poetry || Sheila E. Murphy

from The Daylight Sections


3/

symphonic pietà. through windows
who is there.
upon belief in a fresh flower,
equally faith relives the unseen.

I tempt an early self to join me now.
each lifetime you find me
I am good at finding nothing.
reflex is a crisp flower.

I remove myself. today I heard
him say that he could serve
as a psychologist because he can
exempt himself from feeling.

I cannot remove myself.
from anything. the birds do not
drift by. the texture of a photograph
does not. my hands are here.

I feel what I believe
you feel. pieta. what do I do
with this. still real still
breathing in my thoughts and heart.

and in my mind the half chilled
flower becomes the same crisp
and the body in my arms
my arms around this body.

4/
one three-day morning in Ohio,
still too young to be held
together, I desired that moment
be my eternity.

only years after,
did the blessing come,
reducing my mistakes in love
to powder.

I held a conversation with myself
before being informed that nothing
of that spate of days
existed, nothing had occurred,

I would be picked up at an airport
a legacy to fill in the gap with
a default of home,
and I would wander, perfectly

unwanted and apart from
any body, linger in the hope
that made no sense,
that something would adjust

what seemed to be my fate,
if as unreal as the man-made
lake outside the home
that I was in those nonexistent days,

alone with someone whom I cannot even
picture anymore, because
this beauty that informs
my present tense is dazzling,

shimmers from the glass
protecting and revealing me,
if anyone could care
the way I always care,

as I continue registering
for a class to teach me
to grow fluent in conversational
amnesia.

5/
craft. distinguishes each
tree from fledgling tone
anti-
cipating a fresh song.
young inference be-
stows a wing on care
as if treasure in-
herently were reassuring.

vastness overthrows pinched
tidy view. sunlight wedged
between the two sides
of a vise, playing out

the fear so gradually
it is like playing by ear,
only the silence negates
approach. fragments become

the sole hope. low grade
apostasy say some.
sum of parts no more
than sum.

relive the faith relieve
the fat of "i" to "h"
recover from end
ow, meant to be

sugared as it works
not to control, even accept
responsibility. each level
blends into the ones above,

below, the undertow
is chilling and persuasive.
listen to nothing while you overlap
with your environment.

to sing is to participate
in what's already there.
the confraternity of distances
induces fluctuation. all the time

we occupy this space,
locate a pace for drawing
mood and mood, the qualmed
estate of ratcheting a single-

mooded inference. this is
unyielding, this relaxes
tendency from trinity,
the yoke parading as unceasing love.