Once Maiden

Petals drop
Arroyos, deltas and plains
Cast bolder shadows creasing
About still-quick pupils, telling chart
Snowcapped range
Prologue rings the green valley

Shangri-La lush, smaller, stranger
Farther from the charted world each year
Odd tales protected
In a near dead tongue
Growing more obscure
The heart of an emerald nearly black
In ages no translator has crossed the jungle
Ready to scribe and translate
It will all return to earth

Fits of snorting pleasure
Rolling, twisting, thrashing on my spine
Kicking surging, curving, raising a rain
Of cool dirt, stone
Sprint and buck shake it off
Just mud
Because I still can, mighty
Call and answer to a sweet horn
Limning sieges past
Singing Romeo to my obedient heart
Throwing my blood down
A canal built for Phoebus
To charge urging the very sun
Burns a golden high road
Molten map
I am an empire
Built and branded
A web of roads traced in testament
I am riddled making room for story
I am honeycombed, the lightest weave
Taken given freely until most of me is light
My heart
Started as one voice, rising to the chatter, song, and cry
Of each and every thing, the chorus din thins and spreads
Until the needle of sound passes through the gate of silent
In a rising circle closed
Sugar to floss
Heedless moth to flame
I beat my wings beholding, burning
My cave painted with tales
In the burnt relief of my shielding shadow
Told as I turn charcoal from facing the light
Take no prisoners, the day draws down
Like a symphony tuned to a murmuring crowd
Caressing on the way to sleep

In the cool morning meadow
Who will hear
My dew tinged spirit rise
To dance a maiden offering,
Translucent skirts flowing locks
Carving praise and thanks
In ether epilogue caress
Tracing a fugue with swooping bats
Weaving humming cicadas chords,
Knit and purled by fireflies
Heat lightening and anxious sparrows
Enveloping, tugging the purse strings of the snoring world
The world is only provisions
Drawn careless in a blue kerchief
Tied at the end of a branch
Bouncing on my shoulder as I skip the road
Crickets and Oaks, kind, unimpressed
Bear down in concentration
My oats drift and sink silent
The dust I raised hangs floating
Amber in the day's last rays
Dropping gently like ash, feathers, leaves, light
The silken tassel of my purse
To tear
The vision pops
Head drops
I graze, forgetting
In buttercup


reader you may recognize the image from and homage to Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a few lines before the end.