Susanne Dyckman: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Susanne Dyckman

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Susanne Dyckman

Five Poems

Light:   visual receptor stimulation to make possible inner truth

light passing

we are listening for it

light at play

our voices an occasion

of light

lost in the air of it

Air:  the invisible surrounding a celestial object

meeting here:

a guitar, a woman

the same and not

as the moon card which                     

does not cause the moon                    

but unwinds it     

Moon: visible chiefly by reflection

nowhere changes to somewhere

in minute variations—

lost in a labyrinth

strangers pass as ourselves

the moon disappears

the horizon rounds and fills

we too round and fill

each day, unpacking our story

while lightning and sand make glass

and arcs of white water turn green

Water: bluish in layers from above

our boat is a box

            that moves in a sea of giant ghosts

                                    one of wives and widows,

                                                                        robbers and men

the boat tattoos the water

and our speech, a kind of thunder

or madness,   

empties into the waves as wonder   

Author Bio:

Susanne Dyckman is the author of the full length  poetry collections equilibrium’s form (Shearsman Books), A Dark Ordinary (Furniture Press Books), and Rendered Paradise, a collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Robinson (Apogee Press). She’s had six chapbooks published, and her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, most recently Posit, Winter in America(Again, and Two Cherries. She has taught in the creative writing programs at the University of San Francisco and SF State University, and for a number of years hosted the Evelyn Avenue Summer Reading Series. She lives in Albany, California.