inheritance

silent, still, she lounges and waits to write,
waiting for the inspiration that rarely comes.
heavy, heady rain that falls drips slowly down
the panes, emptying the clouds of dark
ideas. the muses and other cloudy notions sink and fall
through her mind, grazing past slow thoughts.

she lies heavy with cares and thoughts,
too absorbed to let the dark ink write.
she dreams of spring, of summer, though fall
has been late in returning. moonlight comes
slinking through the rain, a vibrancy on the dark
streets that shine as she looks down.

she sighs, tosses the pen, turns upside-down
to greet her own pathos. slowly her thoughts
turn inward, and she revels in her own dark
imaginings. reclaiming paper, the words write
themselves as Calliope circles down. She comes
lazily, wings splayed as though she fears a fall.

eight other figures follow the first, a slow fall
through the heavens. silvery wings that slow down
as they near the tired earth, and now comes
rhyme and verse. pathos wiped clean, her thoughts
now dwell on the ancient and the surest way to write
Calliope's lit intentions, then shrouded in dark.

as greek poets declared, so it shall be; the dark
plot twists that rend a hero apart, the shuddering fall
of achilles or oedipus. characters that write
themselves with ultimate faith in each other sink down
into the mire; each passes through her thoughts
then back into the literary abyss from which they have come.

the elegy halts, remembers, restarts. so the Muses have come
and now will go, their ancient deed unfinished. the dark
covers their gleaming ascent, though her thoughts
dwell still on the sudden inspiration. she lets the pen fall
at the last period, puts the plot and characters down
and loses the potent high that forces her to write.

unrequited love for the word, she reaches the fall
as any hero, and finds no love for her Mothers there. the dark
call of a bird catches her, and she forgets how to write.