What the Muses Leave Behind

I told her            your stories make my heart ache.     Mercy n o mercy, she keeps them coming.   If it’s aching, it’s alive, she answers.     Ache - to have a continuous dull pain, often used in combination: an aching heart, a sad ballad, someone left behind.   I didn’t want to be alive like that:   I'm  favoring breathing space, being space, the fortitude of solitude, stepping out of combination. Like the aspen, rootlets knitted to kin underground boasting to sun and moon: H ere I Am!       and she insists there is no alone, there is no away! It’s all here, all together: the rivers that artery, the land the quanta pixelating space.     And now my ache turns to growing pains - her stories, the elixir.     I would have said that too, she spouts, but you wouldn’t have listened.   Reciprocity lines our combination,...

I. It must have started somewhere, this becoming story - - - out of columns of smoke or skirts of high tide. There is no immaculate conception here. Long ago, sun and water were married, they made love in a turtle shell rattle. Babies arrived: land, rainbows, birds, animals, humans. Grandmother spider ate them all. II. Big bang, black holes, so much to begin and end and begin and end and begin. We see this world as magic ecotone between Venus and Mars. Blue green privilege of carbon-based life rare and precious   assumed - Magi - cal, mutual  more door than privilege        blown wide as a Cyclone   up and up        in helical   path,       to hold            us             ...

We are all in prison - civilians just don’t know it yet.” - Tim DeChristopher Overheard somewhere on the peninsula: Maybe marmot to doug fir. So tired of human occupation... Would that my bones rode a chariot of spore. That they were blown hollow again, bird whistle thin. Would I could gather the requisite dust and drift, Until fountainhead drummed the heavens reborn, axel of creation - the marrow of mushroom  ripe with mineral soil, and at last - one of the ascended  Brown and bitter and sound.

“Our species is committing suicide – that is a choice…”        -- Terry Tempest Williams Death might be just a holy rend                      a stitch of good luck, a weeping of snow melt. How resurrection prefers dirty water and pain, I’ll never understand. Her instructions comprise                    a tiny storm of mercy– full of crows and bottle flies,                                                                to debride the corpse,                                         ...

-- Women's March first anniversary 2018 Crone privilege abides here in the steady pour of the Mississippi. Her laughter, belly deep, shadows grackles and gulls, her inconvenience, forever indentured with her shoals, and her easy is fickle, full of silt and minnows. Crone privilege abides here. Out of the modern drudge, we know these truths: Wisdom is love, love is patience, patience takes its time. On the shoulders of old women, it pushes boulders up a hill, Defying the Sisyphean habit – they will roll it up and over, be done with that. Crone privilege abides here. Call us queen bees, a riot of pussies, hand maidens over done. Maya Angelou made her heart into a mantra, now when we straighten our backs, the chrysalis splits wide, and like cream on whiskey              we rise.

Maybe you believe this land is a tamarind rind                                          or geode hide,                                  or conundrum stubborn. Maybe it reminds you of a sleeping old dog, growling and mean with dreams of glory days and the chase. These hills and muddy folds of dormant agriculture                                                                 never heard of Persephone. Even Eden is a piece of gossip since John Deere and Massey Ferguson. The b...

Long shadows of winter woods crosshatch the afternoon road. Sun strobing a windshield in strange Morse code, delivers, not so much an invitation, but a summons, the pull of growing light. Hip deep in such a year as this - never what we intended, askew in storm and surge, we walking dreams of grandmothers and fathers, swim with the avalanche of history at our back. Light as love, light as breath, light as legacy. It comes from deep in time, a tiny germ, a song we feared was lost, a turning point, a pivot, a catalyst. The messenger, a code of pulsing light among the trees, quickens us like the voice of multitudes heard as from a distance: Light as love, light as breath, light as legacy. Winter Solstice 2017 Rosalynn and  John Michael