What the Muses Leave Behind

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. ―   Leonard Cohen Why are we given this long night when the world stands still? If we shadow maples and hickories, our bodies long and reaching, If we make birds the oracles and sky a Holy Grail, Make a family feud into crow antics, let worry lift into clouds of starlings. We might stop dwelling on what holds us down. Trees in their subterranean sleep, dream of finding a sun. Of spraying pink dawn with bright leaves. At midnight we hear deadfall crashing nearby,                                              and know it’s the old falling off. Healing, releasing pain, and what remains is green and vital. Breath and love the magic elixir – Breathe in crystal melodies, breathe out fever; Breathe in sandalwood, breathe out mishap. If we listen to the darkness, beneath roots of winte...

- - for Noah Your report quickly became epic. It began in a big room filled with strangers, how you had no corner for retreat, how the bus arrived for all to climb aboard – strangers with strangers. You had your doubts. They rested beside the dust of last night’s cobweb, you tried not to get entangled. In the part about the camp, you explained how they brought everyone together, how the real journey began, how it could end with a brave new world.  So you all embarked, not sure where you were going. Now you know, every hero has to travel through the swamps first, you waded into each other’s bewildering house. You witnessed, you cried, you identified. Tears brought the car around when a truth stumbled out. You told us the food was lousy and each day was a feast. Wisdom delights most in the fruit plucked from vines rooted in unsavory places. You never went to bed hungry and even added a few concordant inches about the way the world can be. Empathy laid beside its golden ret...

- for lulu On the day you were born, Ell Pond must have brimmed to tickle all the toes of elm and fir, their limbs dripping with dew and finch chatter. Must have tickled you too. I want to hear you giggle like the summer day, you and Ernie dived for haddock, already hooked once and tossed out by fisherman because they loved your laugh. Like the chowder, necessary nurture - like the sea to float a family shore to shore -  see, even life boat. I imagine it could run with the tide, maybe  even run  amok. Love how it splashes everything. How it touches us with a light twinkling like Mars and Jupiter, chasing the moon.  Let's suppose there’s  no need to dive for fish again, when the gift is in the giggle.

(As if Fuin Mac Cumhal and the Salmon of Knowledge had a heroine instead.) Why bury your wild heart? Honor that rakish salvation   from soap and Jane Austin. It’s neither silk purse nor   sow's ear. Why bother with   the quest for a perfect way? Tunnel the worm holes into   ninth dimension tomorrow.   These notions for life, for duty - so quickly they fill with  dust like puddles in August. If you neglect the beveled  lips of agate, framing you   beside feral kin, proud light   bends obliquely from miracle. When you giggle madly as   a pod of girls in skirts blue and billowing - veils swing open. Hold this passage like April holds spring. The earth aches for each seed and feathered   song; desires grubby fingers   to probe the iron laced fissures, they map our fault line. Follow the dark thread home;   nose to wind. Chase every   sanguine urge. Crave   the Gol...

Helen holds hands with thunderheads. It helps when she's weak in the knees, lightning running down abductors, running down bones. Even temple guards succumb to such days, soft as pillows - scarlet velveteen on silk sheets.  Pink cyclamen bells the air, and Helen cut her traces. Bridget dreams the summer wind.  Its susurrate moan rises in waves, swells with tides of sandalwood to chariot the night.  She spins rhapsody around its howl,  dawns a golden jet stream  on spangled festoons of cirrus. Weak knees fly off with yellow wind,  before Bridget stills the night.   Sicily wets her lips with limoncello, quells the rabble of heartache, the clatter of waiting.  She rings goblets like temple bells, makes a sound map for lost days. Her boat of pink sand brims in blood oranges and cyclamen. Lightning festoons the rabble, Sicily finds Helen’s hand....

Let’s whirl across a yellow sky, wind it tight with wonder. Let’s pledge to shelter the soft and sensitive. This devotion is flame ready, rendering promise like blackened fields, seed heads popping in epiphany, ready to incite a murder of crows, heckle of dragons, a fold of tigers. Ready to sound the bell that brings back our breath. Let’s paint the clouds purple, whirl them into billows of prayer. Let’s imagine a summons for gentle rain, for gardens breaking open like my heart; imagine light dancing and dappled under green canopies, and elephant gods swinging every obstacle sunward. It is ecstasy we ferry from shadow, out of a  yellow sky.

I might appear decisive. Ideas resting akimbo, black & white, The passage to an emerald kingdom. Can I give you a sure thing? Some solid ground?  No need - w hat if   Enigma rings this moment, Like sunlight rides a forest? What if edges have already melded,  Like plaid weds flannel threads? We could court vibrations, wind kinships into wavelengths. We lift each other up. I could rise from sandy sediments Breast bare as a sycamore, The one down our gravel drive. She tugs water droplets Out of the aquifer, Rock bound for centuries; Drags them up Gives them a penthouse view, Opens her lips, out they go To float like lost tribes, To congregate as  cloud-bank . She craves the rain. We lift each other up. I could sit like frog, eyes  Poking above a rippled surface, Meditating on digestion. When in violet flash, a horny dagger He never sees coming, Drags him up and out – Tosses h...