What the Muses Leave Behind

The music is defined by the silence between notes The light, defined by shadow, I live in your story. Wrapped in winter sky under that voluminous missionary, it is told all are one. Whole in its brilliant breathless hoop, the sun kindles our need for closure. For if we don’t shut the door, how can we open it again? How can we unbury our heart of secrets, turn the truth inside out? All is one, all is one, all is one - the bones of our existence exposed: icy lip of river, murmurations of cirrus deep miles of frozen tracks. Here we find what truly supports us, the muscle and sinew of our days - revelation to transform rusted fender into feathered wing, to transpose painted canvas into anthem or dirge, the mettle to welcome pause and shadow. All is One, You and Me, Inevitable - let’s breathe in this darkness, and breathe out the coming song. --(co-written with J.M. Hurt)

What is the opposite of rage? A bass breaking pond skin, ever widening rings of calm. What is the opposite of rancor? Children bursting through double doors, gleeful for recess. What is the opposite of humiliation? A yellow pot of orchids, a riot of summer fields. What is the opposite of apology? Times Square to Fifth Avenue brimming with rainbow flags and pulsing voices, standing fast side by side, feet planted now dancing. What is the opposite of mercy? Knees pressed into a sidewalk filled with road grit and gravel; no shelter from the storm. What is the opposite of moonlight? A dusty corner with bedside table stacked in magazines and plastic lipstick tubes, big screen TV. What is the opposite of celebration? Island of plastic riding a salt water gyre just off the coast of Chile, blue whale beached and bloated, belly full of straws. What is the opposite of preemptive strike? Circle of strangers moving widdershins, shaking hands, blessing each othe...

1 Rain churned puddles to mud, an earthy agitation, unbound and determined. Medea could not remember such audacity, had it been so long? Oh... she knew good, good and righteous as Sunday morning. Divine too, sandalwood rose from her skin, her hair, a tumble of honeysuckle, of ivy, her toenails, tiles of teal, robin egg shards. Like a prayer wheel, her cat circled. The hour was sepia, it twirled with house wrens, handlebar moustache on a tall dark afternoon. Medea slipped into flannel, tucked up with books of blue stories -   with Anais Nin: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” She took another look in the mirror. The burmese curled behind her knees, bony bag of fur had followed Medea’s trail of spice and Gershwin for a feline century. He was her familiar worn down to essentials: whiskers, heart, liver, lungs - a living altar of impunity. She rose from her reading, the cat stretched; another tin pee...

Inside out and no wonder my hide itches. There is a legless man parked in his wheelchair On the corner of 16 th and Broad He longs to join the ranks of morning He sits unseen amidst the roar of 9 am. “Have a nice day”, scrawled on cardboard. There is a ragged pigeon dashing For asphalt warmed bagel scraps among Subaru and Volvo, she never missed a crumb. Rerun is what I long for, so I Flip through a collection of summer wedding shots, basin of daydream. Bittersweet, my confidence grows a tail Sometimes fanned in grand display sometimes curled around low lying limb swinger in black and white cotton. Blue tips in my curls. I recall the deep kisses  how we all cheered, how the flower girls floated behind a shower of petals – Then there were only owls and we crooned for dusk. Not womb alone, let the matrons meddle! No heart to be apart and their river has grown wide and swift. My flight home is a nice diversion from the scattered nest...

five otters: watery rope to braid the Nolichucky with morning three women: iridescent bubbles to pastel an empty sky one man & IPhone: news to bob along a data jetstream four orange rinds, nine cherry pits: exiles to witness the wages of appetite

When I was ten, my dad pot-roasted a cow’s tongue. He brought it to the table on a platter, unsliced, open: a chaise lounge, red and velvet, slip of the lip to swallow us whole. The tongue is a door, a bed of confession, zipper to seal the deal. There is a jade plant on my window sill. Its many tongues sip silent molecules: water vapor, nitrogen, cool pool in the Kalahari. Tongue as cave, as conveyor, as flight of brown bats. Tongue holding space between us, gilded and strong with hope and death - a pocket for everything. Last night a snag of locust blew down over chicken wire. Five hens escaped. The snag, a tongue to freedom, to better pickings, a generous ledge. Sometimes a tongue wags, ungenerous, it keens to ten fingers times twenty dangling over a hand-hewn gunnel. There were children in that boat, fleeing with family over turquoise water. Maybe it was the Mediterranean or cold Aegean Sea - a wide tongue to crac...

The night sulks,  trespassed  by halogen dazzle racing through red railing. An   edgy glare to curtain the stars. The night glowers,  and lucky us,  witness  to a magical thinking, empathic and shining, wordless like resting breath, the morning grass, moonlight on water, coyote’s patient hunger. The day hung mired  in dogwood winter,  a cool flood  of yellow pollen:  Bradford Pear, everywhere. Each surface, a granular umbrage. The day, abuzz in bees knees, felt genuflection to forsythia and honeysuckle, long limbs, maple and sweet.  We come pink  with desire to  a night,  snake-skin fragile,  glacial and deep. The wolf hours grow wrinkled, long in the tooth,  flabby with  nettles and bothered stars. The love songs of toads hide here. In a moment,  harpooned with sirens, the wind is flimsy and flat, no song in its piney tresses...

This moment is liquid, breached with spring peepers, It is sandalwood smoke lifting prayers to Lakshmi, Lifting standard bearers, it ups the ante. It is a cool breeze up a cervical column,   shivering  in Morse code, a genetic ladder to the roof, to Jupiter to a far black hole in one. Nebulas yawn a kaleidoscopic Neverland promenade, and gravity waves sing their arias of emptiness and full again, in nano-rhyme, in tiny grand statements. This moment is rich in grandchildren and great grandchildren, grows thin with constant attention, runs curious as coyote, moans in silken orgasm. This moment is ready as 4 o'clock. It swirls perdition within paradise, it bobs on Adriatic waves, swells with orphans adrift, threatens to wash us away. It uncurls sad lingering memory, clings to vital shadow kin. This moment is mitosis: gold to lead, sunflowers to chickadees, you to me. It has folded the day into 366 paper cranes, each head upturned. Thi...