are the worst, often perched

on a ledge at the edge

of a mountainside,

the danger palpable,

a place where one false

move could prove to be fatal.

 

Why does the subconscious love

to tease us, we who shunned the risky

career of policeman, fireman, soldier

in favor of the relative safety

of music and poetry?

 

Some may call it destiny

though the news keeps us all on edge,

those of us airdropped with no parachute.

A decade after his death the ghost

of Bob Ross still reappears from time

to time on PBS, usually at odd hours

like after midnight weekdays or Sunday

morning when folks are still in bed or gone

to church. With his faintly hippie hairstyle

and gentle demeanor, he instructs us

in the subtleties of adding depth

to a grove of trees, or a slight shimmer

to the surface of a lake in the foreground,

another landscape in time's lost-and-found

with a "happy little cloud" adrift overhead

as if pathetic fallacy were somehow baked

into creation and today was the first day.

I wonder if there's an avian Mozart

who casts her voice more eloquently

than the rest, or why we assume that

 

genius is always masculine, and what

gender has got to do with creativity,

this uniquely human ability to create

 

meaning out of nothingness, manifest

a design or pattern even if only abstract

sound waves titillating our fallible brains.

 

If we're on the same wavelength, maybe

gender was never a factor, though males

have been more ostentatious by nature,

 

through the ages our dominant feature.

Meanwhile, lean a few branches closer

and pretend we are all nightingales.