for phineas

I pluck your pain in A minor
—no sharps, no flats—
and warn: “Your blood sings, but goes hoarse before mine.”
So we follow a path just because it’s a path, and then stray.
It couldn’t be helped, like our footprints or needle pricks
that make me wince when I forget my thimble
while sewing your thick-skinned mantle
that’ll keep me from getting in,
and you from getting out.

See there’s a motherhood in me
I often don’t recognize
because I’m a shapeshifter;
once undoing your premature funeral,
and next a singing Nachtigall
betraying our last night romance.
Just look in the treetops
where I spy through my notebook lens,
until I change (my mind) again.

Now you take the left arm; I take the right.
We wear the skin I sewed
and keep warm at night
while I sing my staccato emotions
transliterated from the moralistic fictions
we trade by the fire.

Between Jack and Jill and all the king’s men
I say, “Life’s a fairy tale
–or a tearing veil,
revealing my blood-red lips
that taste of snowflakes
kids catch on their tongues.
They swallow, grow up, hiccup—
and now I’m here,
Your fickle fiddle,
your harp (or harpy),
with 47 strings of deceit.