What the Muses Leave Behind

I’ve grown indifferent even bound in breath crouched on one leg. Here beneath me so many sturdy shoulders. Steady on (I think) find the balance in the wobble of an apical tip and never neglect the view from here.

Turbid The river is turbid today this moment feels the same Tomorrow’s forecast murky and overhead a ropy underbelly of cloud pinkens with our f bombs wears them as honor badge. One hundred percent Ever notice how rivers cut to the chase? We say inundate but it’s really a full body press. Our angry rumblings an envious companion. Envy, imitation, the highest form of flattery, I hear. I watch us roil to a slow boil. Clearing channels for “hell hath no fury” to break loose! We congregate in divine tempest. Been building for ages, like Katrina and Rita Irma and Sandy Florence Storm surge and flooding the mighty debridement And holy is the rancor that ochers the water. The rivers are ready. The oceans have held worse, have carried more. One hundred percent. Castaways bereft make new lives  if they don’t drown in the trauma and the abuse and the shame. Survivors as persons who continue to function even prosper in...

“Swearing… a bellwether—a foul-beaked canary in the coal mine—” - Emma Byron Somewhere along the Nolichucky in an Appalachian July, gathered a congress of friends: mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, a local nurse, a handyman, a waitress newly unemployed, a pizza cook - all upright, fried crisp and getting crocked. The babies were asleep, the fire bright, the banter surly. It cycled through tightfisted wages and overdrawn accounts, days choked on Trumped up stories buggering common sense, then the regrets - fermented dreams and philanders - they never could make sense of it anyway.   With sheets to the wind and stumbling judgement in sore need of restoration, the repartee slipped off the bank into the raunchy waters of Vulgaria,  where, albeit unexpectedly, along the Nolichucky in an Appalachian July, Hygiea rose from the foam, with shit under her nails.  She was sired that night by conundrum and wombed in a Dickle jar, but her remedy, in that hour of ne...

Return to teenage mind between limbic brain and prefrontal to imagine Persephone spitting dirt and cobwebs Rip Van Wrinkle stretching limber limbs first thing on your tongue let it rise up Ambient and sleep tweeter denial another drug of choice make for home again barefoot and blind the trail long cold crumbs long gone and here is your fresh start fresh as a wound and wounds love honey blood in the honey iron sweet so is a cardinal’s jubilation every resonate note an arrow straight stand straighter feet planted in a new look whipped up rainbow open network fetid breath in shadow homecoming more cobwebs to lace up a wandering detail Lilith wailed Mary wept it dissolved the accretions it shed skins so the center can fly apart   you let it like the cottonwood   see      adolescents do this daily.

BROKEN VENEER BRITTLED CRACKED     FRAUGHT LOOSE DUSTED   DUST TO DUST TO THE WIND     BLOWN TO THE WINDS DISCOMBOBULATED MY UNDOING     UNDONE DISSOLVED  APART IN THE HEART ARCHIPELAGO EVAPORATED ASUNDER IN SHREDS     WISPY THIN   AND COOLING ANNEALED  IT SHOWS ONLY JUST UNTIL QUICKENING MAKES SENSE    AND POSSIBLE ONE THREAD     COALESCED YES CONFABED CONFIGURED RECOVERED  DISCOVERED AND COBBLED BACK  GALVANIZED TIGHTENED RETUNED REVIVED REBOUND     AND PRO FOUND  NOTHING MISSING IN FACT THE SYNERGY NOTEWORTHY NEVERTHELESS IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN   IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN

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             ...