Karla Merrifield
WOMAN ON LOVE
She appropriated the edges of love.
Later, she annotated volumes of it.
In her love stories? Poets.
She was always taking new names.
I was moose; I was armadillo.
Time— and love!— made her giddy.
She wore totem turtles.
She conversed with green tree spirits.
Cosmically, she found home: the Universe.
She embodied the metaphor of love.
She placed lichen in the foreground.
She came so close.
with a line from Michael G. Smith
Author’s Comment: “Women on Love” is from a growing collection of poems that honor poet and friend Michael G. Smith, whom I think of as the next Arthur Sze. In each “Micheal poem,” I tweeze a line from his first book, Almanac, and leap from his words into a new realm, a new poem. Such appropriation has proven successful for me. The Etowah River Psalms, (FootHills Publishing, 2009) is comprised of poems similarly inspired; line after line I extracted from Georgia poet Beau Cutts’s master poem, “The Etowah,” spawned an entire book of poems! Thus I give gushing thanks to my muses.
Wild Goose Poetry Review 