LINDA LEE HARPER
The Myth of Myth
The walls are flooded with flowers.
Outside, the garden is vertical with leaves.
Where the reputed muses dance,
all the grass is beaten down by their
delicate bare feet as they gambol.
The next morning there are empty flagons
where full ones sat the night before.
An amphora once brimming with wine
sits against memory like a drunken aunt,
her curves wider in the morning light.
On the inside of your left arm, you find
teeth prints purpling and irregular.
Your breasts feel heavy, like wine skins
before the revelry, your mouth, sore
and split as a pomegranate spilling seed.
In the west, the mountain you revere
like you would any erect and stable thing,
glistens snow-capped and drenched blue.
Surrounded by ocean, each wave crest salutes
like a triton rising, and somewhere in clouds,
that winged horse rears, then falls into horizon
lines taut and inescapable as Zeus’s golden reins.
pea river journal 
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