I have felt a creative vacuum of late.  I haven’t been able to bring my way of looking at the world into the world.  It helps when folks attend to your observations. It makes me feel alight when I can share.  There are probably reasons for these dolorous times, but I seem to have broken ranks with the forces of passivity with this poem.

My Ashen Muse

Every day
I look up
and displayed
on a metal shelf
above my desk?
My brother’s dust.
I move his ashes around.
One day he is at hand
and another
barely in earshot..
One day he is
out of grasp
and another
he is eye level.
When I touch the urn
that carries him
I feel
he is a semaphore
or an emoticon
or a metaphor
or a figure
dancing,
an eye floater,
a persistent image,
a phosphor blip
on high speed film.
Sometimes
he stays in one place
and others
(I do not know how)
he has moved.
Sometimes he is
a scrying bowl
and others
he holds my tears
intermingled
within his ash aquarium.
Most days
he is not a cliche,
not a reminder,
not an instrument
of something,
not a tool.
He is what remains,
a filter-through
of memory
and time
passing
and held together
with nothing but cardboard
and a twine hasp.
Not a final rest
but a respite
while I consider
a more apt
spot:
perhaps the muddy flooded creek
or with the horsetail
and the peepers
in the wetlands
or 150 feet up
in the heron aerie
or on the wind
of a spring tornado
or with the efts and salamanders
wriggling and stretching
in the moldering leaves and
feeding all the tendrils and hyphae
in reach.
However his entropy
shakes out
the electric circuit of the earth
will fold him into
itself
and me too
and you as well.
Now and forever forward,
our futurity assured.
Amen.