About her life and work, Judith Cody writes:
"Judith Cody has lived most of her adult life in several counties of central California. At the moment, Santa Clara County is the poetry writing place. The people, the ecology and nature's singular traits in California have been a critical theme in much of her poetry. Wet Drive is the latest poetry manuscript; it deals with the theme of the ocean mostly inspired by living in the Monterey and Santa Cruz areas. She has had poems published in an Atlantic Monthly anthology; Lost and Found Times; Stonecloud; Sequoia; and others.
The Smithsonian Institution has placed Cody's collection, on one of her poems, in the permanent American History Collection. She won a national poetry contest in Amelia magazine in 1993; she is a past winner of an Atlantic Monthly national poetry contest.
Greenwood Press published her book on the American composer, Vivian Fine: A Bio-Bibliography, in 2001. The book, Eight Frames Eight is a collection of award winning poems and poems previously published in magazines and was released in 2002 by Xlibris as both an e-book and a printed book."
You can read an excerpt from Eight Frames Eight by following the links at: http://www.xlibris.com/judithcody.
You may reach Judith Cody by e-mail at: http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/author_contact.asp?authorid=6901, or visit her homepage at: http://www.marquiswhoswho.net/judithcody
Their peaks cloaked in snow
Silent into silent days
A million lifetimes
Sky mists
the mountains watch
down upon they
who watch the mountains.
hear stone centuries
slight struggle upward.
measure their surge
to the clouds.
embrace earth's
serene behemoths.
...Pinnacles National Monument, February 2002
Under the plank deck, slugs, snails
On billions of humans evolved
Getting the great picture clear
living some sort of destiny
simple little travesty
over struggling eons
millions of mysteries dissolved
within our moist neurons
enough to find sustenance
for flesh but nothing to keep fear
of dark, of death at abeyance.
The vacuum coughed like an old
dog trying to swallow a bone.
Seemed a big grey clump of regular
house dirt had jammed the brushes
on the bottom of the machine,
when I poked at it trying hard
to pull the clog free of the bristles
it plopped apart at my feet
with a faint smell of pine
where the brown Christmas
needles had been stuck
in the corner.
And at that instant
in my moment
Earth moment
after eons when
silent solitude
was enough geologic
consequence
became merged into
the biological
slip and slid
that Earth and Being
married
time of time this
time of me this
was the great roar
and consummating thrust
of mantle and me
torn mountain
created new canyons
where the raw earth flesh
opened to the warm sun
at last, at last,
all is exposed to
glorifying light
and there was the terror
always there at first
experience when
the world becomes
alive
at last, at last,
another mountain
chain is
conceived
and I
attempt to
survive at the seething
edge of this
rupture
where fear licks
the flesh cool.
1
2
From the tip of the soft green hill
the valley spread before us
as if for our admiration and approval
in the great lush blue-capped day
of puff clouds hung over
us as if curious about our
odd uncloud-like conduct
breezes swept around us in
a warm, kind of maternal
memory.
We and the sky watched
it all in all in the valley.
I stopped the car
months later to see
bulldozers scraping
the hill top into a
parking lot for hikers the
sign explained in blue letters
that the green spot where we
and the sky watched forever begin
Is leveled to stabilize a
row of porta-toilets.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway2002. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Judith Cody 2002 All Rights Reserved
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