poems || Sheila E. Murphy

from 'Toccatas in the Key of D'

20  
In principio, research was meant
To team with polished flagstones,
Tiny print and carpet,
Pink moor folding closed condolences. 
The wreckage of assembled points begins
Rebuilding sun stripes, one color or two, 
Upon the utile plants’ matte flesh. 
Preposition remains accidental, various and
Crafted along ruthless premises.
This afternoon of rote 
Offers semi-precious leisure 
Magnified to last another season. 
The jet stream has logged many hours, 
Surviving relay’s mileage
In the distance by degree.

21  
This is home, with fish oil, sanctity, replacement
Therapy. Abrupt encyclical disjunction,
Thirty years to life.
An episode connotes the space in privilege.
Pawns trill evidence of upper registers
Gone wrong. With nothing changed. 
No partial print. No first 
Coat of paint. Barometer 
Of written pressure and precise.
The tangled ossified new bloat of ice
On different days. Some practical lamps
Whose glare goes watched over 
The night’s linoleum, made responsible
For what is loathe to shelving Pavarotti
High into the rippling trees.
 
22  
Birth glows within an afternoon.
A person of upbringing soft and slow
Who moves among the mis-en-scene with clayfeel
In and out of pockets situated close.
Boards rise, etchings nominate the world.
Impactful Rotterdam bequeaths apocalypse 
To drown out edifying speech.
Our elders shackle many fellows from
A raconteur one may not trust.
Apart from silence there are options:
To clothe and feed the mighty,
To render impotent lane changers,
To coast through life in a vacation mode,
A remunerative shred of past tense 
Seething with intent to fraternize
During deliverance.

23  
Give me your blind blue nervous system,
Once clinically dead and then mysteriously
Wheeled in to what I am / immune to.
A failed line of sight where energy
Is passed over scenery.
Sunshine spills across the arms
Of hearts buried in books.
Stipends fall into unlikely hands.
Evaporation easily sustains the river.
Voyeurs take back things unseen.
Long vast space worn into steamed lace.
By now, narration clarifies
A distance in the year of talismans,
The few pitched crumbs of niacin
Separate from a hold that line approach.

24  
If echo had a mercy curve
We would admit we love the night.
We would endure no less than fight song enmity.
To wit, an argument smalls forth what we are under.
Some days she swears there is a loose plot.
At chosen moments, she asserts
She’s not responsible.
And is apt to leave the fault line to rejoin
The cleavage where we work.
Retaining grace of tone fields,
Taken from a nearby Rococo 
Attending to invention as a consequence 
Of where the cinders cap the lot. 

25  
Carvings left by water lose the thought of water.
When autumn sings it is a flute print
Whittling shrill air.
Now radio intrudes upon a scalar silence.
Dance shaves loam of happenstance.
No bother to awaken tufts of camisole
Or crew-necked mild invasion.
“Such good air” the wheezes in the hovercraft
With bees and butterflies.
The motor sheds its practice
Toward forthcoming winter.
Cauterizing clumps of sores awaiting balm.

26  
A remedy is one kind of neglect.
The cult of hero atrophies our unity 
Until shared repertoire is nil. 
One struts toward projected finish line
With steel-cut cavalry dispatched 
Toward mother lode,
Postponing a full reciprocity 
That might have healed, 
Off-shore rim shots, 
Whose missing cameo appearance 
Revokes the show.

27  
The offhand way she read a chart
Spawned virtual cadenzas of investing.
Reputation simply glows when
One has done too well.
A thriving comes to pass . . .
French word for mushroom 
Blades its way into the language.
Inked lines coast to crumbling.
Problematic distancing of cross talk
Wide into the generous true woods.
Selective service primes prognosis.
What is time
But an extension of the craft of stasis?