Regina O’Melveny: California Poets Part 6, Five Poems
Regina O'Melveny
October 18th, 2023
California Poets: Part VI
Regina O’Melveny
Five Poems
Hand Pinching an Ear
– Image on an Agate Cameo inscribed in Greek “Remember!” Roman 200 – 250 CE
Remember how I like to pinch the edge of your ear in love, the helix as it’s called and the auricle too, a word for the outer ear I love almost as much as pinching the lobe for your oracular sigh.
Remember the moments that bind us together before we go each to our own fire and ash, forming a net that who knows, may catch us like spider’s web that caught my hair as I pruned the jasmine today
while you dug a hole for the wild cherry nearby, saying crankily how much you disliked digging holes, yet you’d do it for me. We’re both fond of sweeping the long stone path,
that fine repetitive swish and drag, back and forth like our days, years, decades passing in rhythm, sometimes catching on a crack yet clearing a way to walk together.
Remember the owls on our dusk walk calling to one another across the sagebrush hill while the ocean bled cerise under flaming clouds of winter, the year about to go out.
Remember and then we’ll forget as our lives slow down, as we go silent and maybe no longer can hear, though they say that’s the last sense to go. No matter. I can still pinch your ear.
Darkling Beetle
Lately on walks through yellow swathes of mustard, bush sunflowers, wild chrysanthemum
I save beetles from footfalls as one or another crosses the path, stops, a black brushstroke on pale rust earth,
half the size of my thumb, bit of night come to remind us spring’s not all white, violet, yellow.
All is not juicy green hymns to the sun. Lush also means dark burrs at sight’s edge, what we may not see
underfoot. Their family name comes from tenebrio— one who shuns light, loves obscurity or night.
Yet I’ve seen a beetle skitter out of undergrowth and pause sunlit, a black dab in the waning white yang of day.
I’m glad to be reminded light contains dark, joy sorrow, generosity its spot of lack.
So I scuttle you humble teacher, to the side with a leaf, or once with my hand that you fouled. Hence the name stinkbug.
I’m not a sharp beak looming to clutch you, yet even well-meaning, I almost crushed you today,
my gaze skyward, though luckily last minute I glimpsed you from the corner of my eye and skipped sideways.
Thanks for that smack of humility, dear darkling. All things imperfect. All things perfectly bewildering.
A Key Out of Her Realm
As I sit Corona-stunned on the cabin porch and wait for a healing muse under pine light and shadow, my sketchbook open to unfinished watercolors of insects – bumblebee, buckeye, water strider, blue darner,
all creatures I’ve noticed these past malaise days, a brown fleck drifts to the page. At first I think – a dry stem exclamation-point-size, but no. There’s a head and six legs.
Then its thread-thin mouthpart drops and probes the page tasting the art. Or is it predaceous on other insects, mistaking image for real? Transfixed, I want to paint mystery this small.
She’s filament thin, dream-sheer yet her gracile girder legs superbly buttress her slightest motion. She’s not afraid though I shift and my shade falls across her.
I have no brush narrow enough to render her antennae, her legs hair-strands with tiny knobbed joints, two dot eyes and comma wings. She tastes the watercolor again.
My paint pans gleam in the sun, lakes by her measure. She leaves me at last with a new love in my belly for every thing I don’t understand, all equal – a tree, a brush, a stilt bug with a taste for art.
Finally Queen Corona also leaves me humbled by her indifferent glories as she rolls on seeking other subjects. I’m glad to be alive, as she bedecks me a cloak of fatigue weighted with awe.
Even lightning claps on the granite ridge above the lake that fear-jolt me on my first walk after being laid low can’t compare to her wild dominion. The Queen simply wants to live even as she dies,
leaving questions and reasons to my jangled mind, while my inner flora and fauna don’t worry over things but settle at home once more in the dark forests of my body.
Grit and Grace
May I be like the black ant who climbs the willow to the catkins where she sips hidden nectar to carry back to her kin underground.
May I be like the small stream who carves her path lovingly among stones, logs and glistening sand, where the caddisfly larva encases herself
in whatever she can find for protection, using her silk to bind little twigs, grit, leaves, a plastic bead fallen from a child’s bracelet, her art a wonder
to me as a girl when I asked my father, what is that finger of sand creeping against the current as if the streambed were alive?
May I be supple as the willow in my views, able to bend here and there even as storm gusts lurch down the mountain.
May my thoughts be juicy as sap rising around the heartwood – all that’s gone dead, around the shape of memory that nonetheless holds up the living.
August
High Sierra
I walked and walked till my body ached among wildflowers, swam in lakes like bowls of sky feathered with wind, or sat
with my family content as a marmot on a warm rock. Watched clouds from my cabin porch. All day, doing nothing but holding a book as alibi.
Maybe read a few pages from Yin Mountain, Three Daoist Women Poets. My heart was with the clouds even when there were none.
Felt blue sky call them up from the Great Basin, just as my blank mind calls words from the wide open reach of forgetfulness.
Watched clouds boil up midafternoon behind Elwell the peak I call Healwell since it always slows me down when I see it.
Watched shadows of fir, pine and hemlock withdraw when clouds thickened and covered the sun.
Watched thin slips of virga near hefty cumulus stretch out darkly like pens laid on crumpled paper.
Watched thunderclouds raise their heads till at last they’re so weary they bow into thick sleeves of blue-grey rain.
Heard them grumbling all around me then finally quiet until they lie like a spacious robe upon dusk.
Watched clouds sit like many plump buddhas awaiting night, turning pink, orange and rollicking purple
then all at once grey, solemn as silence, heavy as sleep, irresistible as mendicant dreams that bring empty bowls to my fears.
The next day gone, all of it. I watched clouds vanish in blue air, reform, twirl in the wind and the next time I looked up from my page,
they’re gone again, just as these words will disperse after reading, just as fears and joys will scatter across the dazzling terrain.
Author Bio:
Regina O’Melveny is an artist and writer whose award-winning work has been widely published in literary magazines such as The Bellingham Review, The Sun, West Marin Review, and Barrow Street. Her poem, Fireflies, won the Conflux Press Poetry Award, released as an artist’s book designed by Tania Baban. She has published three chapbooks, Secret, New and other gods which won a prize from the Munster International Literary Centre in Ireland. Full-length poetry books include Blue Wolves winner of the Bright Hill Press award and The Shape of Emptiness released by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, published by Little, Brown and Company was listed as one of the six best historical novels of the year 2012 by NPR.
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