What the Muses Leave Behind

- for lulu On the day you were born, Ell Pond must have brimmed to tickle all the toes of elm and fir, their limbs dripping with dew and finch chatter. Must have tickled you too. I want to hear you giggle like the summer day, you and Ernie dived for haddock, already hooked once and tossed out by fisherman because they loved your laugh. Like the chowder, necessary nurture - like the sea to float a family shore to shore -  see, even life boat. I imagine it could run with the tide, maybe  even run  amok. Love how it splashes everything. How it touches us with a light twinkling like Mars and Jupiter, chasing the moon.  Let's suppose there’s  no need to dive for fish again, when the gift is in the giggle.

(As if Fuin Mac Cumhal and the Salmon of Knowledge had a heroine instead.) Why bury your wild heart? Honor that rakish salvation   from soap and Jane Austin. It’s neither silk purse nor   sow's ear. Why bother with   the quest for a perfect way? Tunnel the worm holes into   ninth dimension tomorrow.   These notions for life, for duty - so quickly they fill with  dust like puddles in August. If you neglect the beveled  lips of agate, framing you   beside feral kin, proud light   bends obliquely from miracle. When you giggle madly as   a pod of girls in skirts blue and billowing - veils swing open. Hold this passage like April holds spring. The earth aches for each seed and feathered   song; desires grubby fingers   to probe the iron laced fissures, they map our fault line. Follow the dark thread home;   nose to wind. Chase every   sanguine urge. Crave   the Golden Salmon roasting on hot coals. The best morsels   wait for your h

Helen holds hands with thunderheads. It helps when she's weak in the knees, lightning running down abductors, running down bones. Even temple guards succumb to such days, soft as pillows - scarlet velveteen on silk sheets.  Pink cyclamen bells the air, and Helen cut her traces. Bridget dreams the summer wind.  Its susurrate moan rises in waves, swells with tides of sandalwood to chariot the night.  She spins rhapsody around its howl,  dawns a golden jet stream  on spangled festoons of cirrus. Weak knees fly off with yellow wind,  before Bridget stills the night.   Sicily wets her lips with limoncello, quells the rabble of heartache, the clatter of waiting.  She rings goblets like temple bells, makes a sound map for lost days. Her boat of pink sand brims in blood oranges and cyclamen. Lightning festoons the rabble, Sicily finds Helen’s hand.