What the Muses Leave Behind

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 peeled

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 whi