Those who claim the burden of parousian dreams
get fingered by a suspicious Muse.
She hints that in their faded albums
the crystal blues of winter run head to head
with the gold and green of autumn,
no more remote than spring
in her peculiar scheme of things.
Chronology is her garden, and within it
the limits of her tolerance.
No clabberjawed rabbits,
dusking from hedge to wire,
spastic with postlude and coda,
paws like little blackjacks
truncheoning the aphid air.
Nor compass-addled wombat,
stutter-tumbling in fugax blindness,
thirsting the sap of deadly nightshade,
chubby guerrilla shape-shifting her feng shui.
The words she offers, over her garden gate,
bound like cilantro into bunches,
or in a grapelike dangling tangle,
are both gifts and responsibilities.
She is stern with her well-fed lovers,
sees in the shadow of a rib,
a gaunt pair of cheeks, a bony wrist
tightened over with unfolded skin,
signs of infidelity and wavering.
She will spit them from her presence
like the flat black seeds of a juicy, chin-dribbling melon.