Sheila E. Murphy

If Diminuendo

Come sing she said. Near water. Watch the moon go small. Effectual romancing taps the all gone tonsure. Matrices longing for a comma go dish whitely soft and past. Limned fortified known summer was a prince. And he, to small a severance, would water lawns and a curvaceous feel to them would pass. I think I’ll go toward this place a waltz as though the year were differently aligned. If a submerged informal peace were spared the declaration of same fault line. Then and only then some usable infraction would soprano her way tinctured. Lime shifts the grass. Whatever season is inhabitable one might notify one’s past non-vivid in these small young days.

Consensual neglect, imposed unfurnished silence, ritual remorse or plain tuned singing

Requiem

Her smile worked all through her. Her presence just in front of me accounted for the likelihood of future daylight. Otherwise I hurt with my surroundings. Shame might have dissolved because of her commitment to the things one talks about en route to and from school, a center that included stage left and conjugation. I was never really sixteen. Her picture in the top left of the newspaper beautifully written now is vibrant. She is wearing glasses and her smile reminds me I am older now than she was when she drove us up the snow-filled hill. The poem of mine I knew she liked besides the one about my father when he died was one that started 'a woman wants to be a daughter all her life.' I grew up thinking honesty would be impossible to take unless one could agree with all authority. Her children said things. Each one in her family used words. I knew only formulas that had no harmony. I listened to her children's voices find a level I could only imitate. Once her husband a true genius turned to me and marveled over something that she had just done: synthesize the first act for a man who'd missed a plane and had entered right at intermission. I am fondest of people who exude conviction that their partners transcend anybody's wildest luck.

Glow

I fill out questionnaires the way you typically perspire. It’s tricky being cumulative when your offspring miss the way through dumpsters in a live crash course. Robust new bearings cancel tap shoe mingling surely. Listening along the tipsy lean-to shag rug playthings tends to yield somebody’s half babushka in unseasoning the simulacrum. So it lusters past the feat of shallow snow. One wheel dipping into places ice can’t cover anymore. The warming fastens to the psyche.

Rope burns mattering only to memory, the stowaway of summer stratified and low along the totem, chatty, veined, and seaming