What the Muses Leave Behind

Banshee in the headlights, sleek quiver of points bristle - Fly little arrows fly! There is no kindness, in this moment only broken hearts. No one should find such such a day. Grendel in the headlights the growling ache of Saint Lucy. Her bright party sinks with a mired night and stars ring the winter sky. Ashes turn to dust,  we all fall down. Cherubs in the headlights lifting on frozen beams. No time to say goodbye, no way to accept surrender, our most precious forever, and  we could only promise to be brave.    

Be at home in the heart, who cares what extends beyond your brittle hide. Home gives space for light, lets it feather the soft unformed. Be at home with the hunger, who cares that we tremble. Home makes room for mercy, lets it cushion the sharpest edge. When you go follow warmth, the ochre, the golden rod, each umber and ecru, the endless green, the lavender and rust. These signal our songs and bring clues for what twines the plucky hours of July with November. Be at home for the peace, join its long name: Grasshopper Phoebe Rosemary Mother's milk Alabaster First light Gibbous Moon Waterfall Morning fog Lemon balm Black dog Red tide Oak pollen Boney night Dandelion

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 embraced the flood of song pouring in like stardust off the tongues of dancing galaxies- but we lost Pluto – even before the chorus began; before we could ask IAU to reconsider what makes a planet; before we could implore 134340  to bring its moon home, to convince it  that turning in a slow whirl like a dervish around the sun is better than flying wild with legs clutching an 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.

Even under a merry morning sky Her mind drags its shirt tails  through gray slurry. Best medicine - work, she thinks a nd  The yard offers her a blanket of leaves. Rake in hand, she starts at the sidewalk. It's a slow transfer, this brittle, brown tide crawling toward the street, still Worry chafes her shoulders. He just shows up,  Blind to the melancholy under her rake. He fixes instead on his favorite fall ritual -  C an I help? with  kind chatter,  contagious. Now t he sycamore and maple surge swells  With  ample energy  to waylay her troubles. Gloom tumbles with  every tarp load  to the front ditch. Soon two rakes return to the shed, and Thank you - her prayer to him.

My back pocket fills with moons Orbit as friend, and I’ll choose well. I stand beside you, we touch crowns, Stars chase us, our penumbras race ahead. Orbit as beloved, maybe I’ll choose again. Heroes rise like cream with a little agitation While shadows cross penumbral paths, We wait for what was here all along. Heroes rise like dreams with a little work. Now we come to save the day! It wants for nothing, safe already. Best hang travail behind the favor. Here we are to save the hero! I stand beside you, we touch tongues. Ready to kiss the shadows away, My back pocket fills with galaxies.

The Braeburn thought, “Gone again, gone the work of summer;  spread along the stream, fed to Plastic bags; succumbing to one eddy and another, rosy skins lifting like dervish skirts, leaving tender nurseries empty as flotsam drifting below clouds. The late afternoon whispered, we are children of nothing and Everything, two hands fanned wide - no point in worry; bliss doesn’t forget, our story is a sling to set space Dust swimming across the sun. The Eider down explored the good in getting caught up in Something; like a boy with a new book curled and snug among shelves of dust mites and Dewey Decimal codes, eating words from a page, growing fat on dragon lore. The north wind yearned to run steady, still Greedy for the next moment, shoving nimbus clouds so brilliance would turn the day supple as mare’s tail. Duty is like this, sometimes a thorny vine climbing to push its perfume skyward.

since   you decided to say yes and sensed now and believed possible, this road is yellow brick listen you say yes just so luck will unwind from bone and tendon it felts new geography like moss to stone and now yes twins no work twins play bliss twins sorrow all side by side kith and kin when you find river yes rims the banks it rides a downpour fills the well and rises deep and clear yes worry is an old cat let it nap in the sun what vexed you drink like silver song how dusty a traveler you were   now you open like a door hinges oiled – it’s ok          life is ready and vast a kudzu invasion a mayfly hatch each moment a menu           today is hungry a Serengeti plain and your legs are long wings wide - don’t wait kiss the road of yellow brick make it yours with yes.

“ Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw…” – Georgia O’Keeffe 1954 she paints the canvas Winter Cottonwoods East V - it’s a thrifty landscape burnt umber raw sienna mars brown it adores assumptions of sleeping sap, her alabaster basks us in the fresh winter light - with breath of gray trees fill the thin air, each knobby body surrenders its precise edge like fabric fraying in steady wind - their stomata breaths quench a thirsty sky. 2004 o’Keeffe lives in painted canvas Winter Cottonwoods East V, I'm inspired with the landscape burnt umber raw sienna mars brown I’m flush with sandy canyons, weedy with tammarisk smudged with sage, and grateful for my assumptions of the Cumberland Rim - I swap the mirror over my bed for her naked cottonwoods in open sky, they quench a soul thirsty for such thrift.

Okay - let’s push. It’s brittle outside, it’s a day dry as a carapace begging to split and fall away. Follow what rises out of the claustrophobic the rot of dark dreams; what feeds rootlets that push life into fresh buds that swell with a sweet tang that makes love to bees. Okay - blush at the newness, at the innocence that cleaves to this bawdy verve. Even when we try, there is no hiding what breaks open with each bloom - Each breath is a well spring. Today - I believe my shoulders can bear everything that wants a ride. . I believe I am the lake who carries flock after flock of geese, splashing down, dithering - to travel on, to stay around. I believe my spring tonic is spider bites and brown bats, blessed with fireflies, already out in March. Together we admire Mars among the poplars. I believe I well up in purple, yellow, green, softest blue - another chimera circulating with galaxies around this moo...

I might appear decisive. Ideas resting akimbo, black on white framing passage to the emerald kingdom. Can I give you a sure thing, some solid ground? Don’t count on it, no need - If uncertainty frames each portal; then as flower finds fog, melding edges incessantly hued, we court vibrations that triangulate me with you and you and you -harmonizing wavelength. We lift each other up. I could rise from sodden sediments bare breasted as a sycamore, the one down the gravel drive. She pulls water droplets from the deep rock pores, gives them a penthouse view, opens her lips and pushes them out. They connect with brothers and sisters. We see cumulus clouds -water laid landlocked for centuries, one rootlet closed the hoop. We lift each other up. I could sit like frog with eyes bulging above a rippled surface, meditating on digestion. Until in one violet flash, a horny dagger, we never saw coming, drags us up and out - tosses us down a rose gullet to a dank acrid pit. Hell… we cook beyond done ...

I know I'm no simple valentine, pearls don't grow in mud, still thick and thin binds me with you heart to heart – so clear our love. How insolent rises this shadow self – stretching wide as Saskatchewan, full of wild flax and brambles - I tried to press under glass. Still you hold me like open prairie kinder than any velvet glove. Even orchids take a dormant year, resting tightly in a bud. So what makes our congress anyway, tantric dances for the rain? Love flows like that - fresh and fast, changing tempo on a dime. Can we soften like a spreading fog rising up to fill a sky - satisfied, still full of stars, even Venus and Mars watch us now. It's valentine in a dragon year and the affection I treasure most rests in an easy smile, thank you. I'll savor the simple and the small. I know

“Courage is grace under pressure.” - Ernest Hemmingway My mother needs replumbing. Its her heart - it wrestles with globs of klondike bars, angry daughters, medium rare marbled beef, dusty secrets, tired grief. Clutter collected for decades in discreet passages - those dark catacombs, out of sight. Tough love doesn’t work for her. With kid gloves she escorts everything through the front door. Here’s a warm hearth, air of cinnamon and raisins, comfort of paisley pillows . It’s no wonder a generous heart struggles. If seven liters were all her heart must push from head to heart to hand. she’d be dancing up the gentle rise of Johnson Street even at eighty three. But a heart can only bear so much. Perhaps she will live to one hundred. If only she screws up the courage to say yes to a split sternum, yes to fresh pipes stitched around the tired ones, yes to certain pain, possible departure. She’ll tell you no courage required, only grace - She wants what ca...

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart...” – rainer maria rilke We want things to be easy- easy as editing lines by pressing a plastic key – there, alignment. Life revels in its struggle - difficult as kin off kilter with growing pains and broken hearths – here, discord. If we could tweak problems by lifting letters, set dilemma precisely in the good next place- simple would be the road to heart’s desire. Maybe patience is the only medicine and when we survive the swirling murmuration of longings as they tumble like starlings on a soggy afternoon, we find that spirals align best with open space and there is no plastic key to lift tendrils of pea vines sunward nor to steer disappointing news away. There is no easy in the orchid’s bloom, and even plastic uses millenniums to arrive. --rm mist 2012