Guardians            by Nancy Wahl

Fresco      by Nancy Wahl                                                                                                                

She stood there, not tip-toe like Keats

upon his little hill reaching for beauty,

but all atwitter in white shorts and tennies

on my front porch.  So much brightness

she was: her yellow blouse, sun

reflected in her eyes, love

of her new husband on her skin.

They had planted a garden

and, good neighbor, she was bringing

me a basket of bright red

vine-ripened tomatoes—her young bride’s

smile rousing memories

of my own beginnings—summers 

at Lake Tahoe, a first kiss:

my Winandermere shores

around which I would wander in youthful

ecstasies, elated, with unbearable

anticipations: fears growing like mountain lichen

in my unconscious—always the sense

there must be endings.  On a television

documentary, a young woman in overalls                    

spent days painting a mural

on the walls of an empty warehouse, nonstop,

climbing ladders, listening to Gregorian chants,

her fingers bleeding

as she feverishly created images rivaling

the Renaissance masters.  One public showing

only and it was sandblasted away—her art being 

a demonstration of transience, of seeing beauty

in its mortality.  But I think Keats saw more—

saw it in the eternal, picked it out of the sky.

And, while he was an old

softie, he must have been dead serious, too,

working his words into all those passionate colors.

It’s only been a few months since the bride         

brought me the tomatoes and I feel

an ethereal, boundless thing now

as I remember how she shined that day

and how the chemo

that she would later have to take

didn’t save her—and how, like Keats’ goldfinches

pausing upon their yellow flutterings,

she had stood there on my porch

in all her eager happiness

laying on her colors. 

 

Guardians                     by Nancy Wahl      

1.

Time was large once, roomy
parabolas around long, slow days
that wound through corridors between
anticipations.  You could scream
at the top of your lungs allee allee oxen free
with your friends throwing brown rubber balls
over rooftops, or sit for hours on green lawns
building miniature cairns out of colored bits of glass,
arranging them in orbits like stars.
Pick bunchy little dandelions
and wonder why, always why, the yellow
was magic.  Birthdays, Christmases, and summers
were all coordinates outside Cartesian spaces,
circled on predictable calendars.

2

Because he’s younger than we, our guide
paces himself and motions us on
as the trail gets steeper, twisting into narrow turns
around glacier-polished rocks with shining
surfaces that reflect blue ice sky.
We say in our meetings, Tuesday nights down below
in the city, that life is moving faster and faster,
and we try to slow it with meditations, Zen,
Yoga, or with the churches of our choice--
or with programmed climbs like this one,
thirteen thousand feet high
in the California White Mountains.
I slip so many times, my feet tripping
in hollows of old snow, that I am afraid
I can’t keep up with the guide, and I am getting tired
and it’s getting harder to breathe
in this altitude.

3

We reach a spacious clearing where a few knobby
but dignified bristlecone pines bow
from gnarled trunks, pointing their sinewy branches
like bare arms raised to heaven.
As we eat our lunches, our guide tells us
the trees are more than four thousand years old,
and I get a picture in my mind of ancient peoples,
an Abraham or a Gilgamesh, say,
strolling around this earth, breathing this earth’s fine air,
busying about, writing their histories on clay tablets.
I think I see in the striae
on the surface of one of the granite stones
what looks like some kind of cuneiform writing--catenas
of scrawly little wedges and parallel lines: messages
maybe, left for us from the absolute beginning.

4

Alpine hulsea poke their innocent daisy faces
up through the granite cracks,
new each spring, says the guide--
little sylvan hikers, I think,
drawn to the timeless bristlecones, cozying-up
around the ancient Olamic roots and laying their
yellow colors out in bright circles, even in high places
where they are not always seen: being
there anyway, taking their time--climbing
through their short summers.



Judges Award Winners 2002 Turlock Arts Commission Poetry Contest

A NEIGHBOR DOWN THE WAY    1st place by Salvatore Salerno Modesto

I'm amazed.                                           My Uncle's Felt Suit  by  Gary Thomas
He has silk and crimson roses,             She Was Gracious     by  Sheila D. Landre
clearly the floral trophies                      
of our block, but that's not why          

I am amazed: he's eighty-two,
smokes Pall Malls, has a broken nose
and face reflecting every weather,
but that's not why

I am amazed: but this,
the way he works each day
to keep his yard and roses shining,
how he throws his tools
at sunset on his lap,
and rolls his legless body up the ramp.




My Uncle's Felt Suit  2nd place   by  Gary Thomas Turlock

Uncle Josef took the blankets
from the barracks after
basic training,
laundered them,
pressed them on the mangle,
pinned the pattern
of his prewar business suit
to the flat beige rectangles
that had sheltered so many
young bodies bound
for so many wars,
and with his tailor's shears
sliced himself a three-button jacket,
two pairs of pleated pants, with matching vest
and enough left over
for a homberg, fedora, jaunty beret.

All this because of skill, supply,
demand for young men
elsewhere.





SHE WAS GRACIOUS       3rd place by Sheila D. Landre   Modesto

  
Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
   the way she wore her garden hat
   among the bearded iris,
every color, row on row,
bending to her gloved caress.
   She would smile and talk
to violets by the doorstep and
make sure the cats each
had a sunny spot to nap.

Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
   the way she sat so regally
in an antique chair
in her handmade house,
pastel portraits of her children
on the wall. She paid such
close attention, asked such
thoughtful questions,
listened.

Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
   the way she comforted and
held me in her warm embrace
the day of Ernie's funeral
--How suddenly he'd died!--
but she was strength and
she was grace and she knew
where life was going,
where it came from,
how to live it.

Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
   in some fine immortal way
that makes me want to drive
up into the shady hills,
drift along the leafy curves
and down the pebble driveway,
to look across the old stone wall
and see her in her garden hat
kneeling there among the iris.









SWIMMERS    by Patricia Wellingham-Jones

At dawn on a breath-stealing day
we took coffee and chocolate milk
and mangoed oatmeal to wood chairs
by the creek. Our hair feathered
in the breeze like dandelion fluff
in the last swish of coolness
before the north wind fired up the valley.

An otter family tumbled sleek brown bodies,
splashed among rocks. Fish flicked silver
in the white sun of noonday.
As finches dipped beaks in a drying bird bath
three small boys yipped and shrilled
like parrots in the wild of the creekbank.
Flung water, smelly sneakers, deflated balls.

The western sun slanted apricot rays
through cottonwoods. Over the bridge
pedaled a mother and daughter in red helmets.
Just before dinner you followed me, long towel
trailing through road dust. Showed your doting elder
the fine points of dog paddle and float.

Dark drove the humans away. Bullfrogs
bellowed upstream and down. Cats
paced a final prowl before lock-up.
In the moon-gleaming night I awoke
to a deer splashing under my window,
hooves clattering on  river rock.
The water slid to river, to sea, owls muttered.

Space Walk                         by Shonda Renee

When it is said I love you
One feasts on delicacies to die for
Licking, nibbling and sucking things
From shells that slide down your throat
Into your belly — where you live.

You lay pearls that never lead you back
They only push you forward
Toward the edge of the planet
And an obligatory step into encased space
Naked in bare faith.

There, stars wink conceit and hover arrogantly
Mumming their secrets
Or maybe they really don’t know
 why, how or what for.

You glimpse a falling spectacle
Once held in pure black love
Now screaming from the scene
Because one or the other let go
You wish nobody let go
Still, there are letting go’s all over the place.

Fiery streaks of havoc
They land and solder themselves upon your back
A weighty hump
Determined to cause the spine to snap
And plummet you toward shifting plates
Beneath the earth.

Where love is never uttered
A feast never laid
and all you need do is lie there

Mercy.

 

Odd Couple                   by Shonda Renee

The devil lives with me

He moved in some time ago

He cooks for me and never burns a thing

He spends hours and hours in the kitchen

Says it’s where he feels most comfortable, ya know

He tells me to leave when I complain of the heat

It gets on his nerves when I do that

So mostly I stay in my room until the meals are served

When I go down, the table is always beautifully set,
and the meals, well, it pains me to say this
because he works so hard —
but they are always just awful!

 

 

Writing a Love Poem                     by Shonda Renee

the pain of this is to conjure you up

between these lines, somehow

to light a candle

and not let the pages burn

to do a crazy dance

and remain within the margins

to pull my heart out

and not bleed too much here

just hold it for a few pulpy beats

in the palm of my hand, like a sun soaked fish

so I will appreciate the encasement

and all my working parts

running to its rhythm and your melody.

 

 

Infinity                      by Shonda Renee

As I look up I recognize infinity

Spreading itself above me

Curving behind Western mountains.

Allowing the sun to deliver a dazzling farewell of color

In perfect harmonious blends across its canvass.

In recognition,

The Earth shrinks to a mere pebble

And I, a grain of sand

My worries, dust…

Blown away by the magnificence of perspective.

Reflective thought within my infinite mind

Spins on its invisible axis.

I was made in this image

Through faith, willed into being.

No separation here, no parallel either.

Only a demand of co-existence and a willful submission

To the laws of the infinite universe

That I swallowed up billions of years ago,

And which lives in me
And births its miracles through me.

Looking up into the blackness,

The colorful spectacle long came to an end,

I am looking at me.

The beginning, the forever, the black woman,

Infinity.

Masked Beauty        

                                                                                                                        Quilt of Leaves

by Elizabeth Parish          

She wears a mask of serenity,

Her skin thick

As the bark of a tree

In the wind she trembles

But her roots

Remain firm.

She is anchored to granite

And blanketed with snow

She is wrinkled and wise,

Knows seasons of time,

Hears neighborhood gossip

And the laughter of chimes.

Patiently she wrestles the wind,

But stands straight in line.

She rides on trains

And coats ocean shores,

She returns messages

And is never a bore,

Birds love her limbs

And squirrels too,

With her garden a pasture,

She welcomes the dew.

Quilt of Leaves

by  Elizabeth Parrish

It takes a lot of leaves

To dress a tree

In a garment of green

Each one creating a quilt,

A warm robe for a solitary figure.

It takes a lot of needles

To fill up a stand of pines

To provide a blanket

For the earth in winter.

Each leaf and needle

Holds a scent of you,

Sugar cones, acorns and caps,

You are dressed so lovingly.

The sleeves of branches

Embrace sunlight

And folds of laughter.

You are a refuge

And remain

So undemanding.

The music you play

In the rustling wind

Carries such sound,

Notes on a nameless instrument,

Are you a violin, an oboe?

You play so many notes

And never need tuning,

Harmony runs through your fingers.

You listen patiently to the ocean,

Ledges of Cypress,

You circle us all

And are ever green,

Soft whispers in moonlight.