VOLUME SIX (2020): ARCHIVES ON FIRE

Monday, November 30, 2009

Sheila Murphy, "5 Poems"

Sheila E. Murphy

5 Poems

Do Well (Dwell) Amid the Teachings

1/

She planted tulips in a circle in the yard until her knees would not allow her to rise easily.

“Each, a tiny miracle,” she said of fingers of the infant swathed in cotton cloth.

2/

A younger teacher explained that rectangles offer rest,

While circles keep the mind in questions.

One arranges rooms to draw non-thought.

3/

Earth, indivisible by abstraction . . .

Loam soft, crusted

Otherwhere.

4/

Within the wild,

Heart comes to equal mind.

5/

Dreamed failure, the deciphering of map.

Names do not match

Where places are.

6/

One’s reach exceeds an early depth.

The health of others mirrors evenness,

Breath given as received.

7/

Learned is heard,

Is known upon reflection,

Watching being watched.

8/

Fields worked absorb

Known moments gathering

Mind’s yield,

The green / unfolding / fragrance real.


Vespers (91)

Veneer upholds the dream until dissenting weather tastes away the inference of depth in surfaces. Plural as daylight, experience brings on divergence toward self service or devotion. At the beside, a chalk-toned book, The Scala Santa. I know from birth. Today has turned tomorrow prior to my sleep. She left us seven years ago, we learned two days beyond. How is it possible to hold the reach desire attempts to do, by rote, across the moments priestly and still plain. A dowry of fragility comes late to consciousness. In a quality of attention one cannot unlearn. Expensive as a belief in safety.


Hunt the Mood

Is circumspection deliberately local? Why are you so young again? Remember the omega lurks where you have cluttered. Any day now there will have been salts along the runway. Keeping you in keeping. Far away. The sadness aches in retrofit. Be long and tell me hope repairs the woodland sleep. Compare me to a viaduct. If you were breath, I might have taken pains not liberties. The secrets fill a host of summers. Is July enough.? Not quite amended. You can listen to the monologue and call it speech. You can be informed and you can nest. If anyone is there, you can appear as far as you have been away.


Laziness for Beginners

Reflect upon a prompt, consider motion, change your mind.

Multiply your happiness by excess fuel (including breath).


Partition your remaining days into a single reservoir of bliss.


Kiss kismet as the French would do.


april 12, 2009

it is easier not to
have been touched
to have been
left awaiting
the return of quiet (qui es
in coelis) as before when
rhythms sounded clear
beyond the house
alerting memory
to be aligned with sudden present
tense she waited to be
middle year attentive to
the pearling rain against
new leaves and to inspect
without intrusion veins
that lifted nutrients toward
the little house of brain pale skin
with recollected
starts the seasons
homing in on this new east
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Sheila Murphy’s most recent book publications include Quaternity (with Scott Glassman, Otoliths Press, 2009), How to spell the sound of everything (with mIEKAL aND, Xerox Sutra Educations, 2009), Permutoria: Visio-Textual Art (with K.S. Ernst, Luna Bisonte Press, 2008), and Collected Chapbooks (Blue Lion Books, 2008). Her home is in Phoenix, Arizona.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
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