Following your Muse's basic impulse as slavishly as you can . . .

If any of you read the comment I made on (Lena) Gluck's post, I said that I'd post a piece that shows what I'm talking about when I talk about following a given Muse-work's basic impulse.  Here's a piece I wrote last spring in response to the painting below:

In side-view, in the eye

not of whale or blind snake

but the human who looks forward

with bewilderment at what?

We don’t know

the peacock looking on, totem

of efflorescence, and it has put,

in her hair, a token of its beauty

and on her dress, to dress her

in peacock.  And that’s why she’s startled so—

to be as green fanning in the forest,

to shock with eyes on feathers

or blossoms or abysses,

whirlpools down into the bole of the trunk

or branch to find the sap

of green that sparks outer green,’

place we can enter the lower world

with its new laws, its trees that

discuss or cajole, and snakes

that eat pain and extract

the spears stuck in the spirit

lifetimes—in this, Flora

(for who else) who gazes bewildered

each spring—at trees whom she loves,

at grass, and her delicate arts,

her paintings, the wildflowers—

and at us, who desire with new green

desire, iris-desire, tulip, high grass

not yet burnt by summer.

Again, that's what I originally wrote when checking in with my Muse and looking at the painting.  Here's where I've got to with this piece as of now (though it's not done yet):

Bewilder with fabliaux eye, animal-

conjoined-human looking

towards woods . . .

The peacock in grass, totem

of efflorescence for the woman

(here, but last century        ghost)

who has put peacock on her dress, and is    

peacock, a feminine

efflorescence. 

She’s startled

to see in this clearing, in the

grass, this iris-green, violet-green-fanning

before the lost-place-woods [gone woods] [lost woods], the feather-eyes

like abysses or blossoms or gapped

boles open to aesthetic sap—the feather-eyes

looking through her frock

to the interior wood and

the new laws where the trees cajole

and bark and snakes suck

spears out of the spirit . . .

Flora watches bewildered and loses

her spring paints, and fails

the iris and the violet and

the tulip cup—delicacy and desire

die as color is lost

in gray trunks . . .

With fabliaux eye, in the animal-man,

looking towards

the trees . . .

A lot of it still doesn't quite work yet, but you can see, I think (I hope), how I tried to keep even the seemingly unnecessary scaffolding of the first few lines in the original--this idea of looking in a new way, though of course I changed it so that it now addresses the audience as an imperative.  There needs to be more connection with some of the different stanzas, the phrasing needs much more cleaning, and I'm still not sure exactly what I'm getting at with some of the stuff; but the whole excites me and makes me want to keep revising.