What the Muses Leave Behind

Chopped wood brings soup to boil. Hungry nights bait steel eyed traps. Evening light tugs at velvet shadows. Summer poems travel under woolen wraps. Frosty panes obscure coy pleasures. Sizzling onions infuse a kitchen’s bouquet. Gray days savor old love letters. Rusted fenders feed a salted way. Simple soups honor last summer’s labor Razored winds chap purple lips. Barren snow banks beget spring flowers Arctic nights hang with shimmering slips. Cluttered coat pegs announce new company. Comatose hound runs in his sleep. Sappy boughs pop a fiery chorus. Stealth rodents cruise with nary a peep. Winter barters settle around us, shuffling softly as a saffroned nun. We strike the bargains to inspire that lackadaisical solstice sun.

Getting ready for winter takes most of fall and we're still not willing even by January for skies to split with liquid glass to coat the world greasy in rainbows to bury our hearts neck deep in stiff mud to leave us with one wool sock on a three dog night to crave butterscotch early Sunday morning and the Pig is closed to stoke a fire instead and sip on yellow root tea to settle for first light chickadees and blue.

“From experiences of one kind or another shapes and colors come to me very clearly.” – Georgia O’Keeffe She painted her canvas in my protoplasmic days. Decades later I drifted into its bramble of burnt umber raw sienna mars brown contradicting my assumptions of winter disrobing them with her stark truths so they could recline silhouetted among naked trees. She smudged branching crowns but painted each cottonwood's body with watchmaker precision. She smudged branching crowns, they haloed a deeper alchemy each aerial poke of Populous fremontii melded sky with tree I felt tree tips fray like fabric in the wind drawing breaths of magnetic mists pulling apart ionic swarms swooning for photic kisses each arboreal moment titillating and redefined. I come home from desert and canyon, filled with cottonwoods and tammies. Their halos have blurred my edges; I toddle back blessed with ambivalence, freshly plied by wild water strong light, my tips feathering sand and stars. Her painting has re...

"..to be wild and perfect for a moment.." - Mary Oliver Before words, perfection dwells ubiquitous as spores on the wind, roiling over and into each molecule and moment. This little planet has emerged out of miracles five billion years. Chaos hones its lineage of mud and sun. Before words, every kaleidescoping morsel of matter enters in beauty right here, right now heartbreaking as an autumn morning, cocooned in a worship of mother to freshly born. Perfection is tragedy, perfection is harmony, perfection is lost and found. Before words, balance spans ebb and flow, underpinning what stumbles, what stands. Perfection fills a moment and moves on. Bloodhounding its trail, tongues wag and follow ever vigilant; stretching cheeks and cerebrum reaching, reaching - never quite here.

you teased my i pod like there were no royalties like music runs free hurry bring it in old laundry crowding the line we've lost tomorrow why fiddle fuck a round, you dig our moments best when nothing's promised news slaps my ears - ow!! and tight jeans girdle my breath just feed me kisses tugged your hair uphill forgot to tie it tightly bed heads fly away

Daylight cracks its brittle seam snapping apart a wish bone night. Venus has mounted Jupiter already headed for the barn; water simmers in a cracked kettle, just enough for two. And you, dark man, curled like a leather belt in the back of a dresser drawer, unfurl; I’m curled too, like paperback pages in August; we’ll meld mauve dreams and first light. I study you like a self portrait, you hover pretending to understand the chaos of shoes about the room, they lay like punctuations, a tactile Morse Code. I study these dots and dashes, you haunt my sleepy head; we crawl under apostrophes behind question marks. Your gesticulations play havoc with runway lights as I struggle to lower landing gear. Our best intentions for enhancing this entry, have arrived confused. Even so I’m grateful for awkward aubades, dark coffee and you inside my skin.

Fold the letters E P I C around you, let them be your mithril with room for elbows and air. The hero's quest bugles, already it's late morning. You have slept in. It's pointless to step beyond this frame, or soften steely gazes already snagging the long view. Catch up with your dreams, erstwhile claiming script and masque. Don't be late for rehearsal. If the fox can come to the hunters house with lights blazing like the fourth of July; you'd best listen to her story, watch her pace. In myths of vixen couriers, the moment is the message.