Two poems by Kenneth P. Gurney

Craftswoman

The Blue Woman throws pots
on the wheel of the galaxy,
muddies the stars, but cleans them
when done.

She attempts to make one pot
to hold all the love in the world,
another pot to contain all the hate—
both spill over regularly.

The Blue Woman notices
as one pot fills up the other 
tends to empty, notices 
when one spills over
the other fills up 
leaving no mess to clean.

Wet Spot Drying

She crushes all of her crystals into a fine dust
then spreads the glitter on the floor of a dark cave she sometimes enters.

I meet her on the day that she sits upon a rock
at the edge of a mountain glade where I often hide from the world.

It is the day the butterflies emerge from their long change
and their color lifts the mind skyward.

She holds out a skeleton she says she carried
all the way from her closet to view in this particular light.

I see she carries four walls, a ceiling, a floor around her
and her beliefs set them in the hillside for Hecate,

near the discarded antlers Artemis left as a marker,
for Selene, bulging in her gibbous state like a pregnant girl.

She tells me a dragon scarred the rock on the heavenly path above.
She tells me she is a shapeshifter cursed into a singular human form.

She tells me she loves the shifting shadows of the windblown leaves
with which to hide her sins, her curious faith in people.

In a moment I realize I am a satellite, but whether to her,
to her mysterious altar, or the sacred rock she sits upon is unknown.

Myths abound, especially through the sudden curtain of electric rain
that briefly falls, moves me from open air to the rock

under the leaves where she sits. Where, without realizing it,
I enter the house she set within the mountain 

through the door of her unstained hug: the oblique release 
of the flight carried in the grip of a winged snake.

Visit Kenneth P. Gurney’s poetry Web site, http://www.kpgurney.me/Poet/Welcome.html.