What the Muses Leave Behind

five otters: watery rope to braid the Nolichucky with morning three women: iridescent bubbles to pastel an empty sky one man & IPhone: news to bob along a data jetstream four orange rinds, nine cherry pits: exiles to witness the wages of appetite

When I was ten, my dad pot-roasted a cow’s tongue. He brought it to the table on a platter, unsliced, open: a chaise lounge, red and velvet, slip of the lip to swallow us whole. The tongue is a door, a bed of confession, zipper to seal the deal. There is a jade plant on my window sill. Its many tongues sip silent molecules: water vapor, nitrogen, cool pool in the Kalahari. Tongue as cave, as conveyor, as flight of brown bats. Tongue holding space between us, gilded and strong with hope and death - a pocket for everything. Last night a snag of locust blew down over chicken wire. Five hens escaped. The snag, a tongue to freedom, to better pickings, a generous ledge. Sometimes a tongue wags, ungenerous, it keens to ten fingers times twenty dangling over a hand-hewn gunnel. There were children in that boat, fleeing with family over turquoise water. Maybe it was the Mediterranean or cold Aegean Sea - a wide tongue to crac...

The night sulks,  trespassed  by halogen dazzle racing through red railing. An   edgy glare to curtain the stars. The night glowers,  and lucky us,  witness  to a magical thinking, empathic and shining, wordless like resting breath, the morning grass, moonlight on water, coyote’s patient hunger. The day hung mired  in dogwood winter,  a cool flood  of yellow pollen:  Bradford Pear, everywhere. Each surface, a granular umbrage. The day, abuzz in bees knees, felt genuflection to forsythia and honeysuckle, long limbs, maple and sweet.  We come pink  with desire to  a night,  snake-skin fragile,  glacial and deep. The wolf hours grow wrinkled, long in the tooth,  flabby with  nettles and bothered stars. The love songs of toads hide here. In a moment,  harpooned with sirens, the wind is flimsy and flat, no song in its piney tresses...

This moment is liquid, breached with spring peepers, It is sandalwood smoke lifting prayers to Lakshmi, Lifting standard bearers, it ups the ante. It is a cool breeze up a cervical column,   shivering  in Morse code, a genetic ladder to the roof, to Jupiter to a far black hole in one. Nebulas yawn a kaleidoscopic Neverland promenade, and gravity waves sing their arias of emptiness and full again, in nano-rhyme, in tiny grand statements. This moment is rich in grandchildren and great grandchildren, grows thin with constant attention, runs curious as coyote, moans in silken orgasm. This moment is ready as 4 o'clock. It swirls perdition within paradise, it bobs on Adriatic waves, swells with orphans adrift, threatens to wash us away. It uncurls sad lingering memory, clings to vital shadow kin. This moment is mitosis: gold to lead, sunflowers to chickadees, you to me. It has folded the day into 366 paper cranes, each head upturned. Thi...

Day 1 Mercury Pluto conjunction. You might wake up believing you are in possession of the ultimate solution to save the world but you can’t seem to get anyone to listen. No doubt  Obama got the same message. And Hillary And Kim Jong-un  And my mother It blows in fresh from dream dimension Where all is soft clay, blank canvas, new score, of course we can save the world.  First possession, grit and truth under our nails.  Stardust and cobwebs. Mercury has perched in the maple.  He’ll relay our allegiance To his far brother. I pledge allegiance to the woodlands,  to their cloud conjuring prowess,  their cleansing alchemy, their largesse.  Seems very ultimate, we’ll plant 50,000 trees. I pledge allegiance to permaculture, I’ll chop wood and carry water. Surely it’s the pace that presses us into problem.  Pluto is behind this reinvention. Make it no secret! I pledge allegiance to the shrinking icecaps....

Four AM pulls its brittle seam to snap open another wish bone night, Venus has mounted Jupiter, and they’re headed for the barn. It is the hour of cracked kettles, when dreams simmer, and my dark woman  uncurls like fiddlehead, the bud more painful than the blossom.  She cloaks me and we are spoons in a drawer, we are hidden agendas,  we hark back to somewhere between mauve intention and first light.  She hovers within me, pretends to speak for the chaos of shoes in a tumble around the bed. They might as well be our punctuation  for the day ahead. We crawl on our bellies as apostrophe bridges.  In tantric mudras, we bend like ampersand.  Our vagary is an ellipsis. It corduroys the moment into runway lights, and I have confounded  the undercarriage. We could pray for water, but today waking is a crash landing. Even so, I lift my tongue to croon in awkward aubade  with my shadow kin.  She’s pouring us...

The blood moon craves attention. She bangs the glass, panel by panel parading past a naked canopy, oak and ash. She's desperate for praise, for veneration, for long moments of worship like the early days: a world lit only by fire. It's only as her golden lens floods tiny goblets in a south window, that I notice six little lanterns of moonlight, fire flush, ringing in sonorous treasure, a suspended chord, a perfect 4 th  of salty satin harmony with sky.  And I melt into moment – eyes, ears, skin, tongue, breast, belly, legs – adrift her Indian ragas -  puddle of moonbeam. Heavy with silver lipped boats, moans of stone, With pub revelers, ranting, whistling - something about football; With drone strike bloodbaths, cacophonies of grief, gravediggers, muddy boots, dark caskets, someone’s grandfather, mother, sister. With knitting circles, with sex slaves, with cock fights, with string quartets. Tides of grackles, tides of jelly fish, tides of ...