Karla Linn Merrifield

.
Karla Linn Merrifield has had 800+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the 2019 full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. In early 2021, her Half a World of Kisses will be published by Truth Serum Press (Australia) under its new Lindauer Poets imprint. She is currently at work on a poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars; the book is slated to be published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series (Rochester, NY).

.

12-Inch Museum Piece

 

Your ashes will be packed in glossed,

carved teak Buddha-plump ginger jar,

completely lined with stainless steel,

a chamber for your vacuum-sealed plastic pouch

custom-sized for a small-boned man of medium height.

It’s light-weight, portable, suitable for any room’s décor,

but possesses the caché of a whispered allusion to Hiroshige,

worthy of presence in one of the master’s wood-block prints, one

in his renowned series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō,

which we once followed at the modest Washington County Museum.

I detect your vessel depicted in miniature, roped to an oxen cart nearing

the final station, Otsu— one last night—passed at the bustling Hashirii

Teahouse; your pilgrimage on Earth come to its end.

*****

 

There Will Be an Answer

Is the fear of the night our original fear?
Or did early hominids fear starvation more?
Or did our ancestors fear most the loss
of their most beloveds?

What’s in a mis-sung love song?
What’s in a mis-strummed poem?
What’s in my cave wall paintings mistakes?
What’s in my petroglyph chiselings in the stone to your bones?

And how far and how long do we have to wait
for the music and the lyrics to come along to lift us up
and onto George Harrison’s strings?
We will evolve and, if not, somehow solve it all.

We will by firelight learn, eventually,
how to let it be.

*****