Katabasis for Semele

You were once my earth—

blackberry jam, lilacs.

In late summer dusk

you called me for dinner.

I was your kitchen.

I became Mars, the planet of war,

at war with your Venus

and the men of Mars and Jupiter

who orbited you each night

downstairs, while Dad was away.

Years later, I returned, a wanderer

with only memories of home.

I don’t know how it happened—

my shell of anger broke.

Maybe because you again

made bacon and eggs,

burnt eggs,

but we danced at your bar,

Dante's Circle.

You were so small,

your head on my shoulder.

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

I was your baby.

You were my mom.

The whiskey bottles orbited.

The world spun around us.

Now you are Pluto—

as far as death,

the barrel of a gun in your mouth.

And sometimes you come at night,

a slowly falling star

with visions of the life you never had—

burnished by a beauty lost and buried,

but never quite extinguished.

George Burns's work has appeared in journals such as The 2 River View, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlanta Review, the anthology, The Writes of Spring by Tupelo Press, and Verse Daily. He won the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Prize and the Special Merit award from The Comstock Review. His first poetry collection, If a Fish, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press.