Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Four
November- December 2025
Receipt Or Found Object, poems by Kaaren Kitchell.
Obituary, New York Times
I read about my long-ago love,
of his two marriages, each lasting
a mere two years.
I know why.
That man was a leopard in bed,
a woodpecker in daily life—
he nearly pecked me to death.
But my god, the lightning between us!
Receipt Or Found Object
Poking out of the cardboard plank
at the bottom of the caddy:
the corner of a receipt.
I pluck it out, look at the date.
Just as I thought: 31-12-18, four months
before the end when you were still alive.
You showed your love
with acts of devotion
did most of the marketing for us
and when you had lost
more than half your lung capacity
your ability to breathe
after that second ICU scare
when you’d come home in April
and needed an oxygen tank
as tall as your chest,
with a tube trailing out of your nose
just to walk to the kitchen
or the petit coin,
you apologized to me, said you were sorry,
you’d only be able to carry a few items
home after that. I would market for us
with pleasure, I said, but I knew
what you really meant,
that it was a diminishment
of your greatest power, a heart
that wants only to give.
Early in our love you’d called me
the Goddess, till I forbade it—
knowing the real goddesses hate hubris.
But your every action continued to say,
my Goddess, my Goddess,
I adore you.
Peregrine Falcon
My father ruined me
for any man who doesn’t love
the Celtic way
madly, deeply, wholly.
Ruined me for half-hearted men,
surface skimmers, mere seducers.
He dove straight for what he wanted
like a peregrine falcon dives for a dove.
He chose her and was true to her for life.
Having no sisters, how did he learn
the delicate passionate dance
between a man and a woman,
when to lead, when to follow,
when to speak, when to listen,
when to work, when to dare the next adventure?
Perhaps it came from his Irish English mother
with the musical voice, humorous and full of grace
(she reminded me of a calico cat).
Or perhaps it came from his father’s forebears,
French Welsh English gentle men, troubadours,
pilgrims, a peregrine falcon on their coat of arms.
Democratic American to the core,
he treated others with care and respect,
as if he saw the sacred in every soul.
I See Him As A Stately Angel
Driving up Vine, he says,
I could have been a great architect
but I wondered, what is the good
of that if all life is an illusion?
I laugh—I can’t help it. He wonders why.
The floating figures of his art,
his imagination that wants off the earth
and into the Afterlife.
Oh, but that is not the direction
my soul wants to go.
It’s this life I love,
this moment, this oak and squirrel,
this family of deer, this swallow, this body
in which I live, this city across the bay,
and all the inner images of my life on earth,
the treasures in my memory chest.
L’homme Avec Oiseau
Who, what is he?
A magical encounter.
A man with a bird on his shoulder (left side).
An engineer with a secret seer inside.
Shapely letters in blue ink.
A curious mind, winged.
A spark of fire, leaping heart. A sturdy back
carrying the weight of work and a punitive ex.
A man with a sense of measure,
of how things are made. Agi māri, ruler of the edge.
A thirsty soul, French Hungarian Jew.
What kind of bird? Mon petit doigt m’a dit[1].
1 – In The White Goddess, a historical grammar of poetic myth, Robert Graves traces the Druidic associations of each finger to a particular Ancient Greek god or goddess. The little finger is associated with the divinatory god Hermes. ‘’… the ear-finger—in French—doigt auriculaire–…has oracular power—…as they still say in France of a person who gets information from a mysterious source: Son petit doigt le lui dit.” His little finger told him.“…the earliest sense of ‘auricular finger’ is ‘secretly whispered in the ear’. The auricular finger was probably used by the Gallic and British Druids for stopping the ear as an aid to inspiration.”
© Kaaren Kitchell
Kaaren Kitchell’s poems have appeared in various literary journals, including The Jung Journal Winter-Spring 2023, Live Encounters, anthologies, and in a fine art manuscript at the Getty Museum. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, LA. She and her late husband, Richard Beban, taught Living Mythically at the C.G. Jung Institute in L.A., at Esalen in Big Sur, and in private workshops, based on her 30-year vision quest. Her most recent book of poems is Ariadne’s Threads. She lives in Paris, France, and Berkeley, California. She can be reached at ariadnesweb@msn.com