OPUS OOPSY

By Muriel Nelson

The arborist loves our plum tree,
its wild white fluff, its jagged dark lines,
each lop a direction to branch,
recalculating, recalculating. . .
Our dog loves to loaf on his back
gazing through limbs while chomping treats.
As he swallows the wrong way, upside
down, he hears lyrics of unknown songs,
dum dee dum dum dum. . .
What chaos corrections could cause. No daidles
in ‘Rich Man,’ no fa-las in ‘Halls.’
And though Greenwich was wrong, and the Prime’s to its east,
though the world’s a bit off our marks,
that leap second rogue could stop us all
when we let it circle the earth.
May the circle be unbroken? Try starting
a roll of tape without end.
Try uninventing errors. Some say
that prejudice keeps us alive,
that we animals calculate flight paths from strangeness
faster than anyone’s GPS.
But it takes a lifetime to learn
to do justice. And to love? To fudge?
Would you rather live without failures in candy
or pudding or jam? I mean
your favorite lip-smacking oozes, those rich
flowing lavas that won’t set up.
Imagine, atop your ice cream, blobs
freezing stiff in neat squares or turds. Or
dollops of oopsy, daidles of thought
fruitfully, fudgingly, mercifully,
humbly smothering the bumbling tongue.

Muriel Nelson’s publications include the poetry collections Sightsinger (Encircle Publications) and Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and chapbooks, Please Hold (Encircle Publications, Poetry Chapbook Award) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, ByLine Chapbook Award). These and three book manuscripts were shortlisted in four national contests and finalists in seventeen. Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, Nelson’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloom, Guesthouse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, and other journals as well as in several anthologies. She holds master's degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Federal Way, Washington.