November Sequence (6 untitled poems)

Sequence dims meaning. I made choices
To retain narration of one daily and two presented selves,
Some nature is less natural than lanes under the treetops,
Logic falsens how we access what we free
Ourselves to shiver when the lines of moon go
Crinkly by the hope of lane and chained
Gesture of generosity gesture of spoken Wellfleet in the noonday sun
Alarms sound flipsided, alarms sound young as salt,
As perched pine siskins with a fleck of yellow on the tail
The seeds of lunch are difficult, they trail our jargon
Ponderingly spoken, they exclaim in a white huff
Various charbroiled mood swings standing to the side
And blithe cool ringlets purple their way inside
The long-term hems to dust the short-term floor
What kind of absolution do you give to charity
Routinely or exceptionally after the confessional
Is starched full of unwanted reflex
And particulars and sunburn on the case and to the point

_______________

Abundance truncates any thought of young dispersal.
The inductive gardens loosely translate
Photogenic as surprising weeds cast off a glow
In the vernacular, dissimilar to water.

A semicolon gives me treble feeling.
I have washed tight borderlines with yellow soap,
And now some consonants are also gleaming
A pituitary randomness less functional than

Some interlude, in contrast to recitatif
In which libretto is the chalk of infinite
Surprise, a man lingering in years
Takes home a candle, learns to cherish

What is left, and placing the psychometry
In a top drawer with several pairs of socks,
Dismisses morning's rose hue for a better picture
That includes him seated at a window, more aware, and trying.
___________
Mangers press on nerves we didn't know we had.
A seed, a kind of jewel, is bound to open
Variations. Faith becomes a warm fire
That also incubates an other that ingests

A little of that light. Each morning
Prayer in words or wordless gathers
In expanding circles every being touched
By any inkling of affection. Change

Opens a little of the possibility in a reception
By half-candling the loping that will follow
Rest and the intake of soft measures,
Light and darkness, tone and quiet.

Dissolution of invested findings smooth
The many waves of morning's generosity, so may temperatures
Rest in gesture, pieces, placement, lore,
Until small fever finally is broken at the weld.

___________

Bestowal radiates as juice leaves reciprocity
To offer what it merely owns twice
Or even fourteen iterations of the glandular
Detention that accepts too few endorsal fins

When carvings hold the pretty rub of
Grief in singular. A replay of the kiln allows
Some lore to be extraneous until the memory
Comes in a card to break free of dissention.

Moments get on with hinging to the other moments,
Thus reverberate, the lavish implications bulldoze
What is sequeling the problematic implications
Purely rational, purely taken, practically

Requisite by this moment in space, a light touch
Poses before cameras, photographers detach
Invective to resist the hoisting of prevaricated
Distance all at once the focal point of gravity spoken in tongues.

______________

Mainly I want to olive tree my way into
Your aria, if only to imagine
Given things, torrential implication of incinerate
Declensions mimicking a western civ approach

To dissonance. Can you imagine how immaculate
La Traviata might have sounded to the off-
Putting percussion in a wave of some oracular
Pronouncement that a thing cannot be good

Enough? You have to breathe
Into the mike. You must furnish yourself
Plenty tantrum space and thoughts of Giverny,
So when the die-cut
Praxis loiters, it is time to gift

A horse. There is no smother room
In keeping with duplicitous perspective.
Now equals never in the morgue.

_________________

Modesty is not insightful. My predecessor
Would compliment the ivy. All that
Sentiment is sediment entirely
Covetous. I think, therefore,

Refraction includes pondering.
The radio is full of what I learn
Before I listen, that I fill
A generously vacant shelf space

With inductive logic fit for craft
By royalty recently voted out of
Functionality. Life forms placement.
Something to say before

Something to do, then something
To record. If all I do all day is
Gather, there are patiences that pressure
Leaning on their histories of making more.

_______________

Sheila E. Murphy's Letters to Unfinished J. will appear in 2000 from Sun & Moon Press. Also scheduled for release this coming year is The Indelible Occasion from Potes & Poets Press. Recent publications include A Sound the Mobile Makes in Wind: 50 American Haibun (Mudlark, 1998) and Falling in Love Falling in Love With You Syntax: Selected and New Poems (Potes & Poets Press, 1997). In October of 1999, she appeared in the annual Brisbane Writers Festival in Queensland, Australia. Additional upcoming performances within Arizona include collaborative concerts of poetry and celtic harp music with harpist Megha Morganfield. For the past twelve years, Murphy has coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series.