What the Muses Leave Behind

Even under a merry morning sky Her mind drags its shirt tails  through gray slurry. Best medicine - work, she thinks a nd  The yard offers her a blanket of leaves. Rake in hand, she starts at the sidewalk. It's a slow transfer, this brittle, brown tide crawling toward the street, still Worry chafes her shoulders. He just shows up,  Blind to the melancholy under her rake. He fixes instead on his favorite fall ritual -  C an I help? with  kind chatter,  contagious. Now t he sycamore and maple surge swells  With  ample energy  to waylay her troubles. Gloom tumbles with  every tarp load  to the front ditch. Soon two rakes return to the shed, and Thank you - her prayer to him.

My back pocket fills with moons Orbit as friend, and I’ll choose well. I stand beside you, we touch crowns, Stars chase us, our penumbras race ahead. Orbit as beloved, maybe I’ll choose again. Heroes rise like cream with a little agitation While shadows cross penumbral paths, We wait for what was here all along. Heroes rise like dreams with a little work. Now we come to save the day! It wants for nothing, safe already. Best hang travail behind the favor. Here we are to save the hero! I stand beside you, we touch tongues. Ready to kiss the shadows away, My back pocket fills with galaxies.

The Braeburn thought, “Gone again, gone the work of summer;  spread along the stream, fed to Plastic bags; succumbing to one eddy and another, rosy skins lifting like dervish skirts, leaving tender nurseries empty as flotsam drifting below clouds. The late afternoon whispered, we are children of nothing and Everything, two hands fanned wide - no point in worry; bliss doesn’t forget, our story is a sling to set space Dust swimming across the sun. The Eider down explored the good in getting caught up in Something; like a boy with a new book curled and snug among shelves of dust mites and Dewey Decimal codes, eating words from a page, growing fat on dragon lore. The north wind yearned to run steady, still Greedy for the next moment, shoving nimbus clouds so brilliance would turn the day supple as mare’s tail. Duty is like this, sometimes a thorny vine climbing to push its perfume skyward.

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 ...