What the Muses Leave Behind

It’s a big deal, a freshman’s last final big, this revolution back to you. I was a prattling preteen - attention deficit; seeking this and this and this - forgot our heart song, mistook shadow for sound, mistook your silence for thick soft piles of simpatico. Absorbed by orbit, my tethers spiraled behind me. I was a hard shelled beetle banging about a 60 watt bulb. I called it love - seared my wings embracing a dragon; the cavernous the air rippling about me was full of purpose, empty of you. I was a tick encysted for some mega-drought ahead, conjured as if I could be Gaea, creating hunger so I could feed it. Blood is rich but unsustaining. I tasted iron on my tongue and stuck it out. I greeted my revolution; tasted its bitterness for catharsis, how it hates the long view, how it longs for the slow turns that wring out fog and blizzards – how it prefers the incremental procession of heartbeats about an axis. how it baits me with breadcrumbs to trail you

Before dominion over air and land and sea out on thin ice with jackal and seal ptarmigan and tadpole before dominion did we join pleasure and suffering hand by hand was pain of pox purple as it transformed newborns coral pink into some sacred giveaway did we kneel to kiss the ground wailing in celebration of an icy magic draining one life, filling another taking eye for eye so all could see how did we kiss the ground together nose to trunk bark to feather singing bones and snapping fingers did we climb tunnels to find where scars ended and new petals emerged did we color the water sanguine as we crowded clay churned shores so to howl at our triumph over thirst for another day roll on our backs, kicking the tawny air with hoof and talon before dominion did we feed on our best parts tenderloin and opal visions hot fire to signal the fact we never asked to be born and find it all the more fullfilling before dominion did we forget to be separate forget about everything but to swim in the

Inside I push against ancient skins once plankton and algae, soft pillowed bodies buoyancy lost, sunk, oozed with age resurrected on a three hundred millionth year baked brittle. Their cups hold my finger tips I pour words into a holy grail. Outside two gray foxes trace a vital ocher line with ebony noses to pull them through moss and brambles holding, losing olfactory caches. In long litanies of prayer they arrive before dawn for a Eucharist of Sylvilagus floridanus. So busy in and out of the chase so sticky the threads of odyssey we forget who blesses the breath between pulses who parts the curtain to kiss the toad who sings in a scarlet dawn? We forget it is the whole world, its evolution staggering under a gravity of shadow and light; but lucky us holding days like Ball jars, gathering fireflies, night just descending.

spin me lightly she pleads peopled with six billion and more on the way a wobble could tip us with no place to fall except over each other all kick and claw, all knees and elbows, no peace please, spin me gently

Crowing glory glory, we expected to float back all together, even raced to be first  to ford the asteroid riffle. Like children reaching in glee  fingers and arms wide as rice paddies,  we listened for star  song  to pour in like liquid sky off the tongues of distant galaxies-  but we lost Pluto –  even before  their chorus reached us; certainly before we could ask  the IAU  to reconsider defining  planet;  and particularly before we could implore #134340    to bring its moon home, and to argue  that turning in a slow whirl like a dervish around the sun is better than flying wild  with legs hugging the icy braid of comet tails. But they don't hear us, they're already three billion miles gone and outside we notice the stars have never been so bright.

Forget the rocks, use the liquid logic of desert water to understand eternity. Desert water lives for daily miracles, eternity slips through her fingers. Desert water flashes in July and August, a path of least resistance, uses eternity to seduce open granite ridges. Give water an inch, watch it take a mile. Sure, every river dreams of being a mountain, forever eating bowls of gravel, sand, cobbles, boulders, on and on. Water dreams in least resistance: easier to be cloud bank than granite ridge. Give an inch to thunderstorm, watch it flash a mile. Eternity lives in water mind. No one dare seduce the river's muse, fools ask her age.