What the Muses Leave Behind

I might appear decisive. Ideas resting akimbo, black on white framing passage to the emerald kingdom. Can I give you a sure thing, some solid ground? Don’t count on it, no need - If uncertainty frames each portal; then as flower finds fog, melding edges incessantly hued, we court vibrations that triangulate me with you and you and you -harmonizing wavelength. We lift each other up. I could rise from sodden sediments bare breasted as a sycamore, the one down the gravel drive. She pulls water droplets from the deep rock pores, gives them a penthouse view, opens her lips and pushes them out. They connect with brothers and sisters. We see cumulus clouds -water laid landlocked for centuries, one rootlet closed the hoop. We lift each other up. I could sit like frog with eyes bulging above a rippled surface, meditating on digestion. Until in one violet flash, a horny dagger, we never saw coming, drags us up and out - tosses us down a rose gullet to a dank acrid pit. Hell… we cook beyond done ...

I know I'm no simple valentine, pearls don't grow in mud, still thick and thin binds me with you heart to heart – so clear our love. How insolent rises this shadow self – stretching wide as Saskatchewan, full of wild flax and brambles - I tried to press under glass. Still you hold me like open prairie kinder than any velvet glove. Even orchids take a dormant year, resting tightly in a bud. So what makes our congress anyway, tantric dances for the rain? Love flows like that - fresh and fast, changing tempo on a dime. Can we soften like a spreading fog rising up to fill a sky - satisfied, still full of stars, even Venus and Mars watch us now. It's valentine in a dragon year and the affection I treasure most rests in an easy smile, thank you. I'll savor the simple and the small. I know

“Courage is grace under pressure.” - Ernest Hemmingway My mother needs replumbing. Its her heart - it wrestles with globs of klondike bars, angry daughters, medium rare marbled beef, dusty secrets, tired grief. Clutter collected for decades in discreet passages - those dark catacombs, out of sight. Tough love doesn’t work for her. With kid gloves she escorts everything through the front door. Here’s a warm hearth, air of cinnamon and raisins, comfort of paisley pillows . It’s no wonder a generous heart struggles. If seven liters were all her heart must push from head to heart to hand. she’d be dancing up the gentle rise of Johnson Street even at eighty three. But a heart can only bear so much. Perhaps she will live to one hundred. If only she screws up the courage to say yes to a split sternum, yes to fresh pipes stitched around the tired ones, yes to certain pain, possible departure. She’ll tell you no courage required, only grace - She wants what ca...

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart...” – rainer maria rilke We want things to be easy- easy as editing lines by pressing a plastic key – there, alignment. Life revels in its struggle - difficult as kin off kilter with growing pains and broken hearths – here, discord. If we could tweak problems by lifting letters, set dilemma precisely in the good next place- simple would be the road to heart’s desire. Maybe patience is the only medicine and when we survive the swirling murmuration of longings as they tumble like starlings on a soggy afternoon, we find that spirals align best with open space and there is no plastic key to lift tendrils of pea vines sunward nor to steer disappointing news away. There is no easy in the orchid’s bloom, and even plastic uses millenniums to arrive. --rm mist 2012

(for Iris and Joe, September 10, 2011) Let’s make it a day for conjecture. When two get hitched at one on nine ten eleven, Ripe scarlet transecting a Shenandoah slope. The sum is not a Fibonacci. I saw a proof on that. When two get hitched at one on nine ten eleven. Venus blesses them with generosity The sum is not a Fibonacci. I saw a proof on that. The beauty of this wedding will feed multitudes. Venus blesses them with generosity, Maybe elephants and the Arctic ice won’t disappear. The beauty of this wedding will feed multitudes. Here, today, two hearts already together, are everything but one. Maybe elephants and the Arctic ice won’t disappear. And being so close to a full harvest moon plus equinox, Here, today two hearts already together, are everything but one. It’s easy to extrapolate that love goes on and on. And being so close to a full harvest moon plus equinox, Ripe scarlet transecting a Shenandoah slope, It’s easy to extrapolate that love goe...

My feet led me to the woods loop out my back door. The wood thrush serenaded us all under the rich green canopy of oak and hickory and sourwood. Finally I plopped down right down right in the middle of the trail and wrote: 77 that's my number this month, crosses with craned necks - whooping crane month in the middle of the year in the middle of the summer. But moon is new today - a start to something - even in the middle. I am the start of a family, a family begat by Alphonse and Althea - a new lineage of old world spooning with new world as woman spoons with man. So many opportunities to err in the name of bold beginnings - if we get so much wrong, there are so many ways to begin again and again, endless creation- buds bursting open to spray the world with beauty. Step here, not there - new dance; touch this not that - new embrace; think this not that - new dreams; living beyond the lines and within them. Such expansion - big bang! They made this family with lots of daughters ...

We’re diving into deep night again, into a velvet star speckled pocket lusciously cold as a watercress pool, edges laced in frost. We can’t help but fill it with gloomy news of economies kaput, mothers murdered, insurgent storms. All set a perfect stage for this longest night with shadows, shadows everywhere - even the moon eclipses. It’s a firefly called hope, napping in the bottom of Pandora’s golden box that sustains us now. We are preserved for summer – for farmers’market and mayfly hatches and Perseid showers. So today let winter hold our sadness. We’ll feed the fire, sing to children, stir the soup. Tears and worry ride better on the dappled gray fog than on our hearts. When Earth bears everything the January skies can bleed spring again.