Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies

My Muses Sit Upon Uncomfortable Chairs

121 Lynn Schmeidler My Muses Sit Upon Uncomfortable Chairs Writing with children playing downstairs is like whipping meringue with a baby spoon. Piercing squeals seeking limits in teenage reproach. From above I smell the texture of mutiny, my nose stings with its cracked lip warning. The babysitter, flipping elbow-long hair over her shoulder, is reliable as a weather report. I must learn to clamp my head and loosen my heart. The restless computer screen blinks off then quivers, rolls its eyes and reveals full-tongued lettering in pale irises. Like B movies, the afternoons will replay with the same scraps of screams and heavy footfalls invading from beneath the too-large crack under the door. One sitter will morph into the next, these girls whose eggs have only just begun to fall, who could be my eldest children, who I need to love my children. They enter the house amidst desperate protests, then leave in tornadoes of unfulfilled needs. If I store my ideas all week in my cheeks like a squirrel, then images will flow from tingling fingertips to type-set truths. The universe will sigh. Meanwhile, my muses sit upon uncomfortable chairs with little back support, sorting the whirlwind in my mind. They feed on chocolates pirated from a five year-old’s birthday loot, whispering wet secrets in my head. * 122 A glob of dry paint on the wall, a blot of purple earwax on a child’s lobe, returns me to primeval times when I was an ape intent upon grooming, eating bugs off my family’s fur. * Daylight behind curtains crumbles old and faint. Down the hill, a neighbor’s chimney wafts smoke through cracks in my window frame. A knock on the door and Jonah appears, ancient globe under small arm, pointing to Madagascar, “Are you allergic to lemurs?” he demands. “Mommy!” Eva crosses the threshold of my sacred space, “Jonah says I don’t have a pee-pee!” All over her face mortification melts like a warm ice-cream sandwich. Basta Cosi! When I was their age, my mother sat with us at the kitchen table gluing felt and pom-poms on old coffee cans. Because we all ate the same thing at dinnertime, we had a healthy family life. Now petrified memories of my childhood stick to the roof of my mouth. * Flying over my desk through gossamer curtains, I alight on an heirloom pink canopy bed. The girl I was will become a young woman reading poems naked with mud-masked face. She’ll grow to spend evenings searching in the grays and blacks of moving fonts. She has found happiness, but doesn’t know this yet. 123 * Once family meant naiveté disguised in fat fortune. So I scuba dive into the deepening past and fish out rusting hulks of obligation and resentment. Guilt startled children cower in a thunderstorm, plunge under beds, leaving dwarf mud prints— sole proof of having played, as the words on my screen call out from their posts on the glaring front lawn of fantasy. ...