What the Muses Leave Behind

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. We squat sepia-speckled, chagrin, you turn off the light.  The night is reconciled,