White Delirium
BY Margaret Walther
A white fox has settled on my chest.
She is chewing a nest through bone.
The white spokes of a windmill churn into my lungs.
A terrible instrument, the white viola.
Steals your breath.
Paradise’s fruit beckons. Peeled. White.
Oh, to lay my body against the green harp of the earth.
To let the sky, euphoric organ, azure through me.
To be wick’d by the sun, ancient gong.
Each breath, a quest.
A question.
Fantaisie on an Opal
throats of hummingbirds
pulse
inside you
peacocks bare
smoky tails and scream
a wolf stares at the
mantilla’d
moon
dragonflies
crystal harps
or beaded lanterns
scrape a river
fish glint by, their fins
the tiny
hands
of rainbows
quickened by light
you evoke
the panther's
burning
eye
a butterfly's erratic fan
the dark blue thighs
of lakes
glide through
snow
Margaret Walther is a retired librarian from the Denver metro area and a past president of Columbine Poets, an organization to promote poetry in Colorado. She has been a guest editor for Buffalo Bones, and has poems published or forthcoming in many journals, including Connecticut Review, anderbo.com, Quarterly West, Naugatuck River Review, Fugue, The Anemone Sidecar, Chickenpinata, and Nimrod. She won the Many Mountains Moving 2009 Poetry Contest. Two of her poems published in the online journal In Posse Review in 2010 were selected by Web del Sol for its e-SCENE best of the Literary Journals. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Award.