Sheila E. Murphy


from October Sequence

 
86/
I want to ground you 
Without your feeling grounded
Have the tapestry you’ve made stay put 
Along non-linear pursuits 
The gravy and the silos and indifference 
We are inclined to mimic forties films 
In carved black and white reality and style
I’ll see you in the vestibule 
Where all the coats stay overnight
Beyond the party mix and shape new lives
Allowing frantic rain to be itself
Toward midnight the clear coast
Of wannabe and silver and detritus
In our lives one rarely beds down rather
Witticizes to reduce the flat lined silence
From which our forebears rendezvous
Amongst themselves to teach us what we are 
Unlikely to subsume as mere subordinates 
To something vast we learn 
To live by heart

 

87/
She out of nowhere appears in voice
We speak beyond chronology and calendars
To reach the ritual routine conjoining lives 
We stretched beyond into eternity of design
Of claiming back the uber innocence 
Left to dry on fallow land as if mere replication
Were a worthy path we both neglected 
While acknowledging our roots and chasing leafy branches
Treasuring the reason to begin a thing at all
Keys on the flute and flat keyboard
The same as brushes chisels atmosphere 
Through which to dance and shape by modeling 
The way the others see and hear and feel 
Fusing intention pattern accidence
To yield surprise more to the inventor
Than some hypothetical or actual audience
Preparing to contain what is imagined 
Or occurs with seeming ease a comforter 
Or breath through breezeways entering a place
Where we return to locate and refashion
What was missed and what was loved and what we carry
In our skin toward unknown destinations

 

88/
My fault too the tension 
Not something to shrill into another’s court
And blame as if I were all crocus and dimension green 
With spring light in my foot bounce
I expected smoothness infused in everything
Thus a taut string mood flavored in the house
I sought perfection for delicious play
Of daylight nightfall moments in between
Desired simplicity according to my version
Of how light should fall and how perfume
Might hold quietly alive on skin
None of this is true all of this
I taste routine sell to myself
I window dress the life out of the variations
On a theme indulgence if there is a self
And when I motion to the calendar to mimic
March April May within the northern hemisphere
And leap into the pageantry of how I sketch that
Slowly with deliberate naivete as though
Protection were as natural as fear
And to my thinking it becomes as I have dreamed

 

89/
Rule bleeds internally
The fracas is sustained
Apart from wintry beads of clenched ice
Memento mori chafes the atmosphere
Replete with vacuumed DNA
Revealing animals their derivations
And hilltop mannerisms coasting
Or racing past diurnal menacing
The plié caught on video
Will play where thin equations
Have failed will fail while wandering
In search of anything but home
The fiction stasis we have bowed to
Bending low toward ungrounding
Despite learned reach and lattices
We bond with the imaginary feasance
Equestrian or plain routine strawberry
Kilometers from backchannel voice prints
Kept intact descend into 
A silver bucket full of bullet holes
Positioned as protective gear
To keep the irrationally fearful predators
From knowing themselves

Sheila E. Murphy: in 2020, Luna Bisonte Prods released Golden Milk. Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory (2018). Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). As an active collaborator, she has worked with the late Douglas Barbour on an extended poem called Continuations. Initially educated in instrumental and vocal music, Murphy is associated with music in poetry. She earns her living as an organizational consultant and researcher.

 
 

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