Sheila E. Murphy's most recent book publication is titled Continuations, a collaborative volume with Douglas Barbour, available from The University of Alberta Press. Murphy co-founded and for 12 years coordinated with Beverly Carver the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series. The series specialized in commissioning poets to create and perform work in response to traveling exhibitions of visual art. Murphy's home is in Phoenix, Arizona.
* * *
My Pet Genius Is a Fish
We listen to Scarlatti from our different spheres
Untrebled and with reason taxing all our ears
The mere hint of Parmenides unbinds our body chemistries
Until the litmus breathes open our chakras to subtract lament
Untrebled and with reason taxing all our ears
The patronym of early Irish stock-in-trade remands all leisure
Until the litmus breathes open our chakras to subtract lament
We have to purge our innocence of precognition
The patronym of early Irish stock-in-trade remands all leisure
To the fungi cluttering respective corners left open to debate
We have to purge our innocence of precognition
Only to disband the meeting our mental faculties
To the fungi cluttering respective corners left open to debate
Go our possessions, all of them, as if our wish had closed
Only to disband the meeting of our mental faculties
Replete with pompous attitudes and hats to match
Our possessions, all of them, are gone, as if our wish had closed
The only jug of cointeau anyone had known
Replete with pompous attitudes and hats to match
We hatched our sole good idea as if spawned by reflex
The only jug of cointreau anyone had known
Began to bubble up an apparition that resembled the tortilla flat
We hatched a priori as our sole idea spawned by reflex
"Let it go," returned the answer to our only prayer
That began to bubble up an apparition resembling the tortilla flat
The mere hint of Parmenides unbinds our body chemistries
"Let it go," returned the answer to our only prayer
As we listened to Scarlatti from our different spheres
* * *
Decorum Wafts
She heard 'generous' while he painted the layer wedged beneath a surface aching with its depth. As though he were inventing her. His hands upon a place not yet invented. Her expression where smile wrinkles would be. A stucco tree in an imaginary yard, with just the right resistance level planted in the ground. 'Somebody live here,' she implored. 'There's not enough of me.' He gradually rose to invitations that he heard repeated when they spoke their separate languages all the in the name of center fraction. Once when he appeared a boy, a woman wrote in penmanship entire new syllabi. His line drawings of her began to serve as her replacement. As he grew, pale diary entries held an overcast arrangement. When she wept, he also cried. The question of identity was shared, and when dusk began to lose clarity, opaque new dove lines crossed the sense of limits into sweet night. He was feathering a wilderness, and she could be again the child.
Nerve endings, fathomed crests fallen to numbers
