Amputated Moon

I watch the blue heron

all morning until

I find myself within her

still and silent

feet planted in soft mud

a taste of silver fish

fresh in my mouth

I do not move

wings useless while waiting

my eye turned to the water

all spring and summer

I fed the chicks

now they have fledged

and I remain here

at the pond’s edge

a breeze moves through

feathers and along the water

ripples of golden light

move quickly

while a fish hides

my shadow casts myself

upon the waters

a grayed sameness

as above

blurred and soft-focused

here I stand with the heron

waiting in the stillness

waiting for movement

a silvery flash

and the blessing of the lake

Pamela Olson, 9/27/09

For One Single Impression’s

prompt, “colors”

the sun dial stands useless

caught in non-houred

time and space

continuums broken

lines between past and present

blurred

sight and sound dimmed

a white-out

your voice drifts off

each of us stands closer

fog swirls from your fingers

to my palm

a breath of cloud

from you to me

Pamela Olson, 9/20/09

For One Single Impression’s

prompt, “Fog”

our share of the night to bear

divisions of the hours

into the tick of seconds

each one lingering longer

than the last

dawn threatens the horizon

but still night bears down

weighted in its emptiness

lying tightly across our shoulders

binding us both to the earth

Pamela Olson, 9/18/09

Based on a line by Emily Dickinson

Poem #113, “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson”

edited by Thomas H. Johnson

Lisa Ciccarello’s chapbook is full of textures, tastes, scents, and shivers.  Her sparse sentences and phrases quicken the reader’s heartbeat as soon as the first lines call out in a frantic whisper.

“You lock the door.  You lock the window.  You dream of the dead.”

Ms. Ciccarello pulls no punches with the reader.  You know that you might need some company while reading these poems and you might even need all of the lights on in the house.

Most of the poems in the book are formatted as short prose pieces.  Their form reminds one of a grave, full of rectangular width and narrowed length.  Her poems are confined by these earthen walls and then are surrounded by the stark emptiness of blank page.  This effect makes the reader stop and spend time with each poem, giving it a fitting reverence due to the dead.  Since there are no individual titles to the poems, this pause feels necessary.  There is a disorientation that occurs when the reader has no title reference to rely on; instead there is only blankness and silence around each poem.

While reading “At Night, The Dead.” I was drawn to another book of poetry written by Judy Jordan.  Her book, “Carolina Ghost Woods” also speaks of the dead and living and their relationships.  Jordan’s book is semi-autobiographical and draws heavily from the lore of the Southeast Appalachians.  It, also, is a book filled sound and texture as is evidenced by this excerpt from “Sharecropper’s Grave”:

“The night is hoot owls, wind-whistled flue, babies bundled in burlap.

Breath of another child, mid-gasp.

. . . .

Small holes, secret graves,

children scattered around the iron fence.

Not even a scratched stone. . .

The night full of cries they will never make.“

Both Cicarello and Jordan have the ability to invite us into a relationship between the living and the dead.  A relationship salted and waxed with open mouths and unseeing eyes; a relationship of objects that mean something in life and something different in death and seem to dance around within the gaps between the living and the dead.   Perhaps the poem that best evokes this dance contains the lines,

“The dead set up the house they remember, but it is not as they remember.  The pear glass went there, yes & the branch scraped against that window. . . We reach for salt in the empty salt box.  Missing from the kitchen what could keep us from the house.  At this hour we sleep & it is dark.  At this hour we rise & it is dark.  The house is always lit by a flame we can’t blow out.  We watch the wick blacken to measure the hour.  Our mouths draw close.  The flame does not flicker.”

Buy this book and settle in with salt sprinkled along your window sills and candles full of tallow and light – you will not regret it.

Pamela Olson, 9/8/09

For Read Write Poem’s Virtual Book Tour