All My Muses
A poem — dealing with art block
All my muses have left me.
In the middle of the night, gone.
And what color is the sky at dusk?
Hatched out of their Doric, Ionic,
and Corinthian eggshells
lethargic and bulimic
with a fever of 104 degrees BC
dropping the weight of the beauty of the world
between my lashes, petrified
with salt. Stinging.
And what does grass smell of any more?
That’s me, chest to the wall
hardly breathing, always
inhaling — you come here often? — facing
lyrical brutality, literary negligence,
choleric outbursts of hieroglyphs in an
order meaning nothing, feeling
everything.
How does the sunshine taste?
Where to put my hands?
You would cry, too, if you looked up
and your muses were all in a murmuration.
All in good humour, climbing higher.
What time is it?
Is that the sun?
Sure is pretty.
Too bad. Will you stay awake with me?
Make sense of this mess with me?
Pick up the shards of stained glass and remember
the hands that shaded my eyes when in a dream
I cut the pieces to shape and size?
Hold them up to the light
to the moon and remember
the lips that kissed the edges smooth
like sea glass.
Oh, I reckon I’ll never create again.
No, it’s a symptom of the fading heart.
If you opened me up now you’d see it.
Whatever makes me blue now
will make me grey
tomorrow.