Morpheus Dips His Oars by Tamara Madison
By Sharon Waller Knutson
Poet Tamara Madison’s latest book, Morpheus Dips His Oar (Sheila Na Gig 2023) takes us on a visual sensual journey of joy and grief. Using nature metaphors, wisdom and wit, Tamara creates powerful poignant poems about her emotional experiences in the last five years, including the loss of her mother, sister, and ex-husband, with whom she remained very close until he died in 2023.
“My first publication was in the local paper, the Desert Sun, when I was about seven,” Tamara says. “All I remember from that poem is ‘Here I go a-going/said the fall to the winter near/Here I go a-going while you take over here’--but what did I know of winter then?) I did not take my poetry seriously until I joined Donna Hilbert's poetry workshop in 1994; I've been a member of that workshop ever since. None of my poems is ever submitted for publication without feedback from the workshop, which is a very supportive group of writers with diverse styles.”
Storyteller Donna Hilbert, author of Threnody, sings her praise.
“It's not news that every plant and creature will someday cease to be, and each person will be witness to just a tiny arc of the existential drama. It's the poet's calling, perhaps duty, to praise and mourn the temporal world in full-throated song and story. In Morpheus Dips His Oar, Tamara Madison answers the call in a voice entirely her own, in full command of language, wit, and music…Morpheus Dips His Oar is a celebration of life from a poet who knows how to live, how to love, how to grieve, and how to sing the story in beautiful, well-wrought poems.”
Here are some of my favorite poems from the book:
Tonight as the moon draws its arc
through the stars and fog thickens
on the bay, a hummingbird
sits on her nest in the fuchsia plant
warming her one almond-shaped egg.
My adult children, home for a holiday,
strum guitars in the living room
and I wonder how many other mothers
are here on this little plot of land: possum,
mouse, raccoon? There must be spider
mothers here, too, and mother worms.
But I’ve seen this hummingbird, how
she sits on her nest as though in a boat
sailing on the breezes of spring and into
the fogs of night. I remember how I kept
my own offspring warm in my womb
as they turned into babies, and then
became the two adults making music
in their childhood home. Soon the egg
will hatch and a tiny being will emerge,
wet and scrawny, and it will grow
so big that one day the nest will be too small
and Mother will move out, flying back
every half hour to feed the hungry little beak.
My children themselves have moved away;
now they’re the ones who must fly back
on holidays, guitars and laundry in hand,
returning to the nest to nourish their mother.
Catching Children
My mother sketched in quick lines overlapping.
Gradually, the subject emerged, like a Polaroid
exposed to light. Most often she drew people,
sometimes children, though they moved so fast –
like fireflies, they had to be caught. Here’s
my daughter when her hair was fair in curls
around her face, on a dinner napkin with the word
“caught” and the date. Children not her own,
even grandchildren, were a mystery to Mother,
but she could draw them, stilled like insects
on flypaper, like butterflies pinned to a board
where they would be forever quiet and obey.
Cold Morning
I put on my sister’s jacket;
her scent still lives in the seams.
Again I mourn not her death
but her life, the way
she cloistered her longings
within her faith. I don’t
understand that faith
in fables that men pass down.
Those god stories will one day
be like footprints on wind-tossed
dunes. My faith is in the chirp
of the phoebe, the vine’s
supple sinew. My faith
is the glad embrace, the hand
outstretched to help, the lips
pressed to a fevered forehead.
My faith is in my sister’s jacket,
the weight of her still-warm love.
Blue Nude
We did not spend Christmas
together that year,
my husband and I, but
before he left
for wherever he was going
with the woman
who was older,
sexier, more
accomplished than I,
he brought over
such nice gifts:
a white turtleneck
(I already had one)
and a print
of a Matisse Blue Nude.
I stayed home that day.
It was cold, gray, snowless.
And because I was in fact
relieved to have him gone,
although it hurt, although
it would take me years
to understand what we both
must have known
in the deep wordless core,
the faceless woman,
blue limbs folded in a pose
that is almost yoga,
a pose he must have seen
me in dozens of times
in our few years together,
has hung on a wall
in every home
I’ve lived in ever since.
The ivory background
deepening to a pale gold –
her only sign of age.
Waiting for the Scythe
She’s got 93 years on that body. It still works,
mostly. It needs a brace on one leg (Consult
a neurologist next time you slip a disc!)
but it gets around with the help of a purple walker
with zebra stripes. The brain still works most
of the time, especially with the right
old-memory-trigger.
She’s going to donate this body to science:
the 93 year-old heart that hasn’t always
done the right thing; the overactive digestive tract;
the eyes that have seen so much with their
20-40 vision; the vocal chords that have told jokes,
sung arias in five languages and spoken with authority
even upon ignorance; the bony hands that painted
all the paintings that hang on her walls.
She’s pretty sure the Grim Reaper is on his way.
She's been waiting for him for years now.
“What use am I here? Why am I still alive?”
She’s in bed right now in a purple nightgown,
waiting. I tell her, “If you really want him to come,
play hard to get! If you keep throwing yourself at him,
he’ll never come.” And every time he does come by
he takes a look and says, “Nah, not this time.”
Maybe he’s saving her — not for last, for of course
there is never a last. Maybe he’s saving her
for that one day when he’ll be sure she’s the right one;
he’ll drop his scythe and gather her into his arms:
white limbs, silver hair, purple nightgown
rippling in the wind.
Read more about Tamara:
https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2024/03/storyteller-of-week_12.html
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