!
lookit
you and me baybuh
we can make it
I know
your husband is the President
and
...the Secret Service
'n everything...
I'm Sorry I blocked Your Pestering Phonecalls
I was wrong I know that!
Girl!!!

You and Me you know it...



 Martha Ann Blackman reading at Red Alice June 10
—Photo by Michelle Kunert



The triple-digit heat days are back
  The kind of days where I have to tell my Dad—
  Please do your outdoor jobs in the early morning
  and your indoor jobs in the afternoons
  because I see you do the exact reverse
  That means I don’t want to see you clipping bushes when it's 103!
  You break my heart when you do something like that
  because I don’t want to call an ambulance to rescue you if you pass out


—Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

_______________________                  

Pop star Jim Morrison died at age 27 in Paris, the same summer of ‘71 I was born
  —the causes never exactly determined but speculated to be his drug and alcohol abuse
  Now supposedly the last poem Morrison ever wrote has suddenly appeared
  Handwritten on a piece of red- and blue-lined paper of a once-intact notebook,
  labeled "page 152" it says,
  “I have a vision of America 28,000 feet & going fast—
  I have drunk the drug of forgetfulness
  Leave the informed sense in our wake—You be Christ on this package tour—money beats soul
  Last words, Last words out.”
  As I write this, it is expected to be up for auction for $60,000 to $80,000
  which is a hell of a lot for something that appears not even to be suitable for framing                            
  Why doesn’t this piece of memorabilia go to a museum?
  Or maybe be put into a plaque at Morrison’s often fan-decorated, flower-covered gravesite?


—Michelle Kunert

_______________________

Today's LittleNip:

THE TROLL UNDER MY DESK
—Loch Henson, Diamond Springs, CA

He’s almost harmless.

He steals my toenail clippings and
wears them in a locket.

He brings me bouquets of frogs.
(He doesn’t hurt them, but
there is not much for them to eat
under my desk.)

He gets jealous when I write.
Sometimes I have to go
to the garden to get away
from the grumbling.

______________________

—Medusa, thanking today's contributors and noting that we have a new photo album on Medusa's Facebook page, this one by Michelle Kunert, featuring last Monday's Sac. Poetry Center reading. Check it out!



 Hemp Fashion Show Models, CA State Grange
—Photo by Michelle Kunert












Desperate for Poetry

$
0
0
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento
 


FIFTEEN
(1939—Long Beach)

At 39 Mermaid Place
the old whore
neighbor
in bed with another
young husband she
introduces
loans her detective-story
magazines
to the teenage girl
from next door
who looks
so shyly at them
in the bed
and wonders how
such a fat ugly
can get such
a good-looking
husband as this
his
naked muscles
showing
all the way down
to his waist
where the sheet
slips
as he turns
and looks at her
under the
distance of his eyes
as she backs out the door.

         
(first pub. in Rattlesnake Review, Dec. 2004)

____________________

I’M TIRED I’M UGLY I’M ALONE

Yesterday’s pretty face
is gone today.

My eyes have a grayness
at their deepest place.

I look at how
a sadness droops me down.

I fascinate myself.
How dull I
I’ve grown.






THE SEASHORE IDYL
(after “Seashore Idyll” by Heinrich Kley)

       On that god-forsaken, barren length of beach,
there was nothing left to do but make the best of
things.  He was ugly, but maybe she could make him
beautiful, for she believed in lies and spells.

       “If I love you, will you become beautiful for
me?” she would ask each time he came ashore.  And
he would say he would.  She was happy after that,
and each day at the same hour she would lean against
her lonely sea-rock, and scan the gray length of the
sea from one end to the other, and wait for him to
come out of the water.

       And he would lumber out and sit on the sand in
all his grossness and sing to her with his loud and
mournful voice which carried so far away it broke
beyond their hearing.  The sky would churn with stormy
echoes then settle back to the flat and desolate gray
monotony of this place.  And he would droop his head
again upon his chest in some old melancholy.

       She would listen until he was through, then ask,
“How can you be so sad when I love you—you who are
so beautiful to me?”  And she would turn aside and
weep at her own boredom and sadness.

       But he would sit on the sand in all his ugliness,
and he could not lift to her his heavy arms or his
massive head, and he would sigh from his heavy heart
and tell her that she must come with him, then, into
the weightless sea, if she must have an answer they
could both believe.

       And she would lean against her old sea-rock and
think of this and wonder how it would be if she followed
him into the wide gray unknown water.  Until the sun
went down she would think of this, while he would bask in
the low cold western light and make his impression in the
sand for her, which she would later curl into and sleep.

                            
(first pub. in Parting Gifts, 1998)






TIDE TURNINGS
(after “Riptide” by Heidy Steidmeyer)

All that is grim, caught here on this long and shining beach in
the warping moonlight—vague things gleaming in the distance;

a bird wing caught in the sand; the small look of something
made of string; the curve of the wet land where it goes on

and on past the following night; the old deliberate way you
glide along the water’s edge until you feel yourself disappear;

and why does it always seem at once so far away and so near—
as if time and distance can be traveled simultaneously.

_________________________

THE UNCOMELY CHILD
(after Soutine's "A Little Girl", 1920)

Oh, you who are yet a child, though dated by an old dead calendar,
your future cruelty already forming on your face, your hands

clenched together as if to trap yourself somewhere out of reach;
your eyes are the eyes of the oldest anger. The shadows behind you

press forward in a churn of discontent. The hour is sickly green;
it darkens down and wears the light out and grows too heavy for you.

For now you are grimly obedient, letting some brief eternity
name you important. But Soutine has found you out. He makes

the paint thicker, denser. You are stuck there forever; your face
in a pout, your orange dress wrinkled and soiled and your hair a mess.

Your angry mouth looks like it was just washed out with soap.
What ever did you say to make everyone so mad?






UGLY

These tight veins.
These bumps and protrusions.
These scars.
Come hold me while I tell you
how it was.

There were confusions
and wars.
There were stolen destinies.
I had to get even.

See this swollen body
that was beautiful.
I was never a child.
I was always an old remembrance.
No one loved me.

Why do you love me now?
I am cruel.
I am bitten through with
innocent confessions.
Keep the one you choose.

Now you must live with
its forgiveness.
Be its carrier.
Take it with you everywhere
even to the mirrors.

Come, let us touch our
frozen souls together
and weep
for all there is
to weep about.
             

(first pub. in Calliope, 1989)






FOR EVERY PERSON I SEE

I should write love poems
for every person I see.
Even those frowning,
ugly people
at the other end of the room
who quarrel with everybody
with their
hard, unhappy faces.

They are hurting themselves.
They are so desperate
for poetry.


(first pub. in Simbolica)

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

UGLY, I SAY

Truth and I
confront each other
in the glass.

“Ugly,” I say.
“You, too,”
it answers.

       
(first pub. in Portland Oregonian, 1971)

______________________

Our thanks to Joyce Odam for today's tasty breakfast, her riffs on our Seed of the Week: The Troll Who Lives Under My Desk. Our new SOW is for the season: Fathers—good, bad, short, tall, rich, poor—send your poetic or visual thoughts about them to kathykieth@hotmail.com/. No deadline on SOWs, though.

—Medusa











Elvis Returns!

$
0
0
Paula Conant and Jane Conant Blue
—Photo Courtesy of Jane Blue, Sacramento


WAKING
—Jane Blue, Sacramento

He kisses me on the top of the head
before I am quite awake.
I hear nothing, my good ear buried
in the pillow. His touch is a little heavier
than a moth’s. I recognize it
for what it is: a blessing. When I get up,
he’s sitting lotus posture on the red sofa
with the green and pink afghan
draped over his shoulders. The cat
who mewls piteously in the evenings
is out back confidently scratching
his white paws in the dirt, daintily
covering his excrement. The birds are silent,
even the jay that harasses the cat in the evening.
He stands, the afghan dropping off him
like a molting life. We kiss
face to face. I can smell morning on him.
His breath is always sweet. The refrigerator
hums and gurgles, the freeway slinks
past the open window with the sound
of rushing water. It is my birthday.



 —Photo by Cynthia Linville, Sacramento
 


courage to change
—James Lee Jobe, Davis, CA
 
             for d.r. wagner

these souls are transparent,
and one can see what is within.

through the hollows of night
many of us will look, just to see.

and then, next to the walls of day,
we will have to live with what we saw.

and what is there to see? just this;
what we are, and what we might be.

______________________

keep the fire burning
—James Lee Jobe

keep the fire burning for the gods you love the most.
the most private of prayers burns in the most quiet of hours.
you and the flame. faith and fire. the drumbeat of the earth.
the whispers of heaven in the quiet folds of your ears.
you have a secret name, and you speak it in the firelight.

_____________________

marriage
—James Lee Jobe

i love the fragrance of your tiny garden,
and I love those herbs that rest below your belly.

in your teeth, you hold the skin of my love
the way a hummingbird holds a single drop of nectar.

the winds of this valley furrow your brow,
and you sing whenever there is music.

the children are grown, and now their children come.
when heaven calls to us, we will sleep together.

if there is reincarnation, then let a day will come
when I breathe in your garden again.



 —Photo by Cynthia Linville



CALIFORNIA ROMANTIC

NMF

You rendered your suave ivory skin ashen;
not in the Rilkean way transformed your life,
but dissolved in a glass the bitter-almond passion
you chose, your chaser foam and fire. That knife
seawater cleaved & dispersed your cindered grains,
disbursed, that is, your maenad-scattered pieces
Carmel to Kyoto, in Orphic-lyric strains,
antiphonal contractions, tide-releases.
The day your lovers, mentors, scattered you
smoke-to-tidewater—trusting ebb-tide to take you—
that day shone blue, belying the gray mournful
silence, knotted & tough, in the shattered few.
They also trusted wave-shapes not to break you.
No one unstoppers a soul in one small urnful.

I know your protégé; her lifeblood flows
quite unawares in verse unknown as yours;
she aches for gold shores, and for the crystal rose
whose brittle mystic touchstone somehow endures
risen from chaos where fogbanks divide
revealing bared wolf-canines west of Lobos
red from the bitten skybloom oceanward.
Heart pulsing homage to the fear god Phobos,
still this young woman braves that undertow,
that rough surf, rushed into awkward rhythms fierce,
breasting her way to the Rose. Mysterious how,
granted fresh strong limbs and grace, she’ll pierce
the lonely dangerous watercourse she darts
where ruby distances fade to rose quartz.


—Tom Goff, Carmichael

_______________________

MY LAST MYSTERY
—Tom Goff

You were all mystery then.
I saw you slip out that door,
leave me in bank-vault-deep night.
Now clicks the timelock again.
Lostness and distance before,
you are now absolute light.

Shadow devoured that door.
Heart steeped in ink, drenched in night,
I looked and looked for you then.
Eyes I could probe with before
lost with the last stripe of light.
Dawn maybe never again.

I too dissolved in the night.
Palms, wrists, and fingers by then
thinned through one last slice of door,
scenting for you and for light.
Where now? My hands thrust again,
wanting the You of before.

Here is the mystery, then.
How did you find the one door
sealed in my absolute night?
What depths did you cross again?
What cold star-summits before
you came back streaming with light?



 —Photo by Cynthia Linville



CREATION MYTH
—Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

No Zauberberg; in the mountains
a landscape of animated dust, a man (call him
Stranger-alone-in-the-Cosmos but for
the dog scouting his way) set out
toward the Dunklerwald, dark line of forest
cloaking a ridge. Beyond that,
landmarks dwindling to a higher peak.
Along the path, granite eroded,
knifed by weather but, in the light before storm,
soft with lichen. Sky brooded thunder,
no birds flew. Woods-creatures stayed low
in their animal destinies—so thought
the man. Only his dog forged
ahead and the man followed as if nothing
could change his purpose. He meant to climb
the peak, achieve the sonnet, solve
the nth power, the quantum.
If sky gave hints of glower, it quickened
his zeal. Light froze then splintered,
the bolt struck elsewhere, a different page
in the dark hymnal. A spark, surge,
ion glitch pinged a heart-chord
or flipped a brain-switch, puzzling the post-
mortem. What was alive and present
became infinite and now – not lost, but taken in
by the closing of the book so it could open
somewhere else.  

________________________

UNDER THE DESK
—Taylor Graham
 

You thought the cat was tearing up drafts
of poems, stealing pencils, killing
rubber-bands and dismembering dust-bunnies.

But now the cat is gone. A baby rat skulked
in corners, but after pest-control it’s gone too.
No bat nor bird flutters against the pane.

No lizard in the closet. In short, no natural
creature at large. Where logic fails, we turn
to myth and legend. It must be a troll,

a small one—earth-tone hermit who wants
to magic your home into a mountain.
Better wait and see what comes of that.

______________________

TROLL’S TICKET
—Taylor Graham

Like a sentence of the dead: If Troll crawls
out into daylight, does he turn to stone?
If he stays where he’s kept, must he
live like his kin knowing nothing but dark?
New page of the same old legend.

From under the droughty bridge, tiny frogs
seek the only water they can find, a wet-
mop the old wife hung upside-down
to dry. In its dripping, tangled strands
are they caught, or can they leapfrog fly?

Sky breaks the trance. Imagine Troll reading
a thousand romances of desire and flight;
angels and dust devils, a language
of landscape windswept, the names of wide-
open places; sun that sets the heart on fire.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

THE FINAL JUDGEMENT
—Cynthia Linville, Sacramento

Elvis returns to earth:
a sleek space craft
with chrome fins


____________________

—Medusa, thanking today's master chefs for this tasty soufflé, and noting that Jane Blue (and her twin) have a birthday coming up this Saturday!



—Photo by Cynthia Linville











On Thursday

$
0
0
—Poems by B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA
—Photos/Artwork by Keely S. Dorran, Sacramento, CA



ON THURSDAY

The laundry done
under intervals
of turn-around washes
and now drying in the sun
near the tall dune grass
by tuft and cluster
with all the energy
we can muster
in this June mound
shining spoils
of cloth and clothes
in socks and hose
up to my knees
by a vast dawn of light
from scant clouds passing
in a luminous yellow
wondering if after this winter
in hibernation
we are deserving
of a bright chirping laughter
as a cardinal hovers nearby
covering an Evergreen branch
hearing a mother sing
a Spanish lullaby
by a wishing well
to her baby daughter,
the crickets sing a miracle tune
in never-ending perfect harmonies
taking water from the springs
drinking in the blue lake
by the waking morning
of two mourning doves
shouting about the dunes
near neon butterflies
a fellow bard motions to me
by his churchyard fence
of his corner ranch
tells me that a bee
from his hive
might sting him
on his pitching arm
if he can't pay the rent
offers to play cards
from his own solitaire
and recites to me
on a deeply flowered bench
French verses of Baudelaire.






A POET FISHING

Fly fishing with Carlos
and Juanita off shore
who hail from Buenos Aires
after a stroll by the blue hills
and a swim in the ocean
trying to have patience
doing exercise motions
with amphibian gills.

_________________________

PASSER-BY

Passer-by my city
a Beat poet with gentle proofs
welcomes you with a candle
returning to my past
half ghost voices going higher up
to his apartment for a reading
while resting in forgiveness
here beside a rock garden wall
near a sandlot playground
where the hounded
throw stones at the wounded
the night watchman arrives
on the fire escape
who barely catches sleep
in the deepest part of Babylon
where there are no hours
to stop the lights
between the taxi screens
and screams of cab calls
hailing its daily emergencies
near this poet's old hangout
in his adolescent years
outside a dance floor
as voyagers play jazz
on faceless Sixties nights
over the Brooklyn Bridge
quoting Ginsberg and Crane
on wisteria street walls
filled with young graffiti
as a Gothic young Edgar Poe
dressed up at carnival time
in black clogs
jogs by though the shadows
who refuses to pardon his past
putting his tongue out
as Oz's scarecrow
insists he is a futurist
as a breathless witness
of a world of art now gone
by summoning memory
which leaves you hungry
feeling in temporary distress
and powerless,
suddenly the big media sends
drones above us
eyeing a five-star actor
once in TV soap operas
who signs off
on his former contract
suddenly appears
for an outside audition
in a summer playhouse
of Shakespeare in the park
wishing for bravos
and autographs from a chorus
in radiant darkness on stones
like a loner Odysseus
returning home
having been in exiled perdition
after sailing the seas
now hearing an oboe wind
reciting life verses of Homer
about the human condition
awaiting his lover
and wife Penelope.






ON CRANE'S BEACH

Within reach
on the water
we run along the beach
as the sun watches
the lovers under wraps
take cover and relax
from tourist traps
composing an entertainment
on my sax
as it starts to gently
then pours out
in the vaporous air
over our rain wear.

________________________

LIFE CHANGES

Life changes
as a worm and stork
head for New York
in the rain and snow
washing out our drains
in the Big Apple,
day after day while sailing
on the South Seas
Melville after whaling
fishes for wisdom
ipso facto in a hymn
to freedom,
a stand up comedian
realizing we the spoken
hear the June bug crowd
ripping with laughter
all the way to Hoboken
like feathers from waters
then watches
the feeding of the birds
near St. Francis chapel
by Brooklyn's graffiti walls
and gently with a surname
enters a French bakery
where saint Henry James
lives on by Washington Square,
the poet- comedian buys
a spinach croissant from a tray
catches a dripping hot latte
in a drenched cup and saucer
says a prayer under his breath
buckling under his knees
asking the angel Michael
that he make the right choice
by not taking a wrong turn
or going the other way
in the dead-end alley by the bay,
he wishes to visit an art arcade
with the exhibition's consultant
and a friend of his great aunt
Gertrude, full of Kultur
with her incongruent confidence
in her nephew
with inconsistent excuses
of his own critical indebtedness
to her back home in California,
her furniture always dressed
in Dutch laced doilies
who once taught
the Fifties expressionists
here on a park bench,
her nephew announces
"I'm here with her permission
filled with potential"
now a young poet
with existential nerves
like Hamlet
with adolescent inhibitions
in drawing lots with many coats
of multiple colors
covers the sunlight galleries
with his picture verses
and turning his life around
in creating a portrait of Gertrude
and her daughter on a napkin,
it's not enough to be merely good
in this artsy neighborhood
here after so many years spent
by Babylon's twin towers
now with the high buildings' rent
cannot hide any original spin
in any tree of life metaphor
as pastor James the lay minister
gives love to his neighbors
by the laying on of hands
from knuckles of his skin
once this morning
in a work-out at the gym
he trying to assure the congregation
as a priest returning from war
for he is a repentant chaplain
among the night sweepers
views the grim reaper
no longer as a stranger
at the lottery counters
giving out surplus food
to the multitude
meeting the former prisoner
and Santa Barbara gambler,
Tim, once a fresh captive
of Vegas's loser hell
in every show-and-tell
as in a wide screen personnel
who still hides out
but now arrives at church
to ring the bells
he returns the lector's pages
in a Latin-singing hymnal
Tim, once a former prize fighter
and champion of the flesh
as wrestler of his fate
once with carnal censorship
always passing on his plate
who now worships
in a new relationship
by the manger's baby creche.






ALONG THE DUNES

Shuffling a pack of cards
for solitaire
under the rolling sea shore
flowing near wild flowers
and olive trees
at morning's high tide
the sun on our backs
and thunder away on the hills
childhood memories
return to me as a Beat
wrapped in June sand
along tall grass dunes
the hours sinking in words
shadowing my veins
from an inkwell of verses
as unruly waves overpower
washing the Indian blanket
near groves at my feet
the red winged bird sings
and drinks
by those taking to the waters
planting me by tendrils
that curl about a girl's hair
as was the actor Delores
who sang in the chorus,
as my past leans on life
corner me as the waves
thinking of so many things
that a poet saves
in his memory
my early plays in laughter
and stand-up comedy
written in a fury of youth
in curious histories
of my friends in the rafters
and rival enemy critics
trying to be fair
kindled by the summer breeze
when the day wakes here
on the open-air original theater
aware of tragedy
after the troubling war
scouring along the boulevards
with my urban acting troupes
composing and performing
in a new time
of breakdancing in mime
and in the now suburban outback
reciting the protruding phrases
of the troubadour author Villon
with the fervor of Baudelaire.






D-DAY
June 6, 1944

In the Normandy trenches
and back benches
of parliament and House
there is an uneasy quiet
of a mouse that roars
in a mighty war
for Europe needs hope
and in 1944 to be free.

______________________

EXPOSURE

Watching a T.V.
with the memory
of sitting on a monkey
bar stool rocking on a roll
in a five-star hotel
somewhere in Manhattan
not knowing who you are
like the British poet Pope
here after the '80's Roxy spell
my knees are shaking
down by my feet
Hell, feeling like a fool
a Beat with his heart breaking
here after school
can't you tell how we survive
waiting without hope
or life taking its toll
eyeing a celebrity
of sorts so we can tell now
there is Christine
still alive
speaking English out of school
knitting a sweater
or writing a dear John
or Saint Joan or Jane letter
about her self-esteem
who should know better
of requesting a cash loan
while putting the cream
or milk in her coffee cup
along with her make-up,
going back in her memory lane
once palpitating in the corner
hiding out in her living room
feeling the pain and gloom
without much composure
of the world's disdain
once at seven dressed up
crashing at midnight
in her mother's Dutch hose
and patent leather shoes
putting on her perfume
of heavenly ambrosia
her henna hair up in a net
in interest of full disclosure
knowing she will always
be more than a headline
for a publicity jester
to nickel and dime her
for public exposure
in the Daily Times'
society register,
she wishing everything smaller
taking off her stiff collar
of her snow white suit
to put her hand on a guy
perhaps an athletic fellow
like Bruce Jenner
(now a woman called Caitlyn)
after watching eye-to-eye
the Olympic decathlon
wants to pick a winner in sports
and measure a Marathon's span
on a muscular man of sorts
as the T.V. spins
from the high alabaster table
her picture on the screen
knowing she is different
when searching for a gent
not wanting his cash
on the dollar
yet not able to pay the rent
but lets him makes her
a trust fund good offer
for an x-rated tryst,
with what credentials she prefers
in her own master bedroom plan
to be sent or represent her,
others outed her
outdated passport
he insists to surrender
in a former affidavit
she initially supported
and proposed a writ
on her understated gender
in her well-courted transition
that awaited for her,
here a young poet
offers her a Lisbon rose,
for it's not the dress of clothes
or length of hair
that make you a woman
or words that make a writer
merely aware in his metaphor,
nor strength that makes a fighter,
yet Chris cannot be indifferent
for her being different
or cast you as an actor or actress,
does prayer make you a lector
of the saints' Latin
just walking by a church door,
then why do publicists claim
you as a satin golddigger
it's to their own shame
as any foreigner
being blamed and accused
of being a spy
not understanding the "why"
of a political dissident
as a nice conscientious objector
is loosed from the service
or a poetical dissident
pays the sacrifice and price
from any government's
royal ranger,
a criminal may be a beggar
without any inimical crime
are you destined
Christine, to always be a stranger
in the long hallway's mirror
wanting to flirt
in a flared new cotton miniskirt
imported from Lagos, Nigeria
to reverse roles
in a situation comedy's date
or play-act in Shakespeare's
Taming of the Shrew,
Cymbeline,
Merry Wives of Windsor

or Two Gentlemen of Verona
needing her to be assured
from the umbilical chord,
yet you cannot share
her impressive secret
knotted inside
like a foreign war bride
in a far-off zone
not understanding
the meaning or hormone
or testosterone
others mocking you
as you hide out
in your cold silk stockings
or talk in whispers
for four hours
hearing your own blues
still fishing for a prom date
with a mandate to refuse
an engagement ring,
chocolate bonbons or flowers
wishing for an expressive lover
perhaps for a bridal wedding
on this bar "The Other Side,"
how jarring is this reporter
in the print business to sell
his yellow journals
fully worth investigating
as the vile goal of chit chat
on the newsstands
(remembering Irish Oscar Wilde
who landed in Reading gaolin
in London, and all that
for his understanding soul),
though you are old news
still the selfish camera guy
from the Big Apple
will choose to show and tell,
others still challenging you
of what is Biblical
right or wrong
hearing Judy Garland
in her "Over the Rainbow" song.





 
Our thanks to Keely Dorran and B.Z. Niditch for today's fine fare, and a note that our green box at the right of this column has many new submission opportunities in the "Submit, I Say!" section; check them out. Contests are always tough, and the ones that offer big money are highly competitive. But then again, NorCal poets (and others who read Medusa) are top-quality poets and have, of course, a good shot at winning.

Note also that, starting tonight, there is a lot going on in our area this weekend, poetry-wise, both in Sacramento and in Placerville. Scroll down to the blue box (below the green box) for all the info.

My apologies to James Lee Jobe for leaving his name off of his three poems yesterday. Since they came right after Jane Blue's, there was Facebook speculation that they were hers. But no, it was just my goofiness at 6:30 a.m. Apologies all around.

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

JUNE BIRTHDAYS

Feeding the June birds and fly fishing
while reading Irish Paul Muldoon

enjoying Jonson's lyrics and plays
his comics of The Alchemist amaze

wishing for different states of mind
in W. B. Yeats we vent and unwind

offering a voice of quotes
a choice of Joyce Carol Oates.

________________________

—Medusa












If He Were To Come Today...

$
0
0
—Poems by Donal Mahoney, St. Louis, MO
—Photos by Robert Lee Haycock, Antioch, CA



MEETING DAD AGAIN

Thirty years later, Dad came back
and we met for Ham and Yams at Toffenetti’s.
Pouring his tea, he told me he had
to restore power once
at a newspaper warehouse
and the storm broke again
and the lightning cracked his ladder.
He spent the whole day, he said,
sitting in that dark warehouse,
waiting for the lightning to stop
and for the truck to bring a new ladder.
He had a great time, he said,
sitting next to a flickering lantern
and reading for hours the Sunday comics
printed and stacked
six months in advance.

______________________

MONKS IN THE ORCHARD 
PICKING PEACHES

Young monk
and old monk
in the orchard
picking peaches,
sunny and plump,
ready for canning.

Carrying bushels
to the wagon cart,
the young monk
asks the old monk
what to look out for
when growing old.

The old monk
pauses and says
not much.
Life stays the same
for the most part.
Monks work and pray
but an old monk
works slower and
prays faster.

But not to worry,
the old monk advises.
He admits he's
going deaf
but that's just
an inconvenience
since God uses
sign language.
Peaches like these
have no need to talk.






NEW LIFE BEGINS

white hips a soft fist
for the wrist of your waist
black hair in a spill

on your shoulders
small whirlpools
your ankles

green streams ride
your calves
blue rivers your thighs

I finger the flute
on the back of your neck
rise and slip in

at that moment dawn
and new
life begins

____________________

SIGNS IN WINDOWS

In 1920 he came on a boat
from Ireland and found
his way through Ellis Island.

He found a room
in a boarding house
catering to his kind and

went looking for a job
but found instead signs
in windows saying

“No Irish Need Apply.”
A cemetery asked him to
dig graves and lower the dead.

In America today
there are no signs like that.
Black and brown

apply and whites
sometimes hire them.
My father was white.

But in 1920 his brogue
was a long rope that
almost lynched him. 






IN CHESTERFIELD AND SPATS

The father of the girl
I stare at now,
as we wait for our morning bus,
stands across the street,
tall and proper in his
chesterfield and spats.

He is waiting for a bus
that goes in the opposite direction.
He wears a derby,
swings a silver cane,
smokes a green panatela.
Suddenly he pirouettes

and smiles at my daughter.
She takes the same bus
to school every morning.
That night at supper,
I ask her about him.
"Dad, he's super!"

At 12, she knows.
"Dad, he rides the same bus
as me every morning.
He checks my homework
and I ask him questions.
Dad, he knows all the answers."

____________________

BEFORE MICHAEL BROWN 
AND FREDDIE GRAY

Who celebrates
the birthday of a tree?
Birds and squirrels, perhaps,
but not Michael Brown
and not Freddie Gray
and not Rufus Jackson, who was
hung from a weeping willow in 1863.

Rufus stole an apple pie
cooling on a window sill,
a farmer’s wife said.
She told her husband about it
when he came in from threshing.
An uncle found Rufus
and cut him from the tree.

His family buried him
behind a willow not too far
from a barn in Mississippi
where two men took Emmitt Till,
a boy from the city, in 1958.
Both men said Emmitt had
whistled at a white man’s wife.

The two men beat Emmitt,
gouged an eye out, shot him
in the head, tossed his body
in the Tallahatchie River, not far
from the grave of Rufus Jackson,
said to have stolen an apple pie, then
hung from a weeping willow in 1863.






CONCERT AT BERNIE'S

When Bernie wakes at 6 a.m.
there's a piano on his chest
and Erroll Garner's playing "Misty."
Sinatra's on the headboard
improvising lyrics
and Krupa's in the corner
painting on the drums.
The music is magnificent.
Once the song is over

Bernie chants his morning prayers,
shaves and showers and limps to work
for another day at the gherkin factory.
The foreman, Mr. Simpkins, is an ogre
nonpareil, a sumbitch unsurpassed,
who stalks the catwalk all day long
with megaphone and stopwatch.
At 5 p.m. the factory spits Bernie
and his cohorts out the door

so Bernie limps to the Hot Wok Shack
and buys a carton of Egg Fu Yung
and heads back home to wait for dawn
so he can hear Erroll play "Night and Day" 
while Sinatra does the vocal and
Krupa punctuates the piece
softly on the drums.

Bernie spends each day in hell but dawn
is always a concert from heaven.






STUMPS IN HIS CABBAGE

You would think you would
love a man who died
for you and for everyone else,
even those who will never
know that he did.
But you don't, not really.

The monks in the choir
you hear on Sunday
sing hymns from the heart.
They make fruitcake all week
stoked by the knowledge
he died for them.

They love him
in a way that you
can only imagine
despite much prayer.
You adore him, however,
as well you should.

You know he's infinite,
omnipotent, without
beginning or end.
You hold him in awe.
No one commands your
respect more than him.

You follow his will, mostly.
You tell others about him
but the love doesn't come,
gripped as you are
in tongs that have held you
since childhood

growing up in a house
where a man who worked
long hours, never drank,
put you through school
then went nuclear at dinner
with your mother 

when he discovered
"stumps in my cabbage,
lumps in my potatoes,"
a man whose roar rattled
the neighbors and sent
the dog under the bed.

You would think you would
love a man who died
for you and for everyone else.
But you don't, not really.
You keep trying to love him
and your father as well.






THAT DAY

If he were to come today
I have no idea what I would say
except to admit I have been

expecting him, just not today.
Then I would join the sheep
and the goats and wait for him

to point the way I should go.
It would be too late, I know,
but, yes, I would pray.

_______________________

THE CAPITALIST WAY

It is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle
than for one who is rich

to enter the kingdom of God,
Jesus told his disciples.
Centuries later Warren

an investor in America
heard about this and
asked Fu a manufacturer

in China to make
millions of 12-foot needles.
Then he asked Ahmad

a bedouin in Oman
to breed smaller camels.
Look for the IPO on Wall Street.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

MARRIED MAN SHY

Of her eyes
and of her hair
I have been
aware one year
but I have said
no more than
I’ll be gone
all afternoon,
take all calls,
all messages.

_____________________

—Medusa, thanking today's fine chefs for today's contributions, and reminding you that photos in this, the daily diary section of the Kitchen, can be enlarged for your viewing pleasure with a single click.




















Cathedral of the Heart

$
0
0
Glad 2
—Poems and Photos by D.R. Wagner, Locke, CA



UNTIL THE LAST SYLLABLE

The agents of red reminded us
That we only had a short time
Left.  We knew these agents refused
To have any discussion beyond "a few minutes".

They would always say that we only
Had a short time.  They would not listen
For any footsteps on the staircase.

Every time I move I am
Filled up with years tied
To a history I am unable
To imagine.  This is unfortunate.
It is my own history.  I can tell
By the way my wrists are bound,
By room after room that
Smell of stars and freshly cut fields.

“Who are you talking to, boy?”
“You have no idea of yourself.”

I see the bees forming lines.
They fly 'round and 'round the house.

I hear the hollow roar of the blood
Rushing through its veins and arteries
Constantly searching for
Chemical information
That once was plants or animals.

There remain only streets
In a darkened
And closed system,
Ruled by breathing
And the chambered
Cathedral of the heart.



 Cyphostamia



TRANSFORMED BY INSECTS

He replaced his fingers with bullets.
His head was a cobalt blue.
Through the big windows he could see
The huge insects moving closer to the houses.

They looked as if they couldn’t be real,
As if their exoskeletons covered masses
Of circuits and flashing lights.  He wasn’t
Going to stay in this house any longer.

They had called the aircraft in.
Soon there would be fires below the ridge.
They thought it was possible to stop
The changes in the land.  Purple clouds,
Full of unknowing, a ruby gas leaking into
All their bodies, men standing in front of one
Another killing each other in the most obscene
Ways possible.  He packed up what little food
He had and climbed to the rooftop.
He could already feel the heat of the fires.

His wings felt comfortable on his body.
They glistened as he raised and lowered them
With his back muscles.  This was the time,
This was the last moment.  He leapt
From the edge of the roof.  He began to fly. 



 Stuart's Porch



WE’VE LOST THE SHIP

We saw it going down
From the bedroom
Where we had been making love.

You looked out over the trees
As you sat on the edge of the bed.

“The ship is going down,” you said.
“Look, its lights are rising
To the vertical, and the trees
Have white shadows.”

“This is terrible,” I say.
“Yes,” you say, “but it is very
Beautiful.”

_______________________

NO MATTER WHAT

I’ve burned all the maps
Telling others how to get here.
I want you to know that not even
The horses can find us.

No matter what direction
I look, I can’t see
Anything but you.






THE CATS IN LOCKE

Something broke downstairs.
I got out of bed and went downstairs
To have a look around.

There must have been
Seven or eight cats
Just sitting around
Taking bets on what
They thought I might
Be doing there.

______________________

APOLOGY FOR THE SEA

I made up these phantoms
And now they haunt me like
Coastal redwoods lifting from dark
Ravines and billowing high above
Our heads.  Oh, that dreams should
Wear such garments, that the wind
Should be hollow and play flute
Music on our bones.

The beautiful marks teeth make
On the dimmest of lamps,
Always calling for more light, another
Way to know the mother of it all.
The spinning of the days, the warp
And wefts opened up to reveal
The weaving, a random assemblage
Of parts pulled from the sea edge
And old magazine photos, from patterns
Of shells gathered between tides,
Mixed with plastic and that unmeasured
Sound the wind makes as it drags
Everything behind it, pretending
To be a parade of boiled stars and dawn.



 Buddha in a Window



AN ULTIMATE GOOD

An infinity of misery.
It has its own landscape and is bereft
Of people.  Cricket sounds,
A part of the night thrown
Across a plain.  Parts of the plain
Were dark, while others had light.

Haphazard contradictions.  A house
With its lights blazing and, four feet
Away, children swimming in a sunlit
Pond.  To inhabit this kind of place.

Imagination seems higher than anything.
Come here.  Sit beside me.  We shall talk
Of the shifting of the light
In this manner.  Imagine
An ultimate good.
We will call this our lives.

______________________

Today's LittleNip:

THE ALL, THE MOON, THE VOID.

How about some chips
And a cold beer?  It will
Make this poem go by
That much quicker.
The little brunette
With the cute rear end
Will help too.
We have things to do.
We can’t sit around
All day reading poetry.
The next thing you know
You’ll be expecting the moon
To rise over an abalone shell.

_____________________

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











Something to Keep

$
0
0



THE GIFT
—Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy's palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife's right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

_________________________

—Medusa, wishing you a happy Father's Day and noting that today is the Summer Solstice. May it be a long and edifying day for you.









Parrots & Wooden Legs

$
0
0
Halo, Citrus Heights, CA
—Photos by Katy Brown, Davis, CA



PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE MY MOUTH IS
—Caschwa, Sacramento

When I visited the dentist first they told me
I needed some work…lots and lots of work
Then they quoted me a figure that was
Completely more than I could ever handle

So I thought maybe I could take out a loan
You know, one of those collateral loans
Using the very teeth they were going to correct
As the collateral

If their work was as fine as they claimed
And worth even half of what they charged
That would give a much greater value to my teeth
So why not?

Of course I could get a loan against my house
But if I had trouble with the payments
I couldn’t will the house to my heirs, and none of them
Seem to want my teeth when I’m through using them



Piggyback, Napa



TCHAIKOVSKY'S PIANO
        (Kirill Gerstein’s restoration   
        of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto)

—Tom Goff, Carmichael

 
Tchaikovsky shouts vibrations onto a cylinder,
discloses a voice both pungent and high-pitched.
Sardonic and shy, almost as if it itched:
strain speech, or God forbid, music through a colander?
This Edison sieve retains all that coarse fiber
and loses the juice. He feigns the rugged Russian,
but suavity comes first. A thuggish, Prussian
crudeness would be to him a musical viper,
as happens when our twenty-fingered fists
pummel the opening chords of his first concerto.
Roll them with your most subtle touch, those chords,
don’t wreak unnatural shocks no ear should flare to.
Since his death, much as needles lance our cysts,
we ballpeen those same notes, thick spikes through boards.

This restoration, as through a time warp brightly,
brings back his piano, like a fine harp, sprightly.

______________________

NAME DAY
—Tom Goff

“Being an anonymous human being can be…a very great satisfaction…”
                —One of the “moles” who rescued people trapped
                   in the rubble of the Mexico City earthquake

 
What would it be like to live without a name?
Or if you have a name, not have a voice
to volley the same in every handball court?
I think of it—my name an echolocator
so every passing bat could glide its choice
of ricochet through dark caves into the frame
of trees as easy and soft as escalators!
Then I hear tall stentorians distort:

their doings go all over town, and that town small;
reptiles grown scaly with brag, they puff their dragons
eagle, their stomachs beaks attached to flagons.

I love a sly telepath who won’t amaze or appall
with any neural-networking self-referential fable.
Her silent mind speaks magic wands,
         each wand a sable clear cable.



 Cannery Light, San Francisco



FASHION TIPS FROM MY FATHER
—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove

My father was a boilermaker by day,
And usually got many layers dirty.
But he cleaned up well—exceptionally
Well: he was the dandy of a small
Blue-collar Midwest town.

When he was turned out, which
Was usually after 4:30 pm, his
Cordovan wing-tips glowed like
Old fire beneath carefully
Tailored dark suits: charcoal, navy,
Ink black, the occasional pinstripe
If he were going away on union
Or political business.

He kept a running tab at
The local men’s store (Remember
Those?), a closet door hung
With carefully chosen ties.
It was sixty years ago, but
He liked to push: polka dots
With stripes, muted plaids.  And
He could bring off a pink shirt
With a black knit tie, a black
Shirt with white, or a black-on-
Black combination, all while
So not looking like a small
Town gangster.  No, he looked
Towards Chicago for his
Sartorial inspiration.

His shirts might have made
Gatsby himself weep: soft
Collars, fabrics that had the
Hand of flannel, but weren’t.
And seldom just white—those
Were for funerals, going in
A body to view the body; he
And his union or party cronies
Never tired of the joke.

Besides, the white shirts would
Always somehow disappear
In time with Uncle Bernard’s
Visits and departures.  “He may
Need them for court,” my
Father would sigh.  Bernard
Played even closer to the edge
Than the rest of the family.
But never, never, a blue Oxford
Cloth shirt.  Never.  “Do I look
Like some local television
News anchor?”  His inevitable
Response.  Well, yes, sort of.

He’d finish off the look with
Cashmere topcoats, kid (Yes!
Kid!) gloves.  And he wore fedoras
Even when people stopped
Wearing fedoras.  And a watch.
Just a watch, small, elegant, white
Gold, understated, versatile.

I still have the watch.  It still
Runs, but I can seldom bring myself
To wear it.  Not yet.  “But I notice
You usually wear some sort of watch,”
She observed.  “My father always
Wore one.  I wear it for him.”
“But he also wore a wooden leg.”
“Working on that.  The parrot too.”
 
 

Placerville Gargoyle



A FATHER’S DAY
—Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

They didn’t come dressed for this—
shorts, bare shins, sneakers. But the man’s
got a new puppy, and his young son in tow.
Boy and pup are game if dad is.
The June morning’s a wind full of questions.
A playing-field narrows to dirt-trail
into the woods. Without knowing this place,
the pup leads a way, sniffing pine duff,
brambles, a feather. Where are we going?
the boy wants to know. What
can a father say? Somewhere a lily pond.
Blackberries not ripe yet. Indians
summered here but now they’re gone.
Where does anyone go? A father knows
on the wings of his children.  

______________________

OUBLIETTE
—Taylor Graham

He’s been here too long already.

So young to be caught inside bare walls.

No whirligig above his head

to replicate purple cloud, dragonflies, shadow

of the hawk—tribal fear, a wish for wings,

imagining rooftop escapes.

His floor is littered with years-old

newsprint. Is a larger world calling him

by name? What is his name?
No syllable. And the heart beyond

its functional four chambers? a cathedral

fertile with fresh cut fields

and meadows blooming awake at dawn.

Can he see? Curiosity

astronomical as a shepherd gazing

at the stars. Where is his sun?

Dim translucence through six square

inches of pane. Mind opening

its moonglow eyes.  
 


Flowers at Darling House, Santa Cruz



Today's LittleNip:

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

—Carl Sandburg

____________________

—Medusa, with thanks to today's fine contributors!



Clear Lake, Ukiah













A Burst of Bird Song

$
0
0
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento



FATHER
(after “To My Father” by Diane DiPrima, 
from Pieces of a Song)

I think you were on your way to me . . .
and then you were gone.  Goodbye, Father.

I remember rumors of you, but not you—not
the real you.  You were only a photograph.

Then a passing-through one late, far year.
Beyond the possibility, Father.  I was a child beyond

my childhood.  I sat on your lap and tried to return
to you,  but you were not there.  You could not

hold me.  We missed each other by one lifetime.
No, two.  We missed each other by two.

Better the myth than the reality after all—
I am a myth, too, to you.  I mourned you too long—

a mythical daughter with an abandonment phobia.
Yours, Father—yours that filtered through

all others.  I turned off my emotions for them.
I would not love anyone who left me.

________________________

FATHER FRAGMENT

My father is an old rumor.
Where is he now,

his lifelong disappearance
still disappearing?

Life goes one way by itself.
What if my life had held him?

Father, I name you ghost.
Ghost-Father.  Haunt.  Haunt.




 

HE  PONDERS HIS LIFE

All night he lives with his imaginary wife and child, and is
both happy and not happy.  He does not know how deep
to believe.  He does not let himself answer.  He does not
know whether to stay, or to abandon them.  He ponders
their bewilderment and imagines himself in some other
arms and feels guilty.  How could he be so unfaithful. 
Chastened, he returns to them until he feels redeemed
then loses himself to the sleep that always overtakes him.

_________________________

LEGACY OF BLAME   

My father
who was Adam
had one weakness;
he was acquiescent.
And he died
blaming my mother
for his chronic
indigestion.
          
(first pub. in The Muse, 1961)






MIRROR

My father didn’t love me
so I broke his mirror.

Now he hides
in broken glass

and still does not love me.
I forgive the mirror.

________________________

POEM FOR LAURA, DISAPPROVED OF
BY HER FATHER

It will be all right;
I have had this premonition
in a burst of bird song
on a bright day
which had been overcast
a moment before
and no bird had been visible
or heard all season.

You may approach your father
as your self;
he will approve now;
he will be changed,
and you can love him again.
He will say,
“Bless you, bless you.”
It will be okay.
                             

(first pub. in Poetry Now, 2005)






THE SEVERANCE LINE

oh the boat with its endless people
goes forth to drown

goes forth to tip over and spill them
gasping and thrashing down

all the children and fathers and
mothers and friends who cannot swim

look how they dazzle the water
with their startled eyes

and there the boat lies
upside down      looking for them

and the water stares quietly back
growing sleepy in the sun
                              

(first pub. in The Wormwood Review, 1973)

________________________

THE UNREACHABLES

My father in a soft moonlight,
waiting for some dream to waken him . . .

I listen to him crying
but he doesn’t know I am his daughter.

He suffers from failure—that, and some
lost love. My imagination cannot save him.

He stares at a small gray river.
The water-moon quivers his face.

He thinks that love has abandoned him.
My mother stands watching from

her own sad distance—I look
from one to the other and cry out to them.






UNDERTONES

At once I know them
—by their weeping.

Voices abandoned by souls,   
by fathers—by time itself .

Why do I love them—still   
—patiently—in spite of—

these haunted voices.
And I listen,    whisper.  Answer?

__________________________

Today's LittleNip:

PATHWAY

The Architect
of madness and confusion

fathers the embittered mind,
still following some well-worn

trail as stale as the crumbs
it left behind . . .

__________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Joyce Odam for her fine poems and pix, and a note that our new Seed of the Week is Bacon and Eggs. Send your poetic and/or visual thoughts about this (or any other subject) to kathykieth@hotmail.com/. No deadline on SOWs.















On the Ninth Day...

$
0
0
Neil Fulwood at Teviot Water Gardens
Kelso, Borders, Scotland
—Poems by Neil Fulwood, Nottingham, England



HAIL TO THE CHIEF

Hail to the team leader
Hail to the supervisor
Hail to the manager
Hail to the boss

Hail to the scourge
Of bad timekeeping
Hail the god emperor
Of the early swerve

Hail to the clamourer
For responsibility
Hail to the dodger
Of escalated problems

Hail to the judgementalist
Who conducts appraisals
All hail the office’s
Moodiest bastard

Hail to the cynic
Who questions sick leave
Hail the opportunist
Working from home

Hail to the networker
Grapevining departments
Hail to the bully
Demotivating staff

Hail to the backstabber
Hail to the profile-shower
Hail the boardroom sycophant

Hail, O hail to the chief



Raven, Tower of London
—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis, CA


COFFEE

Strong and lukewarm and you unleash
a small avalanche of sugar into the mug,
stir till the spoon’s about to dissolve.

Coffee. It gets the taste of the precinct
out of your mouth. It’s a substitute for food.
It keeps you sharp, keeps you awake.

It’s a black hole, staring back at you
like that thing the fella who died mad
said about the abyss. It’s cheaper than heroin.

_____________________

QUEEN OF THE POOL TABLE
(for Jodie)

And more than anything, her ease
of movement: graceful, confident,
lithe as a ballerina. But in her eyes

and the challenge of her smile,
the earthy experience of a girl
practiced at the bar, not the barré.

No pirouette or pas de deux,
the wall-stretched shadows
of red shoes and black swan

erased in a puff of chalk dust,
a grubby, much-applied blue
staining fingers, baize, tip of cue.



 —Photo by Katy Brown


MATEWAN
(after the film by John Sayles)

“Welcome to Matewan. This here’s
a company town, and the company
is your benefactor and your god,
your pious mother and stern father.
Boys, think of yourselves as tools,
implements for the extraction of coal.

“We pay ninety cents per ton of coal,
but listen up: your train ride here,
your housing and clothing and tools—
them’s a debt you owe the company:
honour it like you honour your father,
pay it from your first wages, by God!

“There’s a meeting house for God
and prayer. But hear me, boys: coal’s
your cathedral, coal’s Your Father
who art in the mine, ninety cents, here
in the darkness as it is in the company,
ours is the profit and thou art the tools.”

You son of a bitch! Men ain’t tools,
doesn’t matter if they’re lost to God
or chosen to sit in His company
come the day this dark pit of coal
and all the corruption that’s here
on earth is the fuel for Our Father’s

prophecy: the last shall be first. Father,
deliver us. That, or give us the tools
to do the job ourselves: now, here,
in the face of men whose only god
is the ledger book written in coal-
black ink and tallied by the company

accountant. Deliver us from company
enforcers with clubs and guns. Father,
deliver us from the price of coal.
Or shelve forgiveness, give us the tools
and look away. In some places God
and man work differently. Like here,

in this company town. Down tools.
stand with father and brother. God’s
absent where coal is. In Matewan. Here.



 Sudbury Market Tower
—Photo by Katy Brown



THE NINTH DAY

On the seventh day, he rested.
In the cold light of the eighth
he compared the finished product
to the original plans, ran through
the snagging list, wondered
about sustainability. Had his doubts.
Best trash it now: insurance
write-off. But think it through;
make it look like an accident.

A vision: war and hunger, ruined
landscapes, brother against
brother in a climate of hate;
austerity in peacetime, nothing
to strive for. Make it look
like he’d left them to it; blame
the screw-up on the human condition.

On the ninth day, he created politicians.



 Big Ben, Parliament, London
—Photo by Katy Brown
 


Today's LittleNip:

TRENDING

I would like to take your hashtag
and use it as a cheese grater
until I’ve flaked away everything
that’s trending. I would like to
reshape your hashtag, make a TV aerial of it

and see if I can find an arts documentary.
I would like to snap off one upright
from your hashtag and use it
to air-conduct next time I listen to Wagner.
Then snap off the others to leave a square

and use it as a frame for a photograph,
in black and white, of someone
surveying a landscape where fields
and horizon have their own idea of distance.
The kind of place where there’s no signal.

_____________________

Our thanks to Neil Fulwood from across the pond for today's poems, and to Katy Brown for her pix which were taken on one of her trips to England. Neil was born in (and still lives in) Nottingham, UK, in 1972. His poetry has been featured in
Art Decades, Nib, Uneven Floor, Section 8, Full of Crow Poetry and Dissident Voice. He's married, holds down a day job, and divides his time between the pub and the cinema. Welcome to the Kitchen, Neil, and don't be a stranger!   

—Medusa



Neil with Funky Statue









Wings, Winds and Arpeggios

$
0
0
Nubble Lighthouse, Maine
—Photo by Denise Flanagan
—Poems by B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MI



CALLS OF THE POET

We're reading the Amherst poet
in her finest words
from an old edition
as blurred threads in a shawl
worn by Emily Dickinson
along an academic hall,
after my semester break
in a morning brick of space
a tiny windowless room
staring at a Van Gogh painting
of a Dutch landscape
shining at the thick edge
of the museum's back wall,
now the sun briefly shines
through Central Park
after the watery dark rain,
we are under umbrellas
on the park bandstand's edge
by a city street's drain,
a chorus of small birds intones
each in their own voices
along a dusty road's ledge
remembering the Cape
every Father's Day in June
draped with ivy
along the river beds and dunes
in summer squalls of thunder
as my lyrical laughing ear
expects to share my lecture,
now he suddenly prepares
for the next swimmer's race
with clocks in half-time
over the dock
trying to save face
takes the plunge
and lunges into the pool
glad to take an hour
from teaching summer school
playing by the gazebo
all the highest musical notes
of Coltrane's saxophone's wonder.

______________________

IN NEW ORLEANS

Outside it is raining
intimacy is only a bar away
on my sax notes
sinking a sound B-flat
over my left arm
in the underground
riverbed off the ports
of a breathless recital
swimming by
an aimless fate
by fleeing a night
of parental storms
muffling my weekend
waking up matching faces
to break up in pieces
of a musician's life
caught like a spider
in a web of others
supported by an outsider's mess
of song and dance
in a fortress on the coast
from solitary rooms
we cannot host
nine to five
in a routine like this
of my metamorphosis
by piled records
near a broken sofa
a prodigal son gnashed
in his own wilderness
reaching on the beach
for seashells and stones
emerges with a musical wave
abandoned at the sea's edge
by his sightless sore hands
he stumbles as his bones
smashed by wine glasses
love is an incoherent echo
of unintended smooth jazz
abstracted as an hour passes
as unforgiving as his rights
to an extended shore gig.

______________________

IN THE OLD HOUSE

Summer's silence
only a Bach solo
plays from my hands
in a radiant bow
daydreaming
of the Mediterranean carob
and the Evergreen,
sounds of water move me
at the windows
a few cardinals suddenly fly
along the Cape's shore
overlapping dunes and trees
by the Bay's shore
a few sailing boats journey by,
all is quiet and tranquil
in the azure June breeze,
my still life hangs
on the drawing board
leaves its eternal image
walled in my own world
Bach swells to flood
the sound-proof studio
as sun offers warmth
now sitting by the piano
shadowed as muted light
on a welcomed new bookcase
and awakened threshold
discloses my musical memory
as mirrors of a childhood dawn
emerges by summer bird voices
by the beach whale watchers
tourists board
a sea sail of ships
as illusions of innocence
travel to the deck and port
near the voices of songbirds
attached to Jacob's ladders
growing in the back yard
near the pale phlox
by burdock and hemlocks
surround our rock garden
near Acacia's thorny trees
which seem to burgeon
as green leaves
newly born to blossom
by the swing's cool breeze
waken to my lyrical arpeggios.

______________________

THERE IS A MOMENT

There is a moment
in some forgotten
fragment of time
anchored on the sea
making a chapter
of collecting rhythms
in a standstill of drums
that break out of silence
a thunder making us
in a defenseless mood
circling out uncertain steps
to recapture our past
involved in art's interlude
through a labyrinth
of my diary's investigation
two thumbs down
all over our expressions
in different European tongues
in a cosmic log of memory
without a noted trace
of a mercenary disappearance
drummed out of a vacancy
or any place to live
among wandering stars
or calling on St. Jude
closing the good book
curled up in dreamed-
of still life's miracles
remembering madrigals
grandmother taught you
on the piano in her voice
now lost to oblivion
with 1940's absent nails
to even cross your mind
that not even a bird on the deck
or a card shark hears us
distressed from the four winds
in a cloudy map of navigation
lost as any exile
with gentle waves to anyone
on the satin blue high sea
who will rescue us
in exile on a flag ship
as any Odysseus or Jonah
of the stateless wind
keeping a vigil for our history
or just reading a memorized Virgil
as a guide in Latin script
translated on ink-stained words
of the original scribe
with passages lost in the fog
boarded up on the St. Louis
bound for a far-city off shore.
 


 Ogunquit Bay, Maine
—Photo by Denise Flanagan



EIGHT STORIES

Eight stories
below my heights
feeling like a songbird
constantly above buildings
on skydived flights
needing water on occasion
nature accommodates
even in high elevation
by electric wires
providing for a city
during a fasting's duration
in feast or whitened famine
exploring every sensation
to examine each night
a poetic novel's sensation
reaching from his sheet
and scenic proofs
at his sleepless sedation
keeping a business watch
outside of space and time
offering us a narration
of verse as an angel
in a planetary separation
as we race like astronauts
through the spider-webbed air
in exaltation gliding
over fourteen metro stations
recovering our life's salvation
with a bright cloud
on a blurred longitude
mapping out our lyrics
overlooking knots of stars
as invoice for our trios
as night falls and follows
the wings, winds and arpeggios
to play along on scales
and encircle through moons
over music notes and high bars
not to mimic our mood mimes
over the timeless tunes of Pillar
with her Spanish guitar
from a June's passer-by, Joe,
an entrepreneur and impresario,
who discovers her arias
and makes her dreams a reality
in Paradise, California
then vanishes behind her eyes.

_______________________

AT TRIESTE

Like James Joyce
sleepwalking
in the city night
sheets to a kindled fireplace
of unwarranted imagination
collapsed into pitiless thought
for a guest in languor of a liquor
from an old bottle of brandy's
unbridled sweetness
in a bandy of winding phrases
at the ultimate pettifog night air
being in a repast of memory
yet wholly aware as any bird
lost like him in a forest's nest
in an exile's surroundings
hanging on the banister
you jest in low-voiced riddles
here in Trieste
among unbridled knapsacks
of oboes, clarinet and fiddles
by lasting vittles on the stove
for a moratorium of survival
exhausted from lacuna's
banter of Irish drama's verse
squandered in a selfish meal
exploding on a quarrel's trauma
of disentangled mindfulness
turned loose in informality
in a modicum of a traveler's wit
and a reveler's lonely music
in valid congeniality
hidden in magic Gaelic tongues
without a balanced sheet
of dwindled cash
from debit and debt
in a magnetic potpourri
under a future laurel wreath
a hidden stash of words
beneath the snowy rungs
of a painter's ladder
you wonder
if it will matter
when Ulysses becomes
a classic.

_____________________

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE

It is not possible
for two to have
the same dream
on the same night
in the same bed
and to dread
waking up
to the waning sun
as the sea weaves
its rushing waves
from live South winds
fading as a gull in the dawn
over the veranda
as new-born songsters
from the port call out
to other shivering sparrows
wrapped in weekend sheets
of musical notes
living in a murmur of harmony
with the resonance in words
of moving alive in the breeze
in a dance of your choice
hearing sounds of a bee hive
and birds floating on trees
each in their own voice.

_____________________

AT BOSTON
(In memory of Sylvia Plath,
1931-1963)

Near the narrow bird bath
feeding the sparrow
who takes a scented bath
as an adolescent poet
returns from his jazz lesson
to the sun of the Esplanade
reads the words of Sylvia Plath.

_____________________

JUNE 17

Songbirds over the train
by wellsprings of memory
from darkness to light
sleepless for ages
stopping my insomnia
from a long night
trembling on winding roads
with dusky eyelids
of thirst and hunger
simmering with nerves
ending in afterthoughts
for the past ventures
a late poet emerges
wishing to laugh again
after a lifetime
of reaching for justice
in a spring's lassitude
of setting aside
my second lapidary thoughts
brushing on stones
as we pass by wisteria bushes
wishing for a visionary nature
fortified by an insightful lens
among polished colorful words
connected in a day break
bridge near sea and sky
in watch for the morning
waves enlightening toward me
by a forgiving sunshine
the birds fly over winds
near a waterfall of voices
blanket the welcome dunes.

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

AGON
(In Memory of T.S Eliot,
1888-1965)

On St. Louis's stones
a visionary
will follow his calling
in a flame of grace
initialed on rose wood
by greensward grass
the Evergreen trees rustle
in the neighborhood wind
his voice atones
and sways in the breeze
speaking to us
between poetry, prose
plays and hymns.

________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to B.Z. Niditch and Denise Flanagan for today's poems and pix!



Perkins Cove Bridge, Maine
—Photo by Denise Flanagan











Three Letters

$
0
0
Michael Ceraolo, Willoughby, Ohio



2014:  LETTER ON SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

To the Posters and Boasters,

It is the day of the big game
and many can't wait for the game to start

And others of you,
in honor of Groundhog Day,
poke your heads out to proclaim
your lack of interest in the game,
which would be fine had you stopped there

But your sense of pseudo-superiority
oozes through your remarks,
saying that you know nothing of the game,
that you care to know nothing of it

More evidence that
Ignorant and Proud of It
is America's new motto


Best,
Michael

__________________________

2014:  LETTER ABOUT HYPOCRISY AS REGARDS 
A BILLIONAIRE MALEFACTOR 

Dear Almost Everyone,

Donald Sterling has long been
a bigoted piece of feces with feet,
                                                 and
has a considerable record establishing that fact
Yet sports and non-sports media,
his commercial sponsors,
basketball players and coaches,
all manner of fans,
                           and
even an anti-bigotry organization
saw no evil because they heard no evil

                                                            But
when some evil was heard publicly,
the professionally offended were outraged,
as though this was somehow news,
                                                     and
then the hypocrisy began in earnest:
players and coaches who chose to work for him,
or had considered working for him,
and had no excuse for not knowing what he was,
now condemned him from the safety of the herd

And the anti-bigotry organization
planning to honor him despite his record
because he had made a donation to them
quickly backtracked trying to save face

And the worst were some of his fellow malefactors,
such as the one whose predatory lending practices
did far more actual damage than Sterling's remarks,
and other assorted malefactors with a list
of crimes too long to list individually;
they spoke out to deflect attention from them

And everyone felt better about themselves
 

Best,
Michael

________________________

2014:  LETTER ABOUT A SPORTS TEAM'S NICKNAME

Dear Daniel Snyder,

Perhaps it's the proximity to politicians
that leads the promoters of Washington sports team
to make the extreme statements that they do
Your recent statement that the name Redskins
will be changed over your dead body
is a prime example
                              Here's a prediction:
fifty years from now your position
will be regarded the same way,
and be as accurate as,
one of your predecessor's statements
that blacks would play for the team
over his dead body
 

Best,
Michael

_______________________

This has been a travelin' week on Medusa's Kitchen, starting with Neil Fulwood from England, then B.Z. Niditch from Massachusetts, and today our thanks to Michael Ceraolo from Willoughby Hills, Ohio, a 57-year old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) published and a second (Euclid Creek Book Two) forthcoming later this year, plus a few shorter-length books and numerous magazine publications. Welcome to the Kitchen, Michael, and don't be a stranger!

NorCal poets should note also that poet Shawn Aveningo is back in our area from Portland for a visit, and will be reading with Poetica Erotica tonight at Luna's Cafe, 1414 16th St., Sac. Then next Monday she and her contributors will be releasing Poeming Pigeons, the anthology of bird poems, at Sac. Poetry Center. For details about these and other area readings, scroll down to the blue box (under the green box) at the right of this column.

______________________

Today's LittleNip:

Ordinary Guy: "Where are you from?"

Harvard Grad: "I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions."

Ordinary Guy: "OK—Where are you from, jackass?"

______________________

—Medusa



 Michael Ceraolo












The Whispering of Songs

$
0
0
The Chicken Coop—A Caravan
—Poems and Photos by D.R. Wagner, Locke, CA



A LAMP OF CHILDHOOD

It smelled like the waiting room
In a train station
Where the train would be two hours late.

Nobody wanted to talk
To anybody.  Two hours late
Was a long time.

After awhile the flies
Began to look like stars.
The children began to fall asleep.

It wasn’t even a train station any longer.
I was standing outside a castle
Arguing about how long a horse ride
Actually took.
“Fuck you,” the guy I was talking to said.
“You don’t even live around here.
Why did you come here anyway?”



 Evening Light



THE DREAM MOUNTAINS SOUTH OF LOCKE

Tonight there were mountains
To the South of Locke.
I could do nothing but watch
Them rise higher and higher
In the night air, massive
As a plan to overrun a country.

And gathered so gently
They lifted past the thunder
Like snow on the quietest of mornings.

I lay on my bed looking out the window.
What would I see at the darkened
Limits of my life?

I will forget the order of things.
Breathing will become inaccessible
And gallop with a strangeness
That is beyond accident.

I must be more modest at my dreams.
It is foolish to tell one of such mountains.

Even as I watch as the streams
Pouring from the precipices
Run with a dark water, darker
Than blood, even while the strangeness
Of this vision returns, night after night
And tears cloud my eyes,
As every stream is golden.
As I rush to the window,
It becomes a patient mirror
Blazing past all the heavens
Fitting each piece together
As if it were to be a great ship.



 Gourds on Fence



GOING TO CALEDONIA

On the stony road
the whispering of songs
beneath the breath.

In the cool air of the coach
the weapons ride, jostling
each other, chewing huge
quids of tobacco.  No
one can see inside to them
so there is no touching.

They squint their eyes
like old-time bandidos
and let their hand
sweat upon the blue metal.

Soon the trains will stop
in European cities and
the fire priests, the soldiers,
will leave, puzzled by
the rain on their sombreros
the chill that makes
their skin steam and
the absence of horses
with their dusty hooves.


(first pub. in Kaleidoscope Newspaper, 1969)

______________________

THE EVENING BEFORE

across the room
a dog is sitting
on top of the couch
holding a man
in his mouth.

The dog thinks
it is a bird
for the man wears
feathers around
his waist.

The dog is very proud
of himself.  His eyes
are proud, ears straight,
walking on through an
endless flower field
holding a man, a
limp doll of a man
so as not to damage it.


(first pub. in Kaleidoscope Newspaper, 1969)



 Mask
 

LETTER

In Mark's room there is
                 this little box
                 with a man in it
                 and the man is
                 screaming and
sometimes you can see his mouth or his eye
through the little hole   
                        nothing else
                  just his mouth
                  or his eye
                  screaming
Mark says:
        ‘There is nobody
                In that little box
         and it must be your
         imagination.’

And all the while he’s talking, this little
man is pressing his eye up to that hole
and I listen to him
              and sometimes I can hear him
              breathe.

Mark says:
         ‘THERE IS NOTHING IN
          THAT LITTLE BOX.
          THERE IS NOTHING IN
          THAT LITTLE BOX.’

but there is.
       

(first pub. in Kaleidoscope Newspaper, 1969)


  
  Russell Ooms in the Garden



THE TENT

A tent once lived in my house.
It found some space in the back
Bedroom and refused to leave.

You have good food here
And it doesn’t rain, it said.

This is no place for a tent.

Maybe not, the tent replied
But at least here I can wear
A fedora and no one will
Laugh at me because of my poles.

______________________

TRANSMISSION TOWER

The tallest structure
In the Sacramento valley,
The Walnut Grove transmission tower
Hasn’t had a single light
On at night for over
A week now.

I think someone is trying
To hide it.

_____________________

Today's LittleNip:

WITCH

I can’t spell
Said the which.

_____________________

—Medusa, with thanks to D.R. Wagner for this morning's poems and pix to kickstart our weekend!   



The Sentinel









Journey

$
0
0
Dust
—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis, CA



ADMIT THE SUNSHINE
—B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA

Admit glory to the sunshine dawn
covering the green water falls
here between the ocean and sky
our shadows live in silence
this early morning hour
on the home harbor hulls
anchored in a shade of serenity
motioning for our summer journey
unsealing our kayak memories
along a sailing Atlantic venture
wanting to sleep on the beach
with the sun to our outback
or go along with a procession
of a middle-aged fisher king
unable to move on his mission
until Arthur locates the Grail
or like Melville's Ahab
searches for the white whale
named Moby Dick
all in stories of exiles scouting
for a forsaken world
as Ishmael wanders
amid a once cloudy nimbus
from a passing compass of time
my words follow an apparition
in a poet's now-shrouded trek
along the horizontal shore
waves rise to four winds
to outer reaches of the sea
by the lighthouse of exiles
near unborn waves of riverbeds
a sudden thunder brushes by us
covering the church window praise
as black- or red-winged songbirds
over wonderful distant voices
exalt heaven from an azure sky.

__________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to today's contributors. Katy's photo first appeared in The Quality of Light from Rattlesnake Press, 2004.















Eggsactly!

$
0
0
Gurvinder Kaur and Rhony Bhopla, Amritsar, India



BABA BOHAR
—Rhony Bhopla, Sacramento

Sacred banyan tree, adhesive sap
You seal the fragments of my incoherence

Bohar, vast twisted bearded bark is essence,
your reaching growth calls for Amritsar’s pundits

Oh, Great Teacher! India belies common mantras—
a shaman in the temple at your roots attempts the havan

No sparks fit in your crags, none can ever alight
except away, in the wanton darkness of solitary pain

I touch your nakedness.
Your aerial roots bind the braid of the deity within me

She speaks of what you have done, cleaning teeth
of poor children with your twigs

She whispers the letters of slaves, written
on paper made from your bark

The sun, drips along the sides of your trunk
as I fall prostrate, knowing that you exist

Sensuality scatters during a meditative reverie
I drift into the soil that nourishes you


Word Key:

Baba Bohar:  A tree that has not been touched for centuries, and the surrounding buildings have actually been built around it. 

Amritsar:  City in Northern India, Punjab.  It is most known for the Golden Temple.

havan:  a consecrated fire


________________________

YEATS WITH EGGS
—Tom Goff, Carmichael

Don’t ever lose your accent: it’s a detail
different in you from me, as any one leaf
is its own essence, distinct, aloof from the sheaf,
alive in the lone. Category’s no holy grail.
Do you speak Thai or Greek, Swahili or Hmong?
Inquiring minds want to know, not really to hurt;
we’re your kind audience, we’d rather you blurt
your beauty, your smidge or smudge. It’s friends you’re among.

I don’t know why, I think of Yeats the poet
and how he celebrated his Nobel Prize,
by scrambling some eggs. I would devoutly learn
how gold or pale those eggs, and if he’d throw at
the cooking mass much peppercorn while it fries.
Does he add bacon? Eggs toughen, or simply burn?

Details for him to keep Irish and live inside,
as coats come herringbone-accented, Irish in pride.
He sang as much as he spoke his verse, with lilt
he could chant around and above his Maud Gonne guilt.
The salt to his egg-feast of song, a musical psaltery.
Umbilical, Delphic, each chord, not one whit paltry. 



 Donner Lake
—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento


By the fresh water at Donner Lake there is just rocks, no sand on its beach
There were people who nevertheless put down their towels to lay on the rocks in the sun
To do so was probably as uncomfortable as it looks
Me, I didn’t even want to take off my shoes to stick my feet in the water
Not only did I fear I would cut my bare feet
I knew there would be no “foot massage” like you get while walking along the ocean shores
On June 20, 2015, though the weather was cooler by Donner Lake than in Sacramento
I enjoyed the sunshine and a breeze on a picnic bench with a female friend named Marie I had originally met in my Russian classes

—Michelle Kunert

______________________

‪My parents' Santa Ana plum tree fruited early this year‬
‪   which it usually does in July‬
‪   but this time, for my June birthday‬
‪   I tried to give away some for free at vegan potluck and church‬
  ‪ but they have somewhat of a bitter taste and therefore not to all’s liking‬
  ‪ and I think they will taste sweeter dried in my dehydrator to become prunes ‬

—Michelle Kunert

______________________

CASTLE INDEED
—Caschwa, Sacramento

“A man’s home is his castle”
Until he puts a moat around it
Filled with critters that will tear
Intruders to shreds

Then he is reminded ever so
Harshly that local laws and
Ordinances were drafted in terms
Of the home being a domicile

And if he is a member of a
Homeowner’s association
The moat must resemble all
Other neighborhood moats

And the sounds coming from
Captives in the tower, or visitors
Falling into the moat and being
Eaten alive must be muted

So as not to be a disruption
That would tend to lower
The market value of
Surrounding properties

______________________

LIKE A BACON-SCENTED BRIGADOON,
THE HOG FESTIVAL RETURNS

TO KEWANEE, ILLINOIS
—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove

Normally dour and grim
As a Grant Wood portrait,
Once a year, the citizens
Allow themselves
To pig out, to go hog wild.

Everywhere, a celebration
Of sheer pigginess: the
High school band, fighting
To play through the slippage
Of their rubber pig noses
In the early September heat.

On Main Street—the World’s
Largest Pork Chop Barbeque.
In the lagoon, the Hoggata
Regatta boat race.  For
Bikers, the Tour de
Pork.  Out in the cemetery,
The Hog Jog: no stopping,
No pigs allowed.

Over near the Burlington
Tracks, the Pork Chop
Sculpture Contest.  Think
Stonehenge, but with
Gristle.  The mud volleyball
Tournament.  Can you
Spike?  Can you wallow?

Once again this year, no
Entries for the Miss Pork
Pageant.  Ditto for
The Hog Calling Competition.
Are you surprised?

On the carnival midway,
Whole families, seen just
This once a year, stroll,
Resplendent, sort of,
In hog ears, ham-themed
Aloha shirts, and yes, in
A daring fashion statement
For the heartland, bacon-
Patterned boxers.  It’s
A special time after all
And just once a year.
Flaunt it.

By Monday, it’ll all
Be gone but the flies.
It’s a fifties sort of
Thing, yes, and not
A little tacky.  But that’s
The point.  Eggsactly.
 
________________________

Today's LittleNip:

I dread a future
     where the only way anyone in America will see once-wild animals at all
     will be taxidermied specimens in museums
     or with their heads mounted on walls
 
—Michelle Kunert
 
________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to today's many contributors, and a note that we have a new photo album on Medusa's Facebook page—hopefully Michelle Kunert's vacation photos will help you cool off a little!



 Sunnyside Restaurant and Lodge, South Lake Tahoe, CA











Time Is Like That

$
0
0
—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento



THE UNIMAGINED ANIMALS        

in the city
the animals finally came

with their glinting eyes
and their quiet walking

with their adaptable hands
and their appetites

great furry shapes
and curdling cries

passing among the people
like pets

pretending
no death

going everywhere on
flimsy leashes and chains

looking in windows
and disappearing

coming out
on the other side of buildings

they even knew how to obey
the traffic signals

no one was ready
for their danger

no one was wary
except the

one imaginary child
in the motionless swing

who was raising a whistle
to his lips and smiling

________________________

BROWN BAG

At dark of morning
he prepares my lunch;

how he surprises me
with

unusual bread,
creative combinations,

a sandwich
of such taste . . .

and I, at work,
unwrap it slowly

on my half-hour,
to see

what delicacy,
or what plain fare,

is there.
Today—this bread:

Whole wheat.
Buttered meat.

Some carrot strips.
An apple, quartered.






A LONG WAY TO THE HOUSE

Such a long way to the house which recedes
one distance for every step toward it.
Time is like that.

On this late afternoon she marks the familiar way toward
the house with no windows, perhaps one door
through which to enter and disappear.

All her life she has been walking toward her childhood
which is a toy house. Inside are her innocent dreams
and toys. She will stay there.

On this late afternoon she practices more gray,
the wet things she will say
when she reaches the house.

The mud shines deep with after-light. It has been raining.
She carries groceries in a heavy sack past the chickens.
Her shadow lags behind her. And the old dog.

The house shrinks back against the flat day.
It cannot help her arrive. It is a toy house.
It holds onto this reality for as long as it can.

She follows the curved ruts.
The weak sunlight upon winter is almost warm.
The chickens float in the light above their small shadows.

The dog looks off toward the left. 
She shifts her sack
from one hip to the other.

Now the house has grown large against the last light.
All else is unimportant—pulled away—like the sky
which is turning its own page to let the slow darkness in.






AT THE CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

I remember that you looked something awful, sitting across
from me at the breakfast table in the late morning light from
the harsh windows. It was awful to see you this way—sitting
across from me at the breakfast table, talking rapidly and
making nervous gestures. It was awful. To see you this way.
Manically distraught. Not caring how you looked, talking rapidly
and making nervous gestures as if the room’s light would
hold you together—manically distraught—not caring how you
looked—washed out by the white glare of the tablecloth as if
the room’s light would hold you together, though you were
coming apart in front of my eyes, washed out by the white
glare of the tablecloth.

What happened to you last night? What happened? Though
you were coming apart before my eyes, I dared not ask the
question. You were talking. What happened to you last night?
What happened? I kept quiet, watching you spill out in all
directions. I dared not ask the question. You were talking.
In the late morning light of the harsh windows I kept watching
you spill out in all directions. I remember that you looked
something awful.

_________________________

DAY’S LAST REACH                    

We face the twilight with generosity:
you at the door feeding the chickens,
I back in the shadows counting how much more.

We turn the distinction into new diffusion:
you in the lowering light becoming less absorbed;
I wearing the dark garment of the house.

We grow as separate as any difference:
you at the door that goes both in or out,
I drawing back into the doorless room of self.

We use the lessening hour for our old commentary:
you at your deflective silence,
I at my usual remark.

We face the twilight that grows swifter than
before: you staring at the sunset that outlines you,
and I out of day’s last reach just inside the door.



(first pub. in Acorn, 1999)






THE CHICKEN RUN

In the back yard the rabbit cages have slowly fallen in, leaning
now against the fence which leans on them, their stilt-legs
sprawled, the wire doors stuck or hanging open, the water bowls
still inside. And the chicken-wire fence is gone, removed for
access.  But the hen-roost still stands, sturdy; its layered rungs
still span the sheltered darkness where the emptiness is deep.
The nest boxes are no more; no more the gathered eggs, the
funny clucking choruses . . . that space is used for tools and
junk that must be kept, though Lord knows why.  Well, that was
then . . . all that was then . . . and this is now . . . this abstract
glance across the recent years.  And you are gone now, too.
The last time you bought the heavy sacks of feed, I had to help
you lift them from the trunk of the car where I climbed in and
strained from the opposite end to shove them out. You held the
wheelbarrow steady and we finally got them loaded and wheeled
them to the back, slit down the sides, and emptied them, half-
way, from the two-pound coffee can till they were light enough
for both of us to heft and empty out into the storage garbage
cans. Well, that was when we decided to give the rabbits and
the hens away, and the pampered rooster who so eloquently
proclaimed himself upon the certain admiration of the neighbor-
hood. And when we found a taker, it was I who had to ease up,
after dark, into the cramped interior of the chicken roost and
grab the feet of the settled hens and hand them, squawking, out
to you, while you held the flashlight—all that you could do.






YOUR DOGGIE BAG

Today I sit down to my table and eat your food,
your small portion of fish, and your hard roll,
your mixed vegetables that need salt.  I re-
member to say a small grace in your honor. 
I remember to chew slowly—to savor.  I allow
time for conversation.  A whole day has passed
under your absence, and I find myself folding
a red cloth napkin when I am through, and
remembering to say thank you for your hospitality.
                      The table is but a metaphor, but
the fish and the roll and the vegetables are real. 
My refrigerator was an accommodation to your
leftover thrift and meagerness of appetite.  I am
sorry you forgot your take-home carton.  I know
how you like to portion and savor, letting the
too-expensive banquet dinner parcel-out to three
more meals.

________________________

Today's LongerNip:

THE SUNNY WINDOW OF THE DARK CAFÉ

Ghosts in costume sit
at the sunny window
of the dark café.

They will not move
from the sunshine.
They are cold.

I think they want
to pray for
new beginnings.

One of them
is at the jukebox
reading the names of music.

Another hides his face
in the shadow he has brought
beneath his hat.

I will not stay.
I will go through the door
and enter the brimming day.

I will not glance
at them
as I pass their table.

_________________________

—Medusa, thanking Joyce Odam for a hearty breakfast of poems and pix, and noting that our new Seed of the Week is in keeping with the weather: In This Brutal Heat. Send your thoughts and visuals about this (or any other subject) to kathykieth@hotmail.com; there is no deadline on SOWS.













Viewing all 4467 articles
Browse latest View live