What the Muses Leave Behind

since   you decided to say yes and sensed now and believed possible, this road is yellow brick listen you say yes just so luck will unwind from bone and tendon it felts new geography like moss to stone and now yes twins no work twins play bliss twins sorrow all side by side kith and kin when you find river yes rims the banks it rides a downpour fills the well and rises deep and clear yes worry is an old cat let it nap in the sun what vexed you drink like silver song how dusty a traveler you were   now you open like a door hinges oiled – it’s ok          life is ready and vast a kudzu invasion a mayfly hatch each moment a menu           today is hungry a Serengeti plain and your legs are long wings wide - don’t wait kiss the road of yellow brick make it yours with yes.

“ Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw…” – Georgia O’Keeffe 1954 she paints the canvas Winter Cottonwoods East V - it’s a thrifty landscape burnt umber raw sienna mars brown it adores assumptions of sleeping sap, her alabaster basks us in the fresh winter light - with breath of gray trees fill the thin air, each knobby body surrenders its precise edge like fabric fraying in steady wind - their stomata breaths quench a thirsty sky. 2004 o’Keeffe lives in painted canvas Winter Cottonwoods East V, I'm inspired with the landscape burnt umber raw sienna mars brown I’m flush with sandy canyons, weedy with tammarisk smudged with sage, and grateful for my assumptions of the Cumberland Rim - I swap the mirror over my bed for her naked cottonwoods in open sky, they quench a soul thirsty for such thrift.

Okay - let’s push. It’s brittle outside, it’s a day dry as a carapace begging to split and fall away. Follow what rises out of the claustrophobic the rot of dark dreams; what feeds rootlets that push life into fresh buds that swell with a sweet tang that makes love to bees. Okay - blush at the newness, at the innocence that cleaves to this bawdy verve. Even when we try, there is no hiding what breaks open with each bloom - Each breath is a well spring. Today - I believe my shoulders can bear everything that wants a ride. . I believe I am the lake who carries flock after flock of geese, splashing down, dithering - to travel on, to stay around. I believe my spring tonic is spider bites and brown bats, blessed with fireflies, already out in March. Together we admire Mars among the poplars. I believe I well up in purple, yellow, green, softest blue - another chimera circulating with galaxies around this moo...

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