Sheila E. Murphy

Three American Ghazals

1/

Absolution clears the sand of salt foam.
Footprints hold still mid-recollection.

This is my corpus, my clematis, my curfew.
The sole infringement of a code breaks ground.

Chapters to be thumbed through, rest.
The mind allows for rearrangement.

Career miniature artifacts
have been touched by a capsized emotion.

Numbered worlds caress their likely forged ideas,
variations theme themselves by recollection.

2/

Here in physical form she is less
pressured than along our honeymoon.

Breath as art trumps breath as science.
Whosoever catapults to war refracts.

Caprice releases blood one notebook at a time,
sequestering the spoils before they're here.

His face, dark stencil of new growth
accepts endorphins at the same time as release.

Semitones fall against the wall space
as if perfectly fitting substrate.

3/

"Our life together," I heard her channel
from eternity in my mother's words.

I am holding a stopped watch, absorbing
tension I have always known, misunderstood.

All the keys fall from the piano.
Quaint faith in the source of melody.

One infant at a time, a place behind the eyes
no one has reached or tried to find.

Lamps, barely discernible behind cloth
in every window that is left.

***

***