“I Find It Most Curious,” the Mouse Said of the Butterfly

Day by day
I grow more aware

Tiny miracles(you think I don’t notice them you with your silk and your crafty hands)
but I do.

Good morning, I am your chrysalis
(I know what may lie inside!)

We young and writhing souls
Will be your broken silverdrops and your blue-eyed sailors
Your malachites and your mourning cloaks
Your satyr commas and your shasta blues
No two the same

So I wait(and sometimes you might even call it patiently)
Wanting to become, aching to change

Not and still not there yet

It’s a tiny miracle—all I ask—a tiny miracle to take this flailing caterpillar

And make me a butterfly

I Dreamt

Craving somnolence, I think
Sleepsleepsleepsleep
Pass the dream around
And spice of ages run through
Tired eyes and purple veins

In less then a minute I am
The darkest shade of burgundy you have ever seen

So you fly me a cloud or two
Creek so slightly lightly in my
Figure, it's all just
Swimming along

So naturally I sing sing
In pockets of clover and
Taken for days at a time I am
Zebra-striped madness loving
All but a pocketmouse

Navigatrice

The Navigatrice
Is tiny
But do not for a second
Underestimate her

I follow her
When I can keep up
Swearing under my breath and

While I thrash through cobwebs
She lilts through memories

And gingerly points out
Ideas
Like Vanna White
Smilingly illuminating clues

I resent on occasion
The uneasy footing

Finally
With wobbly legs and
Soreness in my voice
I ask, "Where am I
Going?"

Her eyes slide across the horizon
Then she points
At my chest
On the left side
Below my collar bone
And says,

"There."

An Offering

When too early the extinguished flame
It was a mother's voice that came
Billowing up from some primal place
She tore her dress and hid her face
"Oh heart, poor heart, my heart" she sang

The man, stony-eyed with lethargy
Walked dreamlike through the cemetery
His mind could not bear the processing
As his wife kept on to sing and to sing
"Oh heart, poor heart, my heart" sang she

For any imagined fate is preferred
No father breathes the same afterward
His fist around his own heart curled
He reasoned it is an upside-down world
When a parent lives and a child's interred

His heart a throbbing, seizing mass
He believed the rest of his days would pass
With the wearing of sackcloth and smearing of ash
Her heaving breaths a thunder crash
A jagged fulminate, "Alas!"

When "Oh heart, poor heart, my heart" she cried
A tiny glimpse of hope espied
Reminding her of Love and Light
To wait out patiently the night
So these dark times she might abide

And their hearts, poor hearts, broke wide open
But Love and Light came softly spoken

So after time, in sadness seething
They moved to quieter, softer grieving
And were less broken for the believing

Sometimes I Think

On the Relevance of Fluff

The dog sits mildly beside me
As I tap away at an unforgiving keyboard
Frowning at metaphors that won't play out

He pants and thinks deep thoughts
Or maybe shallow ones, I can never tell
But he seems, if nothing else, happy
As my hand falls away from work
To rumple his fur

I get to thinking about fluff
While I run my fingers through
His abundance of hairs
How he delights in the sensation
How little it takes to make his tail
Thump quietly on the floor

When all-important things
Are flying querulously about my head
He nudges a flocky ear against my hand
And makes me wonder if perhaps
The fluff could be the best part

The quasi-finished product

A Song About Theresa

I know of no one like Theresa
With voice and hands always an intricate ballet
It’s RENT and Phantom and Tori Amos
When she feels erasable
She grins then and sweeps it all away

Theresa gives more than she’s taken
All she asks is for a prayer along the road
She’s serving pancakes, and her winsome lover
Can never keep up with her
He tries, though, with te amos in the cold

And when I try for musicality, impossible to arrange
I wish upon a Milky Way and still get ten stars’ change
And I invoke muses to abate my lack of inspiration
And the ebbing of my faith becomes a writer’s devastation
But if I quiet, quiet, quiet down, and let the waves subside
It’s Theresa sketched in charcoal that swims over my mind

Theresa’s flown across the ocean
I haven’t seen her now for days and days and days
In Venizia she greets me with that stare
Says, “I’d know you anywhere”
And somehow, somehow it’s all okay