A lake,
Deep, dark…
Bordered
By low-hanging trees.
Boughs,
Rippling the waters
Flown
By a late-night breeze.
Fading stars foretell the coming
The dawn.
A dying moon-bird hovers.
Dryads call from woodland homes
Good-bye
To their naiad lovers.
Here,
Here Melpomene comes to sing
And through the forest about her ring
Her melancholy tales.
We like to believe that we are too sophisticated
for superstition
only then a Friday thirteenth,
will surely, as ever, call up
demons and fears
from the limbo of lost voodoos.
But, then again,
consider the quotation
From Shakespeare,
“There are more things…”*
*”There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy [science].”
Often now when the sun goes down
a sadness comes to touch my heart.
I think of our tender yesterday—
Memories weave their special art
A sadness comes to touch my heart
before the twilight afterglow.
Memories weave their special art—
I dream and watch the sun burn low
Before the twilight afterglow
can steal away the sunset hour
I dream and watch the sun burn low
and ponder on true love’s power
Before the twilight afterglow
I think of our tender yesterday
and sigh and let the sadness go,
often now when the sun goes down
A vein pulses
at your temple—
it signals the pressing things
you have somehow, some why to get to
I would ask you
“Linger yet a while
For friendship’s sake”
But your eyes have already turned
To other places
Other happenings
That have no part in me
“Someday,” you say,
“when we have time”—
“There are so many things
I’ve stored up,” you say
Ah, my dear friend,
The dust of dissolution
Has already seeped into that storehouse
There are those who think
Time is the great robber
But time
is not the thief here
(For Elena)
There is a liberation
when the green stem stretches
in strength, baring
its buds to the blazing sun
Then the golden light
rains gladness
upon glazed windows
and tapering towers
upon bird-hugged trees
and leaf-rugged paths
and upon the unexplored
places of the human heart
My name Tammy Muffett
and you don’t know me
but I live on your street
and last night
right after Dean Martin’s song
of wine and roses
and Joe E. Lewis’s joke:
“If I’m standing up, it can’t be me!”
when everybody laughed,
darkness crawled into our house
slinging long ink legs
into the farthest corners,
for my daddy stumbled,
and falling
shattered all our lighted lamps.
I sorrow
But I know not
What is sorrowed for…
The days at hand,
Or the melting away of onetime?
I search
In my sorrow
For what?
What intangible do I seek
Sometimes
A poem
Or just a line or two
–strong wild words—
Will strike at my heart’s door
And shatter the windows of my mind
Such moments I store away
For re-dreaming
When all searching seems fruitless
And all sorrow rootless
What if we should break
a greater barrier
move like light and then
cast upon black sea of space
like pin-points search tri-zillion miles
of night’s glassglow moons
and reddust planets and distant suns
and never voyaging there
find another race?
Will we returning once more adrift
upon this opal starship
sink back to death
and dead men’s worship
make gods for our unholy restless days?
Or might we then make peace
with our aloneness
and new-born and strangely strong
set heart and soul and sinew
on a course sail outward bound
within our inner ways
and like a sleeve indrawn into itself
find that once lost:
the other side of space